It’s no secret that exercise is good for you. Exercise improves your cardiovascular health, your muscle strength, and your overall balance and stability. Exercise is also good for your ears. Regular exercise can reduce the risk of hearing loss, and when you get active, you’ll enjoy a lot of health benefits.
How Exercise Benefits Your Ears
Getting regular exercise is great for your ears. One reason for this is that exercise helps you maintain a healthy body weight. A healthy body weight is associated with:
- Better blood circulation.
- Lower risk of low oxygen levels in the blood that will deprive the cells in the ear of oxygen.
- Less free radicals in the body which can damage cells in the ear.
- Better immune system function and lower chance of an ear infection or other damage to the ears.
Regular exercise can also reduce your risk of hearing loss by improving your heart health. You’ll have lower blood pressure and better circulation. Your body will be able to fight off an illness or infection easier, you’ll enjoy better kidney function, and have a reduced risk of diabetes.
Exercises for Your Ears
The kind of exercise you do isn’t nearly as important as how much exercise you do. You can improve your overall health and your cardiovascular health with just 30 minutes of activity every day. This could be going for a walk, joining a yoga class, or doing a home workout in your living room. Getting active for a few minutes every day is the key to improving your overall health, and reducing your risk of hearing loss.
The delicate cells in the ear rely on this oxygen to survive. If you have poor circulation, the cells in your ear can be damaged from lack of oxygen, and this can lead to hearing loss. The reason exercise can reduce your risk of hearing loss has to do with blood circulation. When you exercise and improve your heart health, your blood circulation improves. Your heart can send nutrient-rich, oxygenated blood throughout the body, including to your ears.
Can Exercise Harm Your Hearing?
It’s important that you’re not harming your hearing while exercising. Getting active is great for your ears, but if you listen to loud music during your workout, you could be undoing all those great benefits. For many people, workout music is essential when they exercise, and they crank up the volume when they work up a sweat.
Sadly, this loud noise can damage the cells in the ear, and rather than reducing your risk of hearing loss, exercising with loud music can harm your hearing!
Safe Listening Practices
If you’re going to a gym with loud music, attending a class that’s blasting music, or turning up your own music at home, you need to rethink your exercise routine. The music can be motivating, but you might be damaging your ears. If you experience any ringing or buzzing in your ears after the workout, or feel like the sounds around you are muffled or coming from far away, the volume is far too loud.
Safe listening practices at home and at the gym are incredibly important for your hearing health. A good rule of thumb is to try talking to the person next to you in class. Did you have to yell to be heard? That means the volume is too loud, and you’re risking your hearing health.
For home workouts, never turn up the volume past 60%. This will keep the volume at a safe level, and prevent hearing loss. It’s also a good idea to take a break from listening after your workout to give your ears a rest.
Treatment for Hearing Loss
Have you noticed any hearing loss? Changes in your hearing health can happen gradually, and it’s hard to notice at first. To find out more about your hearing, schedule a hearing test with us and see what sounds you’re missing. We’ll help you find the right hearing aids to help you hear. We even have hearing aids designed for an active lifestyle, so if you go for a daily run or have an energetic fitness routine, we have hearing aids that can go everywhere you go.