Exercises for Lowering your Resting Heart Rate
When learning exercises and routines designed to improve your overall health, it's important to incorporate some exercises designed to lower your resting heart rate. Your resting heart rate is a great indicator of your overall fitness status, as you don't spend most of your waking day doing cardio. Your resting heart rate keeps you informed of how well your body's systems are working, which is especially helpful when you're trying to improve your overall fitness levels. Generally, several factors affect your heart rate such as your age, sex, level of fitness, your physiological state, and diet. As you get fitter, however, your average resting heart rate should improve. Lowering your heart rate is the result of a taking care of your body and keeping it fit. Here are some exercises and tips that will help you improve your health and lower your heart rate.
Prime Your Body
For starters, there are some important steps to overall health and well-being that have been shown to also reduce your resting heart rate. Staying hydrated is an essential component to achieving your physical fitness goals without overtaxing your heart. Eight glasses a day for a total of 64 ounces is recommended, but more is better if you exert yourself regularly. Getting enough sleep will also help your heart relax. Studies have shown that when disturbed during sleep, your heart rate can raise an average of 13 beats a minute. Lastly, be sure to listen to your body, and relieve yourself when you get the urge. While this might sound strange, holding off on going to the bathroom greatly stresses your circulatory system, which puts pressure on your heart. Additionally, weight gain, sedentary lifestyles, and smoking all increase your resting heart rate.
Cardio is Key
Including cardiovascular activities several times a week is important. There are many ways to incorporate moving into your lifestyle, and increasing your chances of exercise even when you're not at the gym is a great way to improve your overall health. If you're new to exercise, try walking whenever you can. If you live near a grocery store, for instance, try walking there instead of driving. Or, walk around the block each morning and evening. When that starts to feel comfortable, increase your exercise to a jog or bike ride. Keep in mind that you don't have to get all 30 minutes of your exercise in at once. Breaking it up into smaller chunks can help you incorporate this change more easily into your lifestyle.
For already active individuals, vary your cardio routine to include more diverse aerobic exercises. If you prefer to jog, try mixing it up with interval trainings, or make sure to add a hill into your daily run. Long-distance runners should consider swimming, which is one of the best overall cardio workouts for the body while also being low-impact on your joints. Other forms of cardio exercises include rowing, treadmill workouts (try walking on an incline or intervals for a heart-pumping workout), Stairmaster, elliptical training, cross country skiing, hiking, jumping rope or jumping jacks, boxing, even vigorously cleaning your house can be considered cardio!
