You’ve probably been told that exercise is one of the best ways to lower your cholesterol and that lowering your cholesterol is one of the best things you can do for your heart health. So far, so good. The next questions, however, are what kind of exercise is best, and how much of it should you be doing? (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3906547/)
You always want any exercise to be as effective as possible. For your performance to be at its best, you need to be targeting it toward the goals you’re trying to achieve. In the case of cholesterol, you want to see your LDL, or bad cholesterol, drop and/or increase your HDL, or good cholesterol. When you’re planning what activities to do, that’s going to be a primary consideration.
Aerobic exercise is the kind that gets you out of breath and makes your heart pump faster. The most obvious kinds are things like running and cycling. Evidence suggests this is good for the balance between your LDL and HDL. It’s effective when you’re performing at moderate intensity, but if you manage to increase your intensity over an extended and ongoing period of time, it can work even better.
For those of you who don’t enjoy or physically struggle with the more movement-based forms of exercise, resistance training can be a viable alternative. This is more about building your strength by pushing or pulling against either your own body or some form of external weight. This is a good way to lower your total cholesterol, with the level of effectiveness again changing depending on the volume and intensity of the exercise.
Most advice on keeping fit will tell you to combine a mix of strength training and aerobic exercise, along with activities to improve your mobility. It’s a combination of everything that keeps you at your best in terms of overall health. That goes for your cholesterol as well. Most sports require you to work on every part of your body if you want to achieve maximum performance.
There are still other things you need to take into account when planning your workouts, like avoiding injury. Exercising too much can cause damage. Nevertheless, considering the value to your body of a healthy cholesterol level, it’s certainly something you need to be thinking about with any fitness routine. That’s how you’re at your best.
