Heart Health Tips

Heart Health Tips hover background

Sep 12
2018

Looking for heart health tips to implement into your life and keeping your heart strong and healthy for many years to come? Exercise and diet will undoubtedly help and are great places to start. But if you want to keep your heart strong for many years, there are many more heart health tips you can be following that are simple and easy to do.

If you are looking for small, simple changes that will help improve your heart health, here are a few places to begin.

Heart Health Tips

Quit Smoking and Avoid Secondhand Smoke

Whether you are a smoker or not, avoid being around it. If you are not a smoker, avoiding secondhand smoke will protect your heart health.

If you are a smoker, quit now. Studies show that the benefits of quitting smoking begin as soon as 8 hours after your last cigarette and continue to show many benefits to your health for the weeks, months and years to come after you quit. Even one year after quitting, your risk of suffering death from a cardiovascular event decreases by 45%.

Avoid Trans Fats

Trans fats are responsible for clogging arteries and raising your bad cholesterol levels. Nowadays most packaged foods contain trans fat, so make sure to read labels and look for foods that contain zero trans fats. In addition, choosing healthful foods such as fruits and veggies also isn’t a bad place to start when eating for heart health.

It is not just eliminating trans fats that is important. Your body does need fats, but they need to be the healthy kind. In addition to avoiding trans fats, add good fats into your diet. Good fats can be found in foods like fatty fish, whole eggs and avocados.

Don’t Stay Sedentary For Too Long

This goes for not only day to day at the workplace, but also applies to traveling. Sitting in one place for too long will increase your risk for blood clots and a cardiovascular event.

If your work requires you to be sitting all day, get up and move when you can. Stand up, stretch, take a brief walk around the building, park further away from the office or get a standing desk. Implementing these ideas into your workday will in turn help to keep your heart healthy and fit for many years.

Sleep Enough

Sleeping takes an important role in human’s body. You should sleep enough to lower the risk of heart disease. According to studies, it is proven that people who are sleeping less than 6 hours daily suffer from an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. Our bodies need restful sleep in order to maintain normal biological processes, heal and reduce inflammation. All of these things ward off illness and disease. In order to keep your heart healthy, sleeping is important, so aim for 7-8 hours of sleep per night.

Manage Your Stress & Anxiety

Managing stress and anxiety in your life and keeping it under control goes a long way in protecting your heart health. Increased levels of stress can cause high blood pressure and do damage to your heart and can also increase your risk of heart attack and stroke when these stress levels are chronic.

Find healthy ways to manage stress, such as time with people you love, laughing out loud, going for a walk, exercising or taking up a fun, new and interesting hobby.

Brush and Floss Daily

Keeping your teeth clean impacts more than just your mouth. If you are not cleaning your teeth daily then also it can affect your heart because dirty teeth produce bacteria which will destroy your heart. Moreover, dirty teeth cause various diseases like gum disease and many other dangerous diseases.

At Above & Beyond Physical Therapy, our physical therapy team takes a holistic approach to your healing and health. Whether it is recovering from injury or illness or preparing for or recovering from surgery, we are here to help. Contact us today.

Locations

Queen Creek Location
21321 E. Ocotillo Rd., Suite 122
Queen Creek, AZ 85142
Ph: 480.987.1870
F: 480.987.9289

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3201 W. Peoria Ave., Suite D800
Phoenix, AZ 85029
Ph: 602.866.2231
F: 602.866.2261

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