Having good eyesight is very important, it helps you to see clearly far and wide. It’s very important that we maintain healthy eyesight to perform different tasks and activities.
As a person starts growing older they might feel notice some changes to his vision. Most of these changes are refractive errors. According to the National Eye Institute:
“Refractive errors occur when the shape of the eye prevents light from focusing directly on the retina.”
Last month we were encouraging our readers to make exercise a priority in their lives as part of their New Year’s Resolution . We shared a few tips for diabetics who are considering taking up the challenge. This week we’ll be talking about hypertension.
It seems as though many of us are living a life that leads to high blood pressure or hypertension. As people age, the situation gets worse. Nearly half of all older Americans have hypertension. This disease makes people five times more prone to strokes, three times more likely to have a heart attack, and two to three times more likely to experience a heart failure.
Along with causing heart and kidney problems, untreated high blood pressure can affect your eyesight by damaging the blood vessels in the retina, which is at the back of the eye where images are focused. This eye disease is known as hypertensive retinopathy.
It is also known as the “Silent Killer” because nearly one third of the folks who have hypertension do not know it because they never feel any direct pain. But over time the force of that pressure damages the inside surface of your blood vessels. It is not uncommon for people to first discover that they have hypertension while going through a routine eye exam because of the change in the blood vessels in the eye! Just another reason to keep up with your yearly eye exam.
According to experts, however, hypertension is not predestined. Reducing salt intake, adopting a desirable dietary pattern losing weight and exercising can all help prevent hypertension.
Obviously, quitting bad habits and eating a low fat diet will help, but the most significant part that you can do is to exercise. And just as exercise strengthens and improves limb muscles, it also enhances the health of the heart muscles.
The exercise stimulates the development of new connections between the impaired and the nearly normal blood vessels, so people who exercise had a better blood supply to all the muscle tissue of the heart.
The human heart basically, supply blood to an area of the heart damaged in a “myocardial infarction.” A heart attack is a condition, in which, the myocardium or the heart muscle does not get enough oxygen and other nutrients and so it begins to die.
For this reason and after a series of careful considerations, some researchers have observed that exercise can stimulate the development of these life saving detours in the heart. One study further showed that moderate exercise several times a week is more effective in building up these auxiliary pathways than extremely vigorous exercise done twice as often.
Such information has led some people to think of exercise as a panacea for heart disorders, a fail-safe protection against hypertension or death. That is not so. Even marathon runners that have suffered hypertension, and exercise cannot overcome combination of other risk factor.
Check with your doctor before beginning an exercise program. If you make any significant changes in your level of physical activity — particularly if those changes could make large and sudden demands on your circulatory system — check with your doctors again.
Start at a low, comfortable level of exertion and progress gradually. The program is designed in two stages to allow for a progressive increase in activity.
Determine your safety limit for exertion. Use some clues such as sleep problems or fatigue the day after a workout to check on whether you are overdoing it. Once identified, stay within it. Over-exercising is both dangerous and unnecessary.
You need to work out a minimum of three times a week and a maximum of five times a week to get the most benefit. Once you are in peak condition, a single workout a week can maintain the muscular benefits. However, cardiovascular fitness requires more frequent activity.
The optimum benefits for older exercisers are produced by exercise at 40% to 60% of capacity.
Indeed, weight loss through exercise is an excellent starting point if you wan tot prevent hypertension. Experts say that being overweight is linked to an increased risk of developing hypertension, and losing weight decreases the risk.
While most of us likely don’t give much thought to our daily vision, there are other individuals who suffer from visual ailments, such as color blindness or blurry vision.
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As we welcome in the New Year, many people take the time to make resolutions to improve themselves. For some it means financial goals. Others may involve personal enrichment. All of the should include working towards optimal health with exercise and healthy eating.
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