How a Single Workout May Immediately Lower Your Risk of Death

Aerobic exercise is a long-term investment in heart health, That’s one reason health care professionals urge their patients to exercise! Over time, your heart adapts to aerobic exercise and becomes a more efficient pump. As a result, your heart doesn’t have to work as hard to deliver blood to the body as it did when it was out of shape. In addition, exercise modestly lowers blood pressure and helps reduce inflammation, an underlying driver of cardiovascular disease. Exercise also positively impacts blood lipids. Finally, aerobic exercise helps with weight control and improves body composition. For example, being physically active helps reduce the accumulation of visceral fat that men and women fall victim to during middle age. If your waistline is gradually growing, it’s because your visceral fat stores are expanding. Visceral fat is the riskiest kind of fat from a heart health perspective as it contributes to inflammation and insulin resistance. Regular workout sessions also improve blood sugar control and lower the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Changes happen at the cellular level too in response to exercise. Aerobic exercise makes tiny, energy-producing organelles called mitochondria more efficient. That’s why your exercise endurance improves over time and you develop more stamina. This is important because healthy mitochondria are linked with slower aging, according to some research. Most of the benefits you get from aerobic training take time. It will be several weeks or months before adaptations, such as improved heart efficiency and changes in lipids, take place. But there are other changes that happen more quickly. Surprisingly, research suggests that we get benefits from aerobic exercise even after the first workout through a phenomenon called ischemic preconditioning. Studies show that for up to three hours after a workout, your heart is more resistant to stress and your risk […]

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