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Health Readiness & Combat Support | Physical Fitness | Medical and Dental Preventive Care Fitness | Total Force Fitness | Heart Health
Having a medically ready force means ensuring each service member is in optimum physical, mental, and spiritual health to perform at their best throughout their high-stress careers. A healthy heart is essential to service members’ performance because it’s the pump that ensures their bodies get the right amount of nutrients and oxygen to work properly and sustain them.
To do that, the heart itself must work properly, and the lifestyle choices service members make contribute to their hearts’ health.
“A healthy heart not only is important for how your body performs in the present, but also contributes to your longevity,” said Tim Bockelman, supervisory physical fitness advisor and sports medicine and injury protection coordinator for the Recruit Training Regiment at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, South Carolina.
Exercise is one important aspect to achieving a healthy heart, but there are specific ways to exercise to ensure your heart is protected to allow for optimum performance. However, exercise is not the only way to achieve heart health.
“A good combination of healthy behaviors include exercise, recovery, nutrition, sleep, limiting alcohol use, smoking cessation, along with decreasing amount of inactivity, such as sitting at the game console or watching television, can positively impact heart health and performance,” said Bockelman.
And though all types of exercise contribute to good health, certain types of exercise contribute most to a healthy heart.
“For heart health, the recommendation is moderate intensity activities for 2.5 hours per week,” said Bockelman.
“Moderate exercise activities increase your heart rate and cause you to sweat, but you’re still able to talk,” he said. Hiking, brisk walking, biking on a level surface, water aerobics, etc. are some examples of moderate intensity activities.
And if you plan to engage in higher-intensity activities, the recommended time decreases because they engage your heart more.
“If you ramp up the intensity to something vigorous, such as running, circuit training, biking faster or with hills, or swimming laps, the recommended time decreases to 1.25 hours per week,” said the recruit trainer.
During vigorous activities, your heart rate increases and your ability to talk is limited to a few words between breaths. These higher-intensity activities are cardiovascular strategies that alternate between shorter bursts of intense anaerobic exercise with less intense recovery periods.