The most important muscle in the body – how to look after your heart

Ten Health & Fitness launches specialist Cardiac Rehab Services. Featuring specialist workshops, clinical rehabilitation care and expert-led programmes, direct from its studios in the capital.

Your heart is the most important muscle in the body. Potentially beating over 2.5 billion times in a lifetime, and never stops pumping until the day you die. As the driving force for our life: supplying our body with essential nutrients and oxygen, the heart can tell us a huge amount about our body. Our heart rate and heart rate variability can indicate how fit we are, how stressed we are and how we are coping with the daily demands of life.

Heart disease affects more than 7 million people in the UK and causes over 30% of the total yearly deaths worldwide.

Lifestyle factors also drastically affect the heart, with excessive weight, stress and underactivity all contributing significantly to reduced life expectancy, worse quality of life and poor overall heart function.

The intricacies of the cardiovascular system mean that the miles of veins and arteries are also extremely important to the normal, regular functioning of the heart too.

Ten Health & Fitness, the only boutique provider to bridge the gap between the fitness and medical sector is raising awareness of the importance of Cardiac Rehabilitation as part of its clinical care offering. The experts at TenClinical, the medical arm of the business are highly qualified trainers with medical and clinical experience.

This enables them to be much more surgical in their approach to prescribing exercise, monitoring progress with high-tech equipment, analysing data and optimising programmes for each client.
As Ten Health & Fitness Founder, Jo Mathews explains; “Given the prevalence of heart disease in the UK, it’s no surprise that cardiac rehabilitation is one of the most common reasons for clients being referred to our team at TenClinical.”

“We’re always happy to do our bit to draw attention to the issue – not just because of the scale of its impact, but also because so much of it is preventable. Exercise has been shown to have a major impact on heart heath, not only as a preventative measure but also for rehabilitation after a heart disease diagnosis.”

There are many misconceptions about Cardiac rehab, with many people believing it is just for those patients recovering from complications such as Cardiac arrest or Stroke. However there are many instances where patients are required to improve their strength and heart health prior to surgery, helping to improve surgery success.

There are also those people who have no idea that they are potentially at risk from heart issues in future and must improve their heart health before complications arise.

Ten’s Cardiac specialists have a breadth of experience creating bespoke, evidence-based and clinically proven rehab programmes to help clients following a cardiovascular disease diagnosis. As Jo Mathews concludes; “This is an important topic, an important mission. We want to give people the tools and services that will truly help them keep their hearts healthy for the long term.”

Further details on Ten Health & Fitness’s Cardiac Rehab Services can be found online via www.ten.co.uk