Exercise and nutrition: If you take care to maintain a healthy balance here, you protect the heart. Researchers found that just a few minutes of exercise a day protect against premature cardiac death.
Do you love sports? Then you are probably physically fit, from which the heart and circulation benefit enormously. Why? Exercise ensures that the heart muscle is better supplied with blood. As a result, it pumps more blood through the body per heartbeat. Pulse and blood pressure drop if you train regularly according to your own fitness level.
So you should not overexert yourself, because that means stress for the heart. If you are unsure how far you should go in training, you should orient yourself to your own training pulse. A rule of thumb can be used to calculate it. For example, the maximum load frequency can be estimated with the formula 220 minus age, as it says on the websites of the Practice for Cardiology and Prevention of Thomas Gamm and Dr. Franziska Bruhn from Berlin. The training recommendation specifies a pulse range of 60 to 75 percent of the maximum heart rate (rule of thumb 180 minus age), it continues.
75 minutes of exercise per week protects against premature cardiac death
If you do sports every day, you are doing something good for your health. It doesn't have to be the hour, even a few minutes a day are enough, according to the study. © Jose Luis Carrascosa/Imago
In addition to maintaining the optimal training pulse, the duration of the training session also has positive effects on the heart and circulation. A team of researchers led by Leandro Garcia from the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine in Cambridge had investigated how non-occupational physical activity affects the risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer and mortality. One of their study results: Just eleven minutes of exercise a day could significantly reduce the risk of dying prematurely from chronic heart disease. The study was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
According to the researchers, 75 minutes of exercise per week – the equivalent of eleven minutes a day – is already sufficient to protect against premature cardiac death. "Our results support the current recommendations for moderate aerobic activity of 150 to 300 minutes per week (or 75 to 150 minutes per week for intense aerobic activity or an equivalent combination of moderate and intense activity), as this level of exposure generally appears to correspond to a maximum or near-maximum benefit. However, the dose-response associations also show that a significant health benefit can be achieved with 75 minutes/week or less of moderate activity (i.e., half the minimum recommended level). Our findings thus support the recent shift in public health messages towards 'some exercise is better than none at all' and suggest that the emphasis on threshold-based recommendations could be further reduced," according to an excerpt from the study.
"Moderate aerobic activity" refers to light endurance sports such as Nordic walking or a brisk walk. By "intense aerobic activity", the researchers mean endurance sports that really make you sweat, such as a jog or a more strenuous hiking tour.
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The study result in a nutshell: Even 75 minutes of light endurance sports such as brisk walking or Nordic walking reduces the risk of premature cardiac death.
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