How to get your heart racing?

You know what can really make your heart race? Rollercoasters. When was the last time you were on one? While you likely haven’t been on a physical roller-coaster in a while, you’ve surely been forced onto the figurative one that has been this past year.

Talk about ups and downs, 2020 is going down in the record books. Congrats on making it through one of the most riveting, heart wrenching years in recent history. Now that we are hopefully coming out on the other side of it all, lets work on setting ourselves up to better handle something like this in the future.

Did you know that heart disease is the NUMBER 1 leading cause of death in the united states for both men and women, making up 23.5% of annual deaths at 647,457? That is absolutely wild, and even more wild – the majority of those heart disease related deaths are avoidable. Physical activity and a healthy diet go a long way in ensuring a good and prosperous life.

The activity guidelines for Americans call for 150 minutes or more of low-level aerobic exercise a week, and while that may seem like a lot, when you look closer – its not. That low level aerobic activity is classified as things as easy as walking or gardening. So, you probably get that in on a regular enough basis.

Why isn’t that enough then? Well – our normal day to day may actually cause slightly elevated blood pressures and heart rates for too long and too often. Think about your daily stressors – relationships, work, money, traffic, physical labor, and more. Combine all of those, and you get a chronically elevated heart rate, chronically elevated blood pressure, and potentially a dramatically shorter lifespan because of it.

So how do you fix it? Well – concerted efforts of exercise, rather than randomly achieved fitness metrics, actually do a great deal to reverse the effects of those chronic daily stressors. So, by getting up and moving at a decent intensity for 20 minutes or more, we can push past those low levels of chronic stress, increase the amount of work we can tolerate, and then give our heart and body a chance to rebound and recover.

Give it a shot – even if you’ve had a long and busy day – spend 20 minutes doing some form of moderate exercise, and see if you don’t just feel like a new person after.

~Tyler