Try a cold bath for improved heart health

Cold baths are great for improving both your heart health, leading to overall better health and wellbeing in the short and long run.

Bathing cold is a form of cold immersion therapy. Cold immersion therapy is well-known for providing beneficial, long-lasting changes to your body's digestive, circulatory, immune and lymphatic systems, whilst leading to deeper sleep and improved energy levels, enhancing the overall quality of your life.

Blood flow is compromised by poor circulation which, in turn, impacts the heart, causing it to suffer increased stress. The fallout from this can be brutal: fatigue and headaches, muscle cramps and, often, heart attack and stroke can follow.

Improving circulation will mitigate this. Cold immersion therapy is one of the best-known ways of improving circulation. During immersion, blood is forced to the organs due to the cold. The heart is forced to beat more efficiently to achieve this, bringing about greater heart health and improving circulation.

If you want to improve your heart health, and thus your overall health, fitness and wellbeing, a cold bath could be just the ticket.

How to form good fitness habits #15- try HIIT for efficiency

Going for high intensity isn't for everyone. Sometimes it's not appropriate. If you're just starting to workout, for example, going slow and learning good form, allowing your body to adapt and enjoying early, easier gains is a much better idea. If you're looking to purposefully build up your endurance, for example in preparation for a marathon, higher intensities will have little relevance for you.

However, higher intensities can be a great boon for many of us. Pick up the pace with some high intensity interval training (HIIT), in which you mix periods of max effort with periods of recovery effort.

For example, sprint cycle 20 seconds out of every minute and maintain an easy, slow pace for the rest of the minute, for ten minutes. You will get a far harder, more beneficial workout that burns through far more energy and builds far more muscle than a simple, steady state ten-minute cycle could ever deliver.

HIIT is far more time efficient and will lead to greater cardiovascular health in the long term than steady state.