Exercise

A strong healthy heart is supported by healthy exercise. The stress of exercise helps to build the heart muscle. 

A heart attack  or myocardial infarction is a condition in which the myocardium or the heart muscle does not get enough oxygen and other nutrients and so it begins to die.

Exercise  stimulates the development of new connections between the impaired and the nearly normal blood vessels, so people who exercise have a better blood supply to all the muscle tissue of the heart.  That also means you have a better supply of blood to your brain and every other part of your body.

One study  showed that moderate exercise several times a week is more effective in building up these auxiliary pathways than extremely vigorous exercise done twice as often.

Such information has led some people to think of exercise as a panacea for heart disorders, a fail-safe protection against hypertension or death. Just as your body does not live on air alone, it makes sense that a sensible diet is also most important to heart health.

If your level of exercise at this time is pushing a button on the TV remote, you must start to exercise your whole body now.  You must start slow and build up.  Your initial efforts at exercising may stop after your stretching routines.  For someone who is sedentary those stretches are exercise.  But don’t give up.  With consistent effort you will join those with healthy strong hearts.

It seems as though many Americans are living a life that leads to high blood pressure or hypertension.  We are now seeing children with high blood pressure that goes hand in hand with their obesity.

As people age, the situation gets worse. Nearly half of all older Americans have hypertension even if they are not over weight. This disease makes people five times more prone to strokes, three times more likely to have a heart attack, and two to three times more likely to experience a heart failure.

One of the biggest problems with this disease is that nearly one third of the people who have hypertension do not know it because they never feel any symptoms.  Occasionally someone will say they have a headache and therefore their blood pressure must be high, but according to doctors, a headache is not a hypertension symptom.

Over time the force of that excessive pressure damages the inside surface of your blood vessels.

However, according to experts, hypertension is not unavoidable. Reducing salt intake, adopting a healthy diet, losing weight and exercising can all help prevent hypertension.

Although eating a low fat diet will help, the most significant single thing that you can do is to exercise. And just as exercise strengthens and improves limb muscles, it also enhances the health of the heart muscles.

It may seem that taking a little pill is the answer to hypertension.  In the case of excessively high pressure, that pill could save your life.  However, the best defense is exercise. 

With a regular exercise program as simply as walking you can reduce your dependance on pills.  Do not stop taking your hypertension pills without seeing your doctor.  Only your health care giver can determine your risk and if you have a current need for medication.