Heart diet: Recommended heart exercise.

Lack of exercise is one of the major risk factors for heart disease. The other factors are smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.

Ideally, you should exercise three to five times a week for 20-50 minutes. However, your health can benefit simply by doing around 30 minutes of moderate activity each day, such as stair climbing, walking to work or gardening.

It’s not just aerobic exercise such as walking, cycling, jogging and swimming that is recommended. Resistance and strength training, like light weightlifting, and interval training are important parts of a good fitness routine, because they increase your strength and stamina, lead to decreased body fat and help improve blood cholesterol levels.

Benefits of regular exercise:

• Improves heart and lungs;
• Decreases resting blood pressure;
• Decreases body fat;
• Decreases total and LDL cholesterol (‘bad cholesterol’);
• Raises HDL cholesterol (‘good cholesterol’);
• Increases energy level;
• Increases tolerance to stress and depression;
• Controls or prevents the development of diabetes; and
• Decreases risk of orthopedic injury.