Apart from feeling better and looking better, what does regular exercise do for the heart?
It has been shown, and this is about the one point on which all the experts on heart disease do agree, that it reduces the risk of, or postpones the onset of, a whole series of diseases, including arthritis, rheumatism, disc trouble, diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary disease, stroke, and even depression and anxiety. And if you are overweight, it is the best way to lose the flab.
If you exercise regularly you are less likely to smoke and overeat. Your blood pressure falls and your heart beats more slowly and more efficiently at rest. When you exercise, the heart rate rises slower, to a lower peak, and returns to normal faster if you are a regular exerciser than if you are a couch potato. That means the supply-demand equation so often mentioned in this book is tilted to your benefit.
Exercising regularly also postpones the onset of old age. You can recognize old people who have exercised regularly by their straighter backs, their better neck movements, their more mobile joints and more bulky muscles. They are fitter mentally, too, being less depressed and less isolated from others.
Exercise is particularly important for women. It helps to drive calcium into their bones, thus warding off the excesses of osteoporosis, the disease that causes tens of thousands of older women in the U.S. every year to have fractured hips. For these women, calcium loss from bones can be a serious problem after the menopause. Physically active women start off their menopause with a bigger store of calcium in their thigh and hip bones, so that any later loss of calcium, hopefully, is never so severe that these bones will break.
It is never too late to start exercising, for men or women. For more than twenty years now, heart attack survivors have been encouraged to exercise as soon as they have recovered from the experience. There have been some astonishing successes. Dr. Terrence Kavanagh, who ran a cardiac rehabilitation center in Toronto, encouraged his patients to start carefully, building up to a light jog for an hour at a time.
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