Love your heart - RED January

As we kick-start 2020 with RED January, let’s take a moment to think about something that we often take for granted…….our HEART! Understanding how increasing physical activity benefits your heart can often be a strong motivator to get moving to get more active.

Your heart sparks into life work just a couple of weeks after conception.

From this moment, a complex chain of chemical reactions and electrical stimulation cause the heart muscles to contract and relax, creating that familiar beat we can hear and feel.

On average, your heart will beat 60-70 times a minute.

Each day, it will beat around 100,000 times.

All day, all night, 24/7.

Your heart continuously pumps about 5 litres of blood around your body every minute. This will increase to 20-30 litres per minute during exercise.

Your heart loves you!

It’s time to fall back in love with your heart.

Exercise, especially aerobic activity, is one of the best things you can do to keep your heart healthy and reduce heart disease risk factors.

As well as lowering blood pressure, improving cholesterol, insulin levels, inflammatory markers & our sense of well-being, regular aerobic activity can also change the physical structure and blood vessel function of your heart. During regular aerobic activity, the heart becomes subjected to intermittent hemodynamic stresses of pressure overload, volume overload, or a mix of both. The heart is a muscle and so to ‘normalise’ these stresses and meet the systemic demand for an increased blood supply during exercise, it adapts by increasing its mass, primarily through an increase in ventricular chamber wall thickness. In other words, your heart gets bigger and stronger, very much like your bicep muscles if you spent time in the gym doing bicep curls!

We are amazing.

Let’s learn to love our heart and find a way to increase our levels of physical activity during the day – don’t forget, it doesn’t always have to be structured exercise. A brisk walk at lunchtime is a great way to kick-start January, burn off some of those Christmas calories and work your way towards accumulating at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity over the course of the week. If you already walk at lunchtimes, try to increase the pace a bit or take in some hills.

Remember, the important this is to get up from the desk, get out and get active!

Need help or advice?

If you want to become more active this year or have any exercise/health related questions then feel free to contact me. You are more than welcome to make use of my Facebook page for training tips and updates https://www.facebook.com/puresportsperf/ or Twitter @PUREsportsperf - alternatively, if you want more specific, bespoke advice then you can contact me by email:  john@puresportsperformance.co.uk