Healthy Heart Tips To Improve Your Cardiovascular Health
If you follow these healthy heart tips, you’ll improve not just your cardiovascular health, but also your overall health. Just give it a try!
Your heart. It stops beating and you stop living, it’s that simple! It’s the most important organ in your body (along with the brain).
So of all the organs in your body, surely your heart is the one that you really want to look after. But with heart disease, one of the single biggest killers in Western societies, it would seem that we don’t.
Here are some simple healthy heart tips from a NASM certified personal trainer. Some of them you’ll know, some you may not. Some will make sense, and some really won’t. But they’re all worth trying!
9 Life-Saving Healthy Heart Tips
These are the healthy heart tips anyone should follow during his/her lifetime to avoid any unexpected cardiac disease:
1. Belt Out A Tune
Research shows that singing teaches your heart to operate at variable rates, making you less susceptible to cardiac arrest.
How many times have you seen a contestant on American Idol finish the last big note and then slump their shoulders and start deep breathing even though they’ve barely moved? Well, singing can really put you through your paces!
2. Weight A Minute
If you don’t do any exercise, do some! But try and incorporate some kind of weight into your exercise. And before you panic, this can simply mean carrying shopping bags home when you would normally stick them in the back of the car.
If you are already quite fit but tend to only do cardio exercise, incorporate some kind of lifting into your routine.
Lifting some kind of weight makes your heart pump harder to feed the muscles that are doing the lifting. And as the heart itself is, after all, also a muscle, it is getting a better workout.
3. Stop Drinking Your Calories
Removing just one soda or sugary shot-filled latte can save you well over 100 calories a day.
Over 12 months that’s going to look like about a 10-pound weight loss and that puts a lot less strain on your heart.
4. Put Fish On Your Dish
The Omega-3 fatty acids in a lot of fish reduce triglycerides, which is a type of fat that sits in your blood and makes life difficult for your circulatory system. Reduce that and you will reduce your blood pressure and that gives your heart an easier ride.
What fish? The oily ones! Salmon, mackerel, herring. If you’re not a seafood fan, Omega-3 fatty acids are also found in things like almonds, walnuts, and flaxseed.
5. Put It Out
If you smoke, stop smoking. A very easy sentence to write, a very difficult thing to do.
The ill effects of smoking are well known and proven, and you’ll have heard them a thousand times before.
So all I will say is get help to stop if you need it and be proud of yourself for every one cigarette less you are smoking.
6. Boo To Booze
Exceeding the guidelines for alcohol consumption is a sure-fire way of giving your heart a very hard time.
It raises blood pressure and cholesterol and can increase anxiety – all of which place strain on the heart which can be very easily avoided.
On top of this, the calories in alcohol are huge so you will either be slowing down weight loss or putting weight on through drink.
The more overweight you are, the more strain you put on your heart and that is what’s keeping you ticking (literally).
7. Take Five
In fact, take 15. Take time each day to relax, focus on your breathing, and attempt to unwind, even if it is just for a few minutes.
You can take it further by learning to meditate and you’ll find lots of apps that guide you through that.
A calmer, emotionally balanced life will help your resting heart rate come down along with your blood pressure.
So your heart will be grateful, as will your brain, which to be fair, is kind of an important organ also.
8. A Spear To The Heart
Asparagus contains a very high amount of vitamin B6, which is proven to improve the health of your heart by lowering levels of something called ‘homocysteine’, a form of amino acid that is directly linked to heart disease.
So a few spears of asparagus a week will help your ticker tick very nicely.
9. Keep It Real
One of the biggest factors in Western societies having such poor heart health is the amount of processed food we eat.
Processed food is unnatural and contains additives, preservatives, sweeteners, and a lot of saturated fats. All of these shouldn’t really be in the human body because they make your heart unhealthy.
You should stick to fresh and unprocessed food. If you look at the ingredients on something and see a whole bunch of words you don’t recognize, start to ask questions.
If you have a spare 5 minutes, just google how chicken nuggets are made and then ask yourself if you want to put that “food” in your body or not.
Now, not all chicken nuggets are so cheap and nasty, but they will give you a good idea of what I’m talking about!
Hopefully, these healthy heart tips will help you achieve what you’re looking for: a healthy, normal heart. Just stick to these tips and you and your heart will be just fine!
