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The American Heart Association recommends that adults get at least 30 minutes of endurance exercise every day to keep your heart, lungs, and circulatory system healthy. A daily workout can help reduce your risk of developing diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Endurance exercise is basically any activity that increases your breathing and heart rate for an extended period of time. Examples include:

• brisk walking
• jogging
• dancing
• biking
• swimming
• climbing stairs

During exercise, your blood vessels expand (dilate), increasing blood flow, and delivering more oxygen to your working muscles. Over time, exercise helps your blood vessels become more flexible. This flexibility allows the vessels to dilate more quickly to deliver blood and oxygen to your muscles. Long-term endurance exercise also increases the number of small blood vessels (capillaries) in your body. All of these things help carry more oxygen to your organs and remove waste more quickly. As a result, you can enjoy better athletic performance, such as being able to jog farther, run faster or swim longer distances.

A recent study in the American Journal of Physiology—Heart and Circulatory Physiology showed that endurance activity may help blood vessels grow by increasing the number of microvesicles in your blood. Microvesicles are small particles that are shed into your blood from all types of cells in your body. When volunteers in the study rode a stationary bicycle, they produced more microvesicles than when they were sitting and resting. The number increased even more when they pedaled faster. The researchers then added the volunteers’ microvesicles to endothelial cells—a type of cell that lines the blood vessels and is responsible for expanding and contracting them. They found that microvesicles caused endothelial cells to grow twice as fast. In other words, when you exercise, the number of microvesicles increases, which in turn helps your blood vessels grow.

Now you know why exercise builds a better circulatory system, so get moving!

Dao H. Ho, PhD, is a biomedical research physiologist at Tripler Army Medical Center. The views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Department of the Army, U.S. Department of Defense or the U.S. government.