Providing cardiology services and cardiac care since 1983.

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

Are you ready for exercise?

At a time when 63% of us are overweight – and 28% of us are obese – it’s no surprise that governments, businesses and celebrity trainers alike are encouraging people to exercise.

But while more exercise is a good thing – and we certainly encourage it here – are you really ready for exercise?

While sports cardiology is a relatively new subspecialty of cardiology and sports medicine, cardiac screening of recreational and professional athletes is steadily becoming more common.

Sports Cardiology Clinic team

To help GPs make sure their patients are ready for exercise Sydney Cardiology’s Sports Cardiology team conducts a comprehensive sports cardiology screening including history and physical evaluation, ECG, echocardiography, stress echo and electrophysiological studies.

The team also manages athletes with cardiovascular conditions, prescribes exercise for adults and does pre-participation evaluations for middle-aged people who are returning to exercise.

People attending a Sports Cardiology Clinic include adult athletes who are involved in sport at any level from recreational to high-level competition. Adolescent athletes, ages 15 or older, may also be evaluated. Patients may be referred by their GP or sports physician.

The Sydney Cardiology rooms have comprehensive cardiac assessment facilities including electrocardiography (ECG), echocardiography, exercise stress testing and ambulatory ECG monitoring.

Our sports cardiology team includes cardiologists Dr Fiona Foo, Dr Jason Kaplan, Dr Bill Petrellis and Dr Abhinav Luhach, who have completed additional training in sports cardiology.