Will Exercise Lower Your Cholesterol Effectively?

Regular exercise is the key of way to improve your entire health, including for helping to keep your LDL (bad cholesterol) off. It is so recommended in TLC program (a kind of diet and program designed to help maintain and lower cholesterol). In fact, lack of physical activity can increase your risk of developing high LDL. It also can be the major reason behind weight gain (another risk factor of high LDL). So, it’s clear that getting plenty of physical activity can help lower your cholesterol effectively.

Having high LDL means increased risk of heart disease, heart attack, and even stroke (depending on where the clogged arteries occur).Furthermore, high LDL and hypertension (a medical condition to call high blood pressure) are often found together.

Hypertension itself is also risk factor of high LDL. In other words, if you have hypertension, your risk to have high LDL increases. And both can be a great combination to harm your cardiovascular system.

We all agree that there are many health benefits from exercise. The following are some major checklists of these advantages in addition to helping you lower your LDL and raise HDL (good cholesterol):

1. It’s very clear that getting plenty of physical activity can be great to improve the health of your heart in short – and long term.
2. When you are becoming a sedentary individual, you are easier to gain weight. On the other hand, with regular exercise, it can be effective formula to help your weight control – as noted before. Exercise is one of effective ways to boost your metabolic rate. And having good metabolic rate means easier to control your weight and keep it off.
3. Getting plenty of physical activity is not only good in physically but also great for your emotion. With it, you tend to have a better idea to cope with your stress. You will feel better when you are physically active.
4. It is not only about for your health, but also for your productivity. If you are physically active, your productive level will improve, either for your career.
5. Overall, again getting plenty of physical activity is great for your overall health.

Though all of us agree that exercise can help lower cholesterol, but actually its direct role in lowering LDL and boosting HDL is still not fully understood.

Regardless to the issue of the effectiveness of exercise in helping to lose and control weight, some experts believe that there are other reasons why the level of your physical activity is very crucial for your LDL and HDL levels.

According to some recent studies, the following are other benefits of exercise in helping to control and lower cholesterol:

1. Exercise can increase and improve the size of lipoprotein (a package of protein-cholesterol that carries cholesterol through the blood inside the blood vessels). The bigger size of lipoprotein is less harmful than the smaller ones because the bigger ones are less likely to squeeze into the lining and walls of blood vessels that can lead to atherosclerosis.
2. It also improves the body’s ability to stimulate specific hormones that can be helpful to move LDL from the bloodstream to the liver. In the liver, LDL is converted to become bile which then will be excreted.

Unfortunately, there is no clearly answer of this question. Some studies found that the effect of exercise to lower LDL and improve HDL can vary from person to person.

Sedentary individuals who take poor diet usually experience a significant improvement of their HDL and LDL levels after taking regular & moderate exercise.

And if you get used with a regular exercise and well-balanced diet but your cholesterol is still too high, medical intervention can be involved to treat the problem. For this case, you may develop a condition called familial hypercholesterolemia.

Instead of discussing about how much physical activity you need to do and how much will it help, it’s much better to focus on how to make exercise as a part of your daily activities (aim and do it most days of the week).

Overall more exercise you done will be better to keep your LDL off and boost more HDL. However, make sure your body get what it needs – don’t do exercise too much /higher than your body needs.

First, you need to completely understand that you should not jump directly to a strenuous exercise when you are physically inactive before. Increase the intensity of your exercise gradually until your body is ready to respond the changes!

If you still don’t have idea where you should start, the following are some helpful guidelines.

You don’t need to train yourself like a professional athlete to boost the intensity of your physical activity, particularly true if you are now a sedentary individual. Make it simple – start and build it gradually so thus you can enjoy it and do it with fun!

To start your exercise, try with some simple ideas from your daily activities or even your hobbies to get moving more. For instances, try with doing a yard work, redecorating your room, painting a room, playing your favorite muscle instrument, or even cooking.

As your body is ready to respond the change, light exercise can be a good starting point for your moderate exercise.

There are many kinds of light physical activities you can explore to get moving more. These include recreational table tennis, house cleaning, garage work, or recreational walking (walking slowly for about a 24-minute mile).

As your body to become more able to take a light activity, now you can increase the intensity of your physical activity. For instance, you now can take 15-minute mile of walking.

Other ideas include dancing, playing tennis, fun-bike, gardening, or skiing.

If you think that your body is very ready to get high-intensity, you now can set to try walking for about 10-minute mile. If you love playing game to get moving more – soccer /football, climbing and basketball are some of good choices.

The goal of your working out is to keep your cholesterol off and improve your overall health. But sometime it may become counterproductive if you do it improperly.

The following are some major checklists you should always remember.