Exercise And Cholesterol

It has been in the general public's perception that exercise can reduce cholesterol and gives you a healthier body. The more exercises you do, the healthier a person will be and all the heart attacks, strokes, high blood pressure etc will go away. Is this view correct? And if so how does exercise really reduce our body cholesterol?

When we do exercise long enough (30 minutes or more), our body will starts to burn our body fat for fuel to cater for the higher demand in energy while we are in the high physical activity state. As we know, cholesterols are fat like substances in our blood stream. The regular burning off of fats in our body prevents the accumulation of LDL cholesterol. Exercise will stimulate the production of enzyme that promotes the removal of LDL by transporting them to the liver to be converted into bile or secreted. The more exercise we do, the more LDL cholesterol will be removed from our system.

On the other hand, high physical activities can promote the production of HDL cholesterol in our body which function is to transport excess cholesterol away from our blood stream. In fact studies have shown that exercise is the only way that we can increase our HDL level. That is why people who lives a sedentary lifestyle has a lower level of HDL in their blood system which is why most of these people will have high cholesterol and suffer a higher risk of having heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure and so on.

So what kind of exercise we can do? Normally if you have never been exercising for quite some time, it is advisable to start slow by doing regular light exercises to make your body use to the higher level of physical stress or to consult your local doctor first before you start to do anything. You can do walking for 30 minutes a day, 3 times a week. As your body begins to get used to the low intensity exercises, you can crank up the level by doing fast walking or even slow running for 30 minutes or more a day. The key is to increase your exercise intensity in a gradual manner. You can always try different types of exercise to inject variety and thus prevents the boring effect from making you stop exercising! Exercises like, treadmills, stationary bike, stepper, ellipticals, rowing machine or even rope jumping are among many cardio exercises that you can choose.


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