The advice is clear-cut: Sit less and purposefully move more for heart health. But how does exercise help keep your heart healthy?

Exercise has many positive effects on heart health. Regular exercise routine can help:

• Lower blood pressure
• Lessen risk of developing diabetes
• Maintain healthy body weight
• Reduce inflammation throughout the body

Experts say one of the key benefits of exercise is that it helps to control or modify many of the risk factors for heart disease. Smoking is another big factor for heart disease, and research indicates people who exercise regularly are unlikely to take on or continue a bad habit such as smoking.

Exercise also:

• Improves the muscles’ ability to pull oxygen out of the blood, reducing the need for the heart to pump more blood to the muscles
• Reduces stress hormones that can put an extra burden on the heart
• Works like a beta blocker to slow the heart rate and lower blood pressure
• Increases high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and helps control triglycerides

A number of studies have also shown that people who exercise regularly are less likely to suffer a sudden heart attack or other life-threatening cardiac event.

While exercise has benefits in and of itself, the best way to prevent heart disease is to combine exercise with a healthy diet. Exercise alone can help with weight loss over a long period of time. But a short-term approach is to reduce the number of calories you take in through diet, while increasing the calories you use through exercise.

Ideal Exercise for the Heart

The American Heart Association recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise each week. That’s aerobic exercise — the kind that gets your heart rate up for more than a few minutes.

Additionally, an ideal exercise program for heart health also incorporates about an hour of strength-training exercises per week. Two sessions of resistance training for about 30 minutes at a time is a typical recommendation.

Those suggestions may change depending on your health, your goals and your current amount of physical activity. And reaching that standard could take some time. 

The goal should be to first and foremost avoid sedentary behaviors that take up the majority of your day.