The internal irrigation of our body
The most important aspect of your health
Today, more than 90 million North Americans have some sort of cardiovascular disease.
Many of them don’t even know it.
Cardiovascular disease has been the leading cause of death every year since 1918, even during World War II.
Being sedentary is now formally classified as a major cardiovascular risk factor, one that ranks higher than even smoking or high cholesterol.
Regular, vigorous exercise cuts the risk of dying from heart attack by half.
Heart attacks actually have nothing to do with our hearts, and everything to do with our circulation.
It’s not the hearts themselves that fail … it’s the coronary arteries that do.
They get blocked, they clot and quite often we worry and stress for far too long, and then we die.
In nature, arteries never wear out, they don’t harden, they don’t become clogged, and they never burst.
In our modern life, however, our arteries are exposed to the same, chronic stress, information and deterioration for decades on end.
As a result, they become weak, inflamed, and our body responds by repairing our internal highways and absorbing cholesterol.
Eventually, this repair mechanism leads to what we call plaque … and plaque, in one way or another, eventually kills almost half of us today.
Our hearts are actually quite amazing, and will beat roughly 4 billion times over your life … without taking a single break.
When you are born, you start out with your maximum cardiac capacity, which is our ability to get blood and oxygen deep into our muscles.
When we get older, this is what changes dramatically.
Your heart muscle is still very much intact and functional despite many of the things we might do to it later in life.
The problem is that these small arteries are not.
The inside lining of most healthy, 50-year-old male and females is like … the top of a cheese pizza.
It is still somewhat nimble and flexible, however, it is no longer smooth, which is the big worry, because that is where plaque and the whole resulting road of health issues, stress, and all the nasty co-morbidities lie in wait for you.
Overall mortality falls with exercise, something that is not at all surprising when you consider that it is wounded blood vessels that kill you, and that exercise heals wounded blood vessels.
These blood vessels go to every single corner of your body, and every single one of them responds in the same way, too, what we put in our bodies, and how active we keep it.
Think about … a stream …
and where you might see pond scum, or muck, on water surfaces outdoors. It always accumulates where the water doesn’t move, or is relatively stagnant.
If you were very thirsty and wanted to take a drink, you would seek out an area that had a steady stream of fast-flowing water.
Although this is a very simple generalisation, the gist is the same, however the health implications for humans are enormously different.
The reality is that when you are resting, only 20% of your blood flows through your muscles.
During times of aerobic exercise and periods of vigorous movement, this increases to almost 100% in a relatively short period of time.
Think about it … when you’re trying to clean something, why do you usually rinse it with fast-flowing water … or let it sit in a sink that’s full of it?
Then ask yourself why should the internal mechanisms of your own body be any different?
As a first step, when moving up the health curve, regular aerobic exercise is what most of us need to improve our ability to circulate blood around our bodies.
Think of good cardiovascular health as the irrigation within your body that keeps everything nourished, cleansed, and on permanent standby to deal with any of the biological hiccups you might experience in life.
It prevents us from softening, and becoming fragile on the inside when we get older.
Circulation is what controls our capacity to get fuel and oxygen to our muscles, where it is burned to create the power that keeps us strong, energetic and moving.
Just as importantly, it sweeps away the debris and byproducts of our metabolic burning process.
During exercise, when you breathe heavily for air, this is because your body is trying to get rid of debris, not because it is desperate for more oxygen.
The same thing applies to muscles which get sore not because they are stressed because of torn muscle fibres after a big workout … rather they are sore because of the buildup of lactic acid, which it cannot get rid of fast enough.
Good circulation really is the key to good health.
If you’d like to know more, IMPORTANTLY how you can take care of your cardiovascular health in your spare time, please check out my BEAT Heart Health Coaching website and book an initial free consultation.