How does exercise affect the cardiovascular system?

          Exercise is very important for everybody’s life.  You can live longer by being in shape and keeping active.   Without exercise, some people can die at early ages from stroke, heart attack or disease.  Exercise not only helps fight heart disease, but for most people, just adding a little exercise to your daily routine reduces the risk of high blood pressure, osteoporosis, breast and colon cancer, depression, anxiety, and stress.  You should exercise from 20 to 50 minutes every day.  You could walk, bike, jog, swim, or lift weights.  This will also increase your strength, decrease body fat, and help improve blood cholesterol levels.

           Before you exercise you should wait at least a half an hour after eating.  You should also have something to drink while exercising so you don’t become dehydrated.  Be sure to dress for the weather conditions and wear protective footwear.   Always take time to include a five-minute warm-up and a ten-minute cool down.  It’s helpful to stretch standing and sitting. Exercise at your own pace and never over do yourself.  You really don’t need memberships to clubs or expensive equipment to get and keep in shape. Last of all, you should exercise with a friend(s) to have more fun and to also have someone there to help you if needed. 

          You should learn to monitor your heart rate while exercising.  To find the heart’s rate of intensity, feel the carotid artery, the temporal artery, or the radial artery with your pointer and middle finger. Count the beats in six seconds and multiply by ten.  That will give you a good measurement of your heart rate.  Remember to never use your thumb to check your heart rate because it has its own artery that can throw off the beat of your count.  Also, the sooner after the exercising you take your heart pulse, the more accurate it will be.

          How the cardiovascular system responds to exercise is very important in studying physiology because the changes that take place demonstrate a large number of control mechanisms.  These mechanisms keep the body stimulated to produce a cardiovascular response in three ways.  When the cortex realizes the increase activity, it produces sympathetic activity.  The sympathetic activity causes increased cardiac activity and increased contractile force in the heart.  This is how the cardiovascular system responds to exercise. 

          There are so many other reasons to exercise though.  Other benefits of exercise are that it can help you lose weight, decrease your total LDL cholesterol (the bad stuff) and increase your HDL cholesterol (the good kind). Without exercise, you would be extremely out of shape and be in an unhealthy condition to play sports or any fun, physical activities.  With no exercise, the world would be … fat and lazy.