Maintaining a healthy heart throughout your life is essential for keeping a healthy body and improving factors like flexibility, endurance and strength. While eating a balanced diet is a key part of keeping a healthy heart, exercise is the other vital component. Here are some exercises that are going to benefit your ticker:
Yoga
Finding your Zen could mean improved heart health. Yoga has been shown to decrease stress, which helps to lower blood pressure and put less impact on the heart. It also increases lung capacity, improves respiratory function, heart rate and immune health, and boosts circulation and muscle tone.
Swimming
This aquatic activity is not only great for the joints, it works wonders for the heart as well. Due to the resistance from moving in the water, your muscles have to work harder to move, helping to improve your muscle strength and tone. Swimming works the heart and lungs and trains the body to use oxygen more efficiently, which often results in a decline of the resting heart rate.
Brisk walking
If running is too hard on your joints, walking at a particularly brisk pace is great for improving your fitness and helping your heart to stay healthy. In fact, a brisk walk wards off poor heart health just as much as running does.
Interval training
Interval training includes combining high intensity exercise with a normal speed and switching off between the two. If you're walking, you might walk at a faster pace for about a minute, then go back down to your normal speed for three minutes, then repeat the process. By doing so, your heart has to work harder to continuously lower and raise your heart rate. This burns calories, improves cardiovascular function and essentially makes the body better at getting fat and sugar out of the blood. You can do the same with strength training exercises by doing more reps or moving to a higher weight.
