Blood Flow

Blood flow is important in almost every aspect of a functioning body.  If our heart decided to take a break, we would die.

Ways To Increase Blood Vessel Size

There are many ways to do this.  As we know, the harder the heart pumps, the larger our veins and vessels need to be to keep up.  We can easily achieve this through two cardio excercise: swimming and cycling.  You were probably thinking running, right?  Caught ya!  Running is a great excercise to losing weight, both fat and muscle.    There are two reasons for this: muscle weighs three times more than fat given the same volume.  Another is diffusion is extremely slow, and in order to get nutrients to the outermost muscle fibers, the muscles have to be small if going for a long time to keep up with energy output- which is why running over long periods of time that your body actually eats away at your muscles to get the nutrients to the skin faster- which is not a good thing for fat loss, because muscle burns fat.  With cycling and swimming, we are able to get more oxygen to the lungs and burn fat while keeping muscle.  Running doesn't always break down muscle.  Fast spurts of energy in sprinting build muscle as well as a stronger heart, but does not increase vascualar size as easily.  High blood pressure is optimal, only when we can control it.  High blood pressure while working out increases our ability for long term energy and increased vascular size (being with more pressure).

How To Control Blood Flow

Our blood is measured in two ways, usually in a notion such as a number over another.  Our blood pressure increases (going towards our feet) or decreases (towards our head) 10 mmHg per 5.4 inches.  That is a ton of pressure!  Everyone has experienced this- you sit up too fast and... you get light headed and see stars.  This is a result from lack of blood.  Since our blood from laying down to sitting up increased by roughly 50 mmHg our heart has to work very hard to pump the blood back to our brain.  Our blood pressure is taken by wrapping a band around our upper arm (located directly parallel to the heart)  This is to get the best estimate of our hearts blood pressure, the top number.  If you raise your arm to shoulders length, the top number will show roughly 10 mmHg less than what the actual rate is.  Knowing this, we can control blood flow just by moving our body.  Raising your legs up while doing a bench press pushes the blood to give more oxygen to the brain, as well as more blood to chest muscles.  Simple but brilliant tricks that increase strength and performance.