7 Heart Benefits of Exercise | Johns Hopkins Medicine

7 Heart Benefits of Exercise
One of the very best gifts you can give your heart is physical activity. In
fact, pairing regular exercise with a
Mediterranean-style diet
, maintaining a normal weight and not smoking is a great protection plan
against coronary artery disease and vascular disease, Johns Hopkins
research has found.
Not convinced such simple steps could be so powerful? These four lifestyle factors reduced the chance of death from all causes by 80 percent over the eight-year period that more than 6,200 subjects were tracked.
Understanding just how physical activity benefits your heart can be strong motivation to get moving to get moving more. Here's what to know.
Exercise lowers blood pressure.
Exercise works like beta-blocker medication to slow the heart rate and
lower blood pressure (at rest and also when exercising). High blood
pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease.
Exercise is key to weight control.
Especially when combined with a smart diet, being physically active is an
essential component for losing weight and even more important for keeping
it off, Stewart says—which in turn helps optimize heart health. Being
overweight puts stress on the heart and is a risk factor for heart disease
and stroke.
Exercise helps strengthen muscles.
A combination of aerobic workouts (which, depending on your fitness level,
can include walking, running, swimming, and other vigorous heart-pumping
exercise) and strength training (weight lifting, resistance training) is
considered best for heart health. These exercises improve the muscles’
ability to draw oxygen from the circulating blood. That reduces the need
for the heart—a muscular organ itself—to work harder to pump more blood to
the muscles, whatever your age.
Exercise can help you quit smoking.
As smokers become more fit, they often quit. And people who are fit in the first place are less likely to ever start smoking, which is one of the top risk factors for heart disease because it damages the structure and function of blood vessels.
Exercise can stop or slow the development of diabetes.
Johns Hopkins research has shown that when combined with strength training,
regular aerobic exercise such as cycling, brisk walking, or swimming can
reduce the risk of developing diabetes by over 50% by allowing the muscles
to better process glycogen, a fuel for energy, which when impaired, leads
to excessive blood sugars, and thus diabetes.
Exercise reduces inflammation.
With regular exercise, chronic inflammation is reduced as the body adapts to the challenge of exercise on many bodily
systems. This is an important factor for reducing the adverse effects of
many of the diseases just mentioned.
Try It Move More for Heart Benefits
How can you fit more exercise into your day, or become more physically
active if you haven’t been before? Begin with small starts like these, and
build up from there.
Park your car at the far end of a parking lot, so you have farther to
walk to a building's entrance.
Choose the stairs rather than the elevator.
Spend part of your lunch break walking.
On bad-weather days, try walking indoors at a mall.
Wake up a bit earlier and exercise before you do anything else.
Use a wearable fitness tracker to count your steps. Try increasing your
daily steps by 500 each week with the goal of reaching 10,000 steps per
day, a level that can produce many health benefits.