A common recommendation is to get at least 30 minutes of physical exercise each day. Doing so will help immensely with blood flow and heart health. If you count my steps (aka ~12,000 per day), I have exceeded that goal for years. However, I barely see any of the benefits unless I run.
Before leaving Peak PT, my old physical therapist Kelly explained why. The heart needs to be pumping hard during the 30 minutes of physical exercise, otherwise the positive effects won’t show. Logically, that makes sense. Whenever I join my mom on her grocery store walks to Trader Joe’s or H-mart, I easily accumulate 6,000 steps (if not more). But the pace we walk at is so slow and relaxed that my heart rate stays well under 100bpm the entire time.
Anyway, my daily 15-minute run (either on the elliptical or around the neighborhood) seems to help a lot; eventually I want to increase my running time to 30 minutes nonstop, but that will take some additional training.
On a related note, a slightly disturbing thing I’ve noticed on my elliptical runs is that sometimes my heart does not pump properly. A couple of Sundays ago, I ran into a good example. During my morning run, I found it hard to keep my heart rate from falling below 140; during my afternoon run on the same day, it easily reached 156. Both runs lasted for roughly 20 minutes, but it was only after my afternoon run that I started feeling the positive effects of cardiovascular.
Sadly, I still have not figured out why my heart sometimes refuses to pump fast. My current solutions include breathing a different way, doing warm-up jumping jacks, or delaying the run. These fixes are all hacky and unfortunately do not help 100% of the time. Hopefully my 12/14 cardiologist visit will help answer why.
PS: thanks to my brother Chris for teaching me to pretend that I’m gently clawing the ground when running outdoors; doing so seems to allow me to be subconsciously nicer on my knees
