Vitality Program

Cardiovascular Disease Program

What is Cardiac Rehab?

Cardiac rehabilitation serves a purpose to help your body recover post cardiac event, decrease risk factors for future events, and allow the heart to improve its health, capacity, and function. 
Cardiac rehabilitation is where exercise and lifestyle education are used to achieve these goals. Measurements such as blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, and sometimes other measures such as blood glucose and an ECG are also taken to ensure safety for exercise. The exercises target a combination of your cardiovascular fitness through activities such as walking, cycling, rowing, arm ergometry, stepping, as well as resistance training. This is to increase function, fitness, and to strengthen the muscles of the heart and body to improve your health. As we exercise, the heart is required to pump more blood around the body, this done under the right intensity can improve the hearts’ function and capacity to reduce risk of future events and improve your life. 

Why should completing cardiac rehab be important to be? How will exercise help me?

Regardless of previous exercise or gym experience, the aim of cardiac rehab is not to make you the next Olympian. The goal of cardiac rehab is to restore your self-confidence to perform everyday life activities, to restore and improve your movement capacity, and to increase your heart health to avoid another heart attack. Exercise can allow you to walk for longer, breath better and for longer before you become short of breath, can lower your blood pressure, improve your heart’s function, and allows you to be yourself and be more able. 

Common consequences people experience following a heart event: 

  • Death or damage to heart or brain tissues 
  • Decreased functioning
  • Impaired movement 
  • Reduced physical and cognitive capacity 
  • Shortness of breath 
  • Dizziness / light headedness 
  • Fatigue 
  • Reduced ability to perform daily tasks
  • Secondary conditions / comorbidities 
  • Surgeries

Cardiovascular disease related deaths account for one of the largest percentages of all-cause mortality for those aged 45 years and over and is more common in men than women. The total burden (life years lost to premature death) is twice as high in males than it is females. The latest statistics show that around 646,000 years of life was lost due to cardiovascular related premature death, with coronary heart disease making up 312,045 of these years. Coronary heart disease specifically is the leading cause of total burden through ages 45 to 85. Let’s remember that this disease is caused mainly by modifiable risk factors. High blood pressure, poor diet, physical inactivity, overweight/obesity, high cholesterol, and tobacco use together make up more than 75% of coronary heart disease causes. 

What are we offering?

If you have suffered from a heart attack and you’re struggling to return to work, struggling to perform daily tasks, are afraid and worry about overdoing it, and you prioritise your health, then you should think about joining a cardiac rehab program. 

Our Vitality Program will provide you the assistance to get you started in the right direction in your rehab journey. Perhaps you have completed cardiac rehab through the hospital and now you’re unsure on how or where to continue your progress? Or maybe you haven’t done any rehab yet at all and need somewhere to start. Our Phase II-III cardiac rehab program is a small 6–8-person group class run and supervised by an Exercise Physiologist with cardiac health experience. 

Our Vitality Program will be run on Wednesday’s and Friday’s at 11am. Each program will run for 6-weeks duration including 12 one-hour sessions with education. Our first 6-week block will be kicking off on Wednesday 21st June and will go until Friday 28th July. To join this program, you will have to book in for a Cardiac Rehab 30-minute initial assessment where your health and capacity will be assessed by an Exercise Physiologist. Following this, commitment to the entire 6-week block will be asked with upfront payment for all 12 sessions. 

For more information, please visit the Vitality Program – Cardiac Rehab page, or feel free to contact us with any questions regarding this program. 

Lachlan Maher – Accredited Exercise Physiologist 

Referral form for Vitality Program
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