Your heart pumps about 100,000 times a day and pumps about 5 litres of blood every minute while at rest. That’s 7500 litres a day moving through some 96,000 kilometres of blood vessels in your body. It’s an amazing piece of equipment that responds well to training.  

For the month of February we are placing our focus on this muscle; looking at both how to train for better performance and how to train such to improve the health of the heart supporting longevity. Maintaining high functioning physical fitness is associated with a significant reduction in the chances of dying from cardiovascular disease. It is common to see data that outlines somewhere around a 35% reduction in all-cause mortality derived from successful heart-focused exercise.  

For those generally of good health, of all ages, specific training aimed at improving heart performance is possible and desirable. Any exercise that raises your heart rate is going to provide benefits. The Specificity Principle does apply in terms of what kind of heart performance improvements you wish to experience but all training helps. The Canadian Society of Exercise Physiology recommends every Canadian experiences 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous exercise.  This equates to something like five 30-minute sessions every week.  

What types of exercise experiences should you have as part of the 5 sessions a week: 

A great pattern for these five sessions would be this: 3 to 4 of the sessions are moderate to vigorous experiences and 1 to 2 are vigorous to difficult. It’s up to you what is right for you but the science is clear in that vigorous workouts, assuming your doctor feels there is no reason not to do so, are very good for your heart.