Fitness for a healthy heart


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Exercise has many positive effects on heart health. It helps to control or modify any of the risk factors for heart disease.


A regular exercise routine can help in lowering blood pressure, lessening the risk of developing diabetes, maintaining healthy body weight, reducing inflammation throughout the body, reducing stress hormones that can put an extra burden on the heart, increasing good cholesterol, slowing the heart rate, reducing the blood pressure.


A lot of research done in this field has also shown that people who exercise regularly are less likely to suffer a sudden heart attack or another life-threatening cardiac event.


While exercise has benefits in and of itself, the best way to prevent heart disease is to combine exercise with a healthy diet. Exercise alone can help with weight loss over a long period of time. But a short-term approach is to reduce the number of calories you take in through diet while increasing the calories you use through exercise.


Various scientific bodies across the world recommend combining aerobic exercise (jogging, swimming, biking) with resistance training (moderate weightlifting). Together, these two categories of exercise produce the greatest benefit for preventing and managing heart disease. General guidelines call for a minimum of 30 minutes of aerobic exercise such as walking, cycling, or swimming at least five days a week and moderate weightlifting to tone muscles and build muscle endurance twice a week, or frequently enough to cover the major muscle groups.


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