CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE
Exercise ticks all the boxes
Old advice to ‘take it easy’ has gone out the window in favour of ‘get physically active’!
Exercise ticks all the boxes – it improves overall heart function, reduces stress on your heart and minimises your risk of reoccurring cardiac events.
Your Accredited Exercise Physiologist will prescribe the right exercise for your body, working within your individual limits and giving you the confidence to get active again.
Exercise ticks all the boxes – it improves overall heart function, reduces stress on your heart and minimises your risk of reoccurring cardiac events.
Old advice to ‘take it easy’ has gone out the window in favour of ‘get physically active’!
Your Accredited Exercise Physiologist will prescribe the right exercise for your body, working within your individual limits and giving you the confidence to get active again.
People who take up regular physical activity after an initial cardiac event (such as a heart attack), and who have stable disease symptoms, have a 31% lower risk of experiencing another, fatal cardiac event.
Health benefits of training with an Exercise Physiologist
- Improved prognosis – longer lives troubled by fewer symptoms;
- Improvement in many of the risk factors that we know may lead to worsening of CVD (lower blood pressures, better blood lipids and cholesterols, improved insulin resistance and glucose intolerance – which is to say improvement in diabetic health – and less obesity);
- Less angina (cardiac chest pain); and
- Possibly a reduction in the occurrence of depression following a heart attack.
Physical inactivity and a sedentary lifestyle are known and preventable risk factors for coronary artery disease and heart attack.
Exercise Physiology therefore plays an important role in education, prevention programs and cardiac rehabilitation programs.
Your exercise physiologist can assess your exercise capacity and advise you on exercise training.
Your exercise physiologist may also offer advice on other issues that people with cardiac disease may require such as the management of pain and breathlessness.
Exercise Physiologists have an important role in the care of people who require (open) heart surgery such as coronary artery bypass graft surgery, heart valve repair or replacement.
Your exercise physiologist can provide you with respiratory (breathing and coughing) exercises to treat postoperative complications, such as chest infection and pneumonia.
Respiratory exercises may be particularly important if you have respiratory conditions, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Increasingly, postoperative exercise physiology focuses on helping you with early mobilisation and exercise. This restores you to a good level of physical activity and fitness and reduces postoperative musculoskeletal (bone and joint) problems.
There are a number of modifiable risk factors for coronary artery disease including smoking, high cholesterol, poor diet (high in saturated fats and salt), obesity, physical inactivity, high blood pressure and diabetes, and many of these risk factors are linked.
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is maintaining a healthy heart and includes stopping smoking, watching your diet, increasing your physical activity, taking your prescribed medication and having regular medical check-ups.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) comprises of diseases of the cardiovascular system (coronary, cerebral and peripheral circulation, the heart’s pacemaker and conduction tissues, pericardium, myocardium and heart valves).
