A physical activity like skipping is essential for a healthy heart can also help prevent Coronary Heart Disease. Your heart is a muscle and like any other muscle it gets stronger with exercise. Enjoying a frequent physical activity like skipping enables your heart to become stronger. This means it can pump more efficiently giving you more stamina and greater energy. Becoming more active through skipping or other aerobic pursuits will also improve the ability of your body’s tissues to extract oxygen from your blood. This will help you maintain healthy levels of blood fats and speed your metabolism.
Skipping to Help Prevent Coronary Heart Disease
Particularly important to prevent coronary heart disease is aerobic or cardiovascular exercise such as skipping. This is true for the following reasons;
Firstly,
a physical activity like skipping helps to lower blood pressure and high blood pressure is one of the major risk factors for coronary heart disease. Skipping can also help prevent high blood pressure from developing.
Secondly,
skipping can play an important part in achieving or keeping to a healthy weight. People who are overweight are more likely to have both high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol levels and so have a greater risk of coronary heart disease. Skipping (and other similar physical activities) can help improve levels of HDL cholesterol (healthy cholesterol), but it does not affect LDL so to maintain a good balance I would suggest a regular amount of physical activity and a balanced diet.
Lastly,
heart attacks usually occur when a blood clots forms over atheroma (small fatty lumps that develop within the inside lining of arteries). Performing a regular physical activity like skipping is shown to help prevent blood clotting.
A Happy Heart is a Healthy Heart
The last point to make is that a sense of well being is important for health. The fun that can be had from skipping should not be overestimated. We have had many people in our skipping workshops tell us that it is the most fun they have had while exercising. Having a great deal of fun can lead to a positive outlook on life and this brings it’s own health benefits including helping towards a healthy heart.
