Physical activity :: heart health

Physical activity for a healthy heart

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For many people the idea of doing physical activity, getting fit and in shape means endless hours sweating away in a gym. Believe me, it really doesn’t have to be like that. Read on …

A very important factor of your plan towards living a longer and healthier life focuses on your physical health, vitality and fitness. Simply put, you have to get fit and stay fit.

The Heart and Stroke Foundation recommends at least 30 minutes of moderately intense physical activity almost every day to maintain good health. In fact, regular physical activity helps to prevent or reduce high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes. It can also go towards your goal of reducing the risk of developing heart disease and stroke.

As we said before, it isn’t necessary to sweat away in a gym. There are physical activities to fit individual tastes and level of fitness, age and capacity. One important aspect about getting fit and staying fit, is to choose a fitness program that you actually enjoy doing. Enjoying what you do will make it so much easier to stick with it and get the results you need. You should also try to incorporate some form of physical activity into your daily routine, here are just a few tips.

As you can see, these fitness activities are not particularly strenuous, but they will help to bring you closer to your goal. One thing to remember is that getting in shape goes hand in hand with a healthy diet and calorie control. For instance, we know that a 3500 calorie reduction per week is needed to produce a one pound weight loss of fat. Therefore, a daily calorie reduction of approximately 500 –1000 calories is necessary to loose 1 to 2 pounds of fat per week.

Reducing your daily calorie intake by 500 may be difficult. Let’s use as an example some packaged ready to cook macaroni. This kind of product typically provides around 250 calories per serving, and we all know how easy it is to eat a double serving of packaged foods, which would be 500 calories. Using the example above of 500 calories a day, if we don’t eat the macaroni we easily reach our daily goal, but we don’t eat!!! So, how do we manage this … We eat one portion (250 calories), and we burn the remaining 250 calories with physical activity.

250 + 250 = 500.

Using the diet + exercise example, it is easy to see how much easier it is to reach your goals. You really don’t have to starve. In the case above you can still eat your macaroni. Does that seem hard to you? I don’t think so. By the way, in order to burn 250 calories with physical activity would mean about 30 minutes of heavy gardening or 30 minutes cycling at 11 mph.

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As you have seen regular physical activity as part of a well balanced exercise program and lifestyle can go a long way to adding years to your life.