Exercise Your Heart Right

The heart is your most valuable muscle, it is working for you every second of every day for the entirety of your life span. It is a muscle with ultimate endurance, and like any other muscle in the body can benefit from training and looking after.

So without any conscious control over the movement of our heart, what can we do to exercise it properly and contribute towards its longevity?

Exercise and movement of our body is the perfect way to ‘work-out’ our heart. As we discussed in the previous blog, the hearts role is to act as a pump and move blood around the body as well as to the lungs.
Therefore when we choose to exert ourselves through movement and exercise, we demand harder work from our heart to push the blood around our body quicker. This enables the muscles that are now working to get more oxygen to function and not fatigue.

Movement and exercise is something that we should do daily to increase the potential and adaptability of our heart. If we remain sedentary, the heart never gets a chance to work harder and then should a time come that we need to exert ourselves, be it run for the bus or dodge the traffic, it will put unexpected stress on the heart and potentially lead to injury.

To avoid injury and to allow our heart to function at its best, here are Epoch’s Top 3 heart and exercise tips:

1. Just move – the simple action of moving our body will increase the activity of the heart. If you are forced into a sedentary work environment, be sure to stand up and sit down every 20 minutes.

2. Take 20 minutes – most of us avoid exercise as we ‘don’t have the time’ to do it! We suggest just 20 minutes out of your day is enough.

3. Move faster – the more you increase the intensity of the activity you’re are doing, the more good stress you will put on the heart. So if you’re walking to work or to the shops, speed up a little.

Remember, to achieve big results in the health of your body doesn’t always require a large amount of time and energy. Learning to be efficient with your time and pushing your comfort zone can have a dramatic effect.