Missouri Health

Are you a fan of Oprah? If you are, you know she is an advocate of exercise. You may also know that she has Drs. Mehmet Oz and Larry Rosen as frequent guests. And, if you’ve heard these doctors or read their books, you can probably repeat this mantra: “30 minutes of walking a day is the best exercise.”

In other words, exercise doesn’t have to mean joining a gym or rigorous training. You don’t have to look like the model in the magazine to be healthy.

Exerting ourselves 30 minutes a day by simply walking will increase your metabolism, which allows your body to more easily process and digest food and sugar and break down fat. In turn, you will:

• reduce your heart’s “afterload” (the force needed to eject blood out of a chamber of your heart)
• improve your blood pressure
• decrease your stress
• lose weight

Sounds simple, but it’s the “every day” part that’s the hardest.

Dress appropriately, but go do it
Too many people let too many things stand in the way of a daily walk. The most common hurdle is the days you come home from work and simply don’t feel like doing anything. That’s why you should partner with a friend or a neighbor for your daily walk. That other someone often provides the impetus and encouragement to keep you on your daily routine.

Don’t let the elements stop you, either. Keep walking in the rain, in the winter and in the snow. Dress appropriately, of course, and don’t go out during a storm or in unsafe conditions. But these times are rare. Weather makes for too easy an excuse to break the cycle and return to our inactive ways.

If you’re really committed to daily walking, perhaps the biggest obstacle you will face is frustration. I’ve discovered that at just about the time my patients are starting to make a real difference in their health — after four to six weeks of daily walking — they give up because they haven’t reached a weight loss goal they’ve conjured in their mind. Don’t despair; the results are just around the corner.

Stay the course; the difference is profound
When you stay the course, the heart health differences you will make are profound. Over time, exercise will:

• make your heart’s left ventricle contract more efficiently
• decrease the pressure on your aorta
• lower overall blood pressure as the aorta, with less workload, relaxes
• strengthen your heart valves, increasing the heart’s capacity to feed itself more oxygen-rich blood

It’s all about efficiency — think of your heart in mechanical terms. Your heart is a pump. Like any motorized pump, the heart needs to be finely oiled to remain efficient. Exercise is the oil for your heart.

Consider this: If you’re the typical individual sitting down reading this article, you may assume your heart is working no harder — about 70 beats a minute — than the heart of any other reader doing the same thing. However, if you’ve developed what I call an “athletic” heart, one that has been conditioned through exercise, your “resting heartbeat” is lower, sometimes into the 40s and 50s. Lower resting heart rates lead to longer lives.

Conversely, if you have health issues such as being severely overweight, your resting heartbeat could be as high as 100 beats a minute.

So after you read this article, get up from your chair, go for a walk and make a daily habit.

This article was originally published in the Suburban Journal on July 1, 2009.