WELLNESS AND HEALTH

Even though your job gives you many difficulties to maintain healthy lifestyle, by reading these few tips you can reduce the risk from many chronic illnesses that are caused by poor diet and a lack of exercise. While staying fit is essential to a healthy lifestyle, it is also critical to driving safety.
This is especially true as we age.

One of the most common problems that drivers run into is High blood pressure. Blood pressure is the measurement of the force of blood against the walls of your arteries as your heart beat. High blood pressure can lead to a great risk of chronic conditions and diseases like hear diseases, heart disease, kidney disease, stroke, eye damage, etc. High blood pressure (at or above 180/110) can prevent professional drivers from getting a commercial drivers license. But if you have high blood pressure, it’s not too late! Blood pressure can be lowered with exercise, managing stress, reducing sodium intake and sweets, and most importantly reducing smoking and drinking!

Ways you can prevent high blood pressure

• Eat a healthy diet – Try avoiding sodium and salt as much as you can, those are direct cause to high blood pressure. In addition to that, eat lots of fruits, vegetables and low-fat dairy products, and try reducing oil and fat whenever you can.
• Quit smoking! – When you stop smoking, risk of heart disease and stroke can be cut in half after just one year!
• Limit alcohol – While occasional glass of wine may be beneficial to heart health, excessive alcohol intake actually increases your blood pressure and may reduce the effectiveness of medications. If you choose to drink, stick to one drink per day in order to control your blood pressure.
• Prevent and control Diabetes – Diabetes, while treatable, increases your risk of heart disease. Some people can prevent or manage it through diet and exercise, but others may require medication. If you have family history of diabetes or have developed the disease, it is important to pay attention to doctor’s advices in order to control it in future.

Get rid of the back pain

Say you’ve been driving for 10 hours straight, and you start noticing that lower back pain, or that everyday activities are starting to get harder to. That’s where flexibility training and stretching comes in. Not only you should try to stay active, but you should also stretch regularly which helps prevent the loss of mobility and reduces occasional or chronic back pain from being in a sedentary lifestyle. Remember that stretching and exercising is key to keeping the spine, knee joints and hip joints flexible. Bring your weights, exercise rubber bands and a skipping rope - try putting these in your daily routine for 20-30 minutes every day. Skipping rope provides great cardio training, and stretching after exercise will help you to get rid of the back pain.