Starting or Stopping to Exercise Gradually Impacts Heart Health

Never Give Up Exercising Once you Start

Heart failure is more serious than heart attack as this involves a long-term problem with the heart such as an inability to pump enough blood, pump blood hard enough or bring in needed oxygen to the body. And, primary causes for this include increased blood pressure levels, cholesterol levels, sugar levels, smoking and family history of heart failure. The older you grow the graver is your risk for heart failure. By older, I do not mean your 60s and 70s but even your late 30s and 40s. Such has become the plight of our world with an unending number of processed foods and baked goods flooding the markets.
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Medical advancements have improved longevity of people and there are many who surpass death from heart attacks and live past it. This increases their risk of heart failure and until now, we don’t have effective drugs to curb it unlike the ones available for high BP or sugar levels. Hardcore strategies are the need of the hour despite the availability of certain drugs such as beta blockers as these drugs are only useful to reduce the damage but don’t help in preventing the damage from occurring in the first place.

Starting to Exercise anytime in Life: Beneficial or not for the Heart?
We all know that exercising and physical activity have the capability to keep us away from heart failure as much as possible but how much do we know the impact of exercising as it changes with time? If you have not got the point just ponder upon these two scenarios:

1. You have remained sedentary for most of your life but started exercising in middle age
2. You have remained active for most of your life but stopped exercising in middle age
   
   

Does the first scenario decrease your risk and the second scenario increase your risk? One group of researchers wanted to know the answer to exactly these two questions. They gathered information on more than 11,000 participants aged around 60 years of which 57% were women. These participants were followed up for 19 years and reviewed on their health status which included any occurrence of heart attack, heart failure or stroke. In this period, there were more than 1,500 hospitalizations and 57 deaths. Each of the participants were asked to rate their activity levels as poor, intermediate or recommended depending on their activeness/exercise performance.

We known that it is generally recommended to be physically active at least for 150 minutes a week or 75 minutes when it involves vigorous-intensity physical activity. So, after three visits the participants responded that:

1. 42% (4,733) of them practiced the recommended levels of physical activity
2. 23% (2,594) of them practiced intermediate levels of physical activity
3. 35% (4,024) of them said that they had poor levels (no exercise at all) of activity
   
   

So, between their first and third visit in a matter of over 6 years almost 24% participants increased their activity, 22% decreased it and 54% stayed unaltered. Individuals who displayed high activity levels during the first and third visits displayed least risk of heart failure (31%) compared to those who displayed poor levels of activity. There was a decrease in risk by as much as 12% when almost 2,700 participants shifted from the poor to the intermediate category or from intermediate to recommended category compared to those whose performance was consistently poor or intermediate. Whereas, heart failure risk increased by 18% in those participants (2,530) whose activity levels decreased between the first and third visit.

Its been observed that not even half of the population fulfill the required exercise rates despite insistence on the importance of physical activity. Take charge of your body requirements and follow healthy practices to fulfill the daily required exercise durations and reap health benefits. Along with exercising there is a mandatory need for eating a healthy diet to reap the benefits of a 100% healthy lifestyle and to help you in this regard we have nutritionist and dietitians at www.firsteatright.com  whom you can rely upon for any of your meal planning and exercise goals.