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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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What Sort of Exercise Is Adequate to Prevent Heart Disease? Regular physical activity including exercise plays an important role in preventing heart disease as well as keeping fit. By performing such tasks as walking to station in the morning, marching up the escalators, and taking the dog out at night, can a person claim that his or her day's exercise has been taken care of? Why not? You may argue that in recent years, activities such as housework and walking up the staircases could be counted towards the daily total exercise. This somehow contradicts with the belief in the 1980s that exercise was all about feeling the burn. In other words, no pain no gain. A recent study (2007) published by Bristol University in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, however, revealed that lifestyle activity does not replace the so-called "proper" exercise. The study found that women who did more than 8 hours a week of heavy housework were actually slightly more likely to be overweight than those who did none; and no amount of vacuuming, scrubbing and cleaning would actually lower resting heart rate. Heart rate is taken as an indicator of enhanced aerobic fitness. The activity levels of 2,000 men in Wales, who aged between 40 and 64, were recorded over a 10-year period. No evidence was found to show that either light or moderate physical activity including walking at a leisurely pace, bowling, etc. would reduce the risk of dying from heart disease. On the contrary, more vigorous activity such as jogging, swimming, hiking or walking at a brisk pace for 1 hour at a time would prevent people from getting heart disease.
In short, the harder you work, the fitter and healthier you will become, as indicated by the researchers. The prevailing guidelines, 30 minutes of moderate activity for 5 days a week, are not meant for optimal fitness. Instead, it just serves as a minimum recommendation for safeguarding your health and your heart. Such guidelines, if adhered as suggested, would assure people that their risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some cancers would be significantly reduced. Now, you may wonder what constitutes moderate activity? According to experts in exercise science, one of the simplest way to rate intensity is "talk test". When you exercise hard enough to notice that you are breathing harder yet can still speak in complete sentences comfortably, then this is "moderate" intensity. Moreover, it should be a level that can be easily maintained for at least 30 minutes. On the other hand, exercise with "vigorous" intensity is one that makes you difficult to speak in complete sentences, but that can still be maintained continuously for several minutes. Exercise vigorously can be more beneficial than exercise moderately as it can further reduce the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease, as well as offer better quality of life. Recent studies also pointed out that vigorous activity is essential in the prevention of some cancers, including colorectal cancer. So, what sort of exercise should we engage with? When a person performs either a moderate-intensity exercise for a given amount of time or a vigorously one for a much shorter amount of time, and both consume the same number of calories, the vigorous one would deem to be better. In reality, we need to do both in order to keep ourselves healthy by performing more activity in the daily routine and meanwhile including some vigorous activity in the week.
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