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Lecture Notes

But in addition to having direct effects on your cardiovascular system, physical activity also has indirect effects on your risk of cardiovascular disease by improving your blood lipid profile, so decreasing the LDL cholesterol, or the bad cholesterol, and increasing high density lipoproteins. Physical activity can also help with weight loss, which can have wide-ranging implications for decreasing the risk of cardiovascular disease. We, as we talked about in the last section, can see increase insulin sensitivity and a reduced risk of diabetes, which is another risk factor for cardiovascular disease. With physical activity we also see that stress is a contributing factor that can make other risk factors worse, so physical activity is helpful for controlling stress.