Posted on April 09, 2017 by Kate Halsall

Get Your Heart Pumping More

This week the Telegraph reported that the British Heart Foundation’s latest research illustrated that in some parts of the country, nearly half of adults are not meeting the official exercise guidelines recommended by the Government.

These guidelines simply recommend that each adult undertakes AT LEAST 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity a week. That’s just 2.5 hours a week….think on that for a moment….it’s just 30 minutes of exercise, 5 times a week…..and there’s a large majority not doing this! Sedentary jobs aren’t helping either. We need to help people to get moving, so here is why you should get your heart pumping more!

Cardiovascular Fitness

This is the overall efficiency of your circulatory system (blood, heart & blood vessels) and your respiratory system (the lungs and breathing/oxygen capacity). The short and long term affects on your body from just 30 minutes of exercise on these systems include:

  • Your heart gets stronger and bigger – ultimately your heart is a muscle and it reacts in the same way to training!
  • Increase in lung capacity – think about how much air you inhale and exhale with every breath (known as tidal volume)
  • Reduced blood pressure & resting heart rate
  • Increased cardiac output and stroke volume – as your heart becomes more efficient, it can pump more blood per beat (this is stroke volume) and therefore per minute (cardiac output). The more blood that is pumped, the more oxygen gets to the body

Cardiovascular Disease

This term relates to conditions which affect the heart or blood vessels. Examples of CVD conditions are:

  • Coronary Heart Disease – according to the NHS website, this occurs when the flow of oxygen-rich blood to the heart muscle is blocked or reduced.
  • Stroke
  • Aortic Disease – essentially any condition which affects the largest blood vessel in the body….the one that carries blood from the heart to the rest of the body

Trust me – you need to do whatever you can to avoid these conditions! If this hasn’t given you a push to ensure you do at least 30 minutes of exercise each day, come and talk to us so that we can find out what can be done to help you to achieve this.

www.m8north.co.uk/blog/whydoyouexercise/

http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/cardiovascular-disease/Pages/Introduction.aspx