Stretch Your Legs to Keep Heart Disease at Bay

Stretching your legs may help prevent diseases such as stroke, heart disease and diabetes. Passive stretching can help reduce early death.

Highlights :

Passive stretching may help prevent diseases such as stroke, heart disease and diabetes
Stretching can also help reduce the risk of mobility and early death
So, try stretching your legs during this lockdown to improve your heart health

Are you gaining weight during the COVID-19 lockdown? Then it's time to try some stretching. A new study suggests that stretching your legs can keep you away from obesity, diabetes, stroke and heart disease.//

Benefits of Stretching

Top 7 Benefits of Ballistic Stretching
Ballistic exercise is characterized by rapid and jerky bouncing movements. These movements stretch the targeted muscle group and joints beyond the normal range.

‘Stretching your legs may help prevent diseases such as stroke, heart disease and diabetes. Passive stretching can help reduce early death.’

New research published today in the Journal of Physiology shows that 12 weeks of easy-to-administer passive stretching helps improve blood flow by making it easier for your arteries to dilate and decreasing their stiffness.

Passive stretching differs from active stretching in that the former involves an external force (another person or gravity) stretching you, whereas active stretching is performed on your own. The changes they observed in blood vessels could have implications for diseases, including the number one global killer, heart disease.

Study Details and Results

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Can yoga stretches and popular Chinese martial arts such as tai chi and qigong relieve back pain? Yes, doing meditation, stretching exercises like yoga, and gentle mind-body movements such as tai chi and qigong can ease backache naturally.

Researchers at the University of Milan assigned 39 healthy participants of both sexes to two groups. The control group didn't undergo any stretching. The experimental group performed leg stretches 5 times a week for 12 weeks.

Researchers evaluated the effect of passive stretching on the blood flow locally and in the upper arm. They found that the arteries in both the lower leg and upper arm had increased blood flow and dilation when stimulated, along with decreased stiffness.

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Both of these changes may have implications for diseases such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes as they are characterized by changes in blood flow control, due to an impaired vascular system.

If this study is replicated in patients with vascular disease, it could indicate whether or not this training method could serve as a new drug-free treatment for improving vascular health and reducing disease risk, especially in people with lower mobility.

Stretching Before Workouts may Not be the Best Practice
While it is often recommended that people do stretching exercises before they workout, two new studies suggest that doing so can weaken your workout.

Moreover, stretching may also be used during hospitalisation or after surgical interventions, in order to preserve the vascular health when patients have low mobility. It can be also performed at home by carers or family members.

Stretching during the Lockdown

Emiliano Ce, an author on the paper said: This new application of stretching is especially relevant in the current pandemic period of increased confinement to our homes, where the possibility of performing beneficial training to improve and prevent heart disease, stroke and other conditions is limited.

Source-Eurekalert