How Much Exercise Do You Need To Keep Arteries and Heart Healthy? (and burn fat as a bonus!)

We know that exercise is "good for us."  But how much and what type of exercise is best?  

What's interesting is that the best exercise to help your body burn fat also keeps the cardiovascular system working.  

The most simple way to describe how to keep your arteries unclogged and heart healthy is "produce more Nitric Oxide, through exercise."   

How much exercise? Harvard Medical School says "2-3 miles of brisk walking nearly every day is a giant step in the right direction."   

Some can do that, not all. 

==>>Power Plate is almost uniquely suited to help solve this problem, for a couple reasons.

1. The 1200 vibrations every 30 seconds (on average) produced by standing/doing squats on a Power Plate help increase levels of Natural Growth Hormone by a factor of 4x to 5x.   This is a huge deal.  Increases in Natural Growth Hormone are directly related to increases in Nitric Oxide, which is the KEY to keeping your arteries working. 

2.  You can't just walk. You need to engage your muscles, which help produce a critical protein/hormone to keep your heart healthy.  Irisin is something you'll hear more about.  Irisin is a protein/hormone which is released by skeletal muscle during intense exercise.  It helps these muscles "talk" to every other part of the body. It tells fat to get ready to burn, it tells the bones to get stronger, it tells the heart to get ready to move. (source)

Here is the issue: Irisin is only produced by skeletal muscle during intense exercise.  How do you engage in vigorous exercise when you might not be in any shape to do it? 

People get heavy, they get hurt, and don't want to move.  Power Plate helps fix this mission critical problem.  When you get on a Power Plate, it can do most of the work for you, if you need that. In fact, Whole Body Vibration has been proven by scientists at Harvard to stimulate skeletal muscle enough to produce Irisin.

Skeletal Muscle Stimulation Also Helps Burn Fat:

Irisin is a protein that plays a dominant role in the conversion process of white adipose tissue (fat, as we know it) to “brown fat.” 

Increases in brown fat activity led to decreases in glucose, decreases in cholesterol & decreases in blood pressure.

We all have brown fat however there is an inverse relationship between white fat levels and brown fat activity  Therefore, decreasing the amount of white fat we have help the brown fat we do have work harder and improve metabolic outcomes listed above.

But the more Irisin is studied, the greater its importance appears to be, with benefits that go well beyond metabolic health. 

Irisin has been demonstrated to impact the progression of several cardiovascular disorders and provides favorable outcomes to cardiovascular disease states.

Further, Irisin has been demonstrated to give positive and even protective benefits against cardiovascular disorders, such as pressure overload-induced cardiac hypertrophy.

References:

1] Boström, P., Wu, J., Jedrychowski, M. et al. A PGC1-α-dependent myokine that drives brown-fat-like development of white fat and thermogenesis. Nature 481, 463–468 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10777 

Link:    https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10777

[2] Becher, T., Palanisamy, S., Kramer, D.J. et al. Brown adipose tissue is associated with cardiometabolic health. Nat Med 27, 58–65 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-1126-7 

Link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-1126-7 

[3] Castillo-Quan JI. From white to brown fat through the PGC-1α-dependent myokine irisin: implications for diabetes and obesity. Dis Model Mech. 2012 May;5(3):293-5. doi: 10.1242/dmm.009894. PMID: 22566556; PMCID: PMC3339822. 

Link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3339822/

[4] Ma C, Ding H, Deng Y, Liu H, Xiong X and Yang Y (2021) Irisin: A New Code Uncover the Relationship of Skeletal Muscle and Cardiovascular Health During Exercise. Front. Physiol. 12:620608. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2021.620608 

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33597894/

[5] Li RL, Wu SS, Wu Y, Wang XX, Chen HY, Xin JJ, Li H, Lan J, Xue KY, Li X, Zhuo CL, Cai YY, He JH, Zhang HY, Tang CS, Wang W, Jiang W. Irisin alleviates pressure overload-induced cardiac hypertrophy by inducing protective autophagy via mTOR-independent activation of the AMPK-ULK1 pathway. J Mol Cell Cardiol. 2018 Aug;121:242-255. doi: 10.1016/j.yjmcc.2018.07.250. Epub 2018 Jul 24. PMID: 30053525. 

Link: https://europepmc.org/article/med/30053525

[6] Guo, W., Zhang, B., and Wang, X. (2020). Lower irisin levels in coronary artery disease: a meta-analysis. Minerva Endocrinol. 45, 61–69. doi: 10.23736/ S0391-1977.17.02663-3  

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29160049/

[7]  Huh JY, Mougios V, Skraparlis A, Kabasakalis A, Mantzoros CS. Irisin in response to acute and chronic whole-body vibration exercise in humans. Metabolism. 2014 Jul;63(7):918-21. doi: 10.1016/j.metabol.2014.04.001. Epub 2014 Apr 5. PMID: 24814685.  

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24814685/