How to Maintain a Healthy Heart

by Lucy Miller

A Fitness and Nutrition Expert

We all know that exercise is one of the best things you can do for your heart but its also one of the best ways to measure your level of fitness too, which is why you won’t find me in the gym without my heart rate monitor! 

My Polar FT60 is like my PT. It guides me during my session and if I wake up in the morning and read a slightly higher figure than usual, I know its because I’m either coming down with a cold or some sort of bug or I have been over training and need a rest. Your heart says so much about your training!

by Maureen Cromey

An Acupuncturist and Chinese Medicine Expert

Our heart is our most important organ.  When we think about the heart we don’t immediately think of it as a big muscular pump pushing blood around our body. The Heart seems to house feelings and love and can be easily broken by betrayal, disappointment or bereavement. It is an iconic symbol for love.

by Toby Maguire

A Taoist Master

The Heart is often referred to as the 'Source of Life' as it provides the body with the essential ingredients that it needs to survive. This central muscle is finely sensitive to feedback mechanisms concerning our brain and muscle oxygen needs. It pumps blood, carrying warmth, oxygen and nutrients around the body and its rate and rhythm are determined by our breathing and our mental and emotional states.

by Angie Newson

A Yoga and Pilates Expert

It's pretty easy to improve the health of our heart in the physical sense. Located in the centre of the chest (slightly to the left), the heart is a muscle the size of a clenched fist. It's function is to pump blood around the body - the right side collecting oxygen-depleted blood and the left side pumping out the fresh clean oxygenated blood. With regular exercise and a healthy, nutritious diet, we can help it to do its job, preventing disease.

by Dr. Sarah Brewer

A Nutritionist and Doctor

Your heart is an amazing organ. It contracts and relaxes around 70 times a minute – that's 100,800 times per day and over 2.76 billion times during an average lifespan. If you look after your heart, it can carry on beating significantly longer, but fail to pay attention to your diet and lifestyle – well, your heart may fail prematurely as a result. And although traditionally viewed as a male disease, heart attacks now kill three times more women than cancers of the breast, ovaries and cervix combined.

by Steve Halsall

A Celebrity Personal Trainer

Keeping the most important muscle in the body alive, healthy and strong, is something most people take for granted. I have never had a new client ask me to 'get their heart in shape'; people are generally aesthetic and performance driven in their needs.

The irony is that if it is anything that flags up and shouts 'there's trouble' in the body, it is the heart that shouts the loudest. The average heart ticks along at 100,000 beats per day, a staggering 35 million beats per year and it stands to reason it needs to be strong to keep us going day by day.