When you read about people dying of “natural causes,” it usually means that they died of heart failure because they spent too much time lying in bed. When you become inactive, you lose your skeletal muscles at an alarming rate, and losing skeletal muscle causes loss of heart muscle until your heart can become too weak to pump blood to your brain and you die.
When you strengthen skeletal muscles it also strengthens heart muscle. When you contract your skeletal muscles, they squeeze the veins near them to pump extra blood back to your heart. The extra blood flowing back to your heart fills up your heart, which stretches your heart muscle, causing the heart muscle to contract with greater force and pump more blood back to your body. This explains why your heart beats faster and harder to pump more blood when you exercise. The harder your heart muscle has to contract regularly in an exercise program, the greater the gain in heart muscle strength.
Here are some facts on why exercise is crucial to your health & longevity:
The larger your skeletal muscles, the stronger your heart and the lower your chance of suffering heart attacks and heart disease.
The larger your muscles, the less likely you are to die of heart disease.
A study showed that adults with no history of heart disease who did not exercise were at 65 percent increased risk for strokes and heart attacks. This is the same rate as that found for smoking.
The less you exercise, the weaker your heart and the more likely you are to become diabetic.
A study of 900 heart failure patients found that those who did not exercise were twice as likely to die within three years.
A study of older adults showed that the smaller the muscles in their arms, legs and trunk, the smaller and weaker the upper and lower chambers of their hearts.
Thank you to Dr Gabe Mirkin for allowing N2Shape to use his knowledge, studies and information that he writes in his newsletter.
