Top 10 Exercises to Improve Circulation & Blood Flow in Your Feet and Legs

Hello Health Champions! Today I want to talk about 10 exercises and things you can do to improve circulation in your legs and your feet. An exercise number one is walking, which is a fantastic exercise because you can do it for a very long period of time. You can basically do it for hours, which means that you do thousands and thousands of repetitions that improve circulation. So what exactly is circulation? To start understanding this a little better, we want to talk about cardiovascular circulation and interstitial circulation. So cardiovascular circulation, like the name says, starts with the heart. And then the heart pumps out through the arteries and these arteries have thick walls so that they have muscles they can contract and change the tension in that artery. So we pump into the artery and then it gets into the peripheral tissues into the cells and then a lot of this comes back in and it is circulated back through the veins. But on the way there we also have a bunch of cells and that's where the purpose of the blood is to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the cells. So some of this leaks out the oxygen leaks out but with it also some of the fluid and it gets into the cell it does its thing. So inside the blood vessels it's called the cardiovascular, the vascular portion and in between it's called the interstitial. So we have fluid going from the blood vessels outside into the interstitial area, the extra cellular fluid which is between the cells and then we also have the intracellular. So some of this fluid is now going to go in and out of the cells themselves. But then this fluid the interstitial fluid needs to get back in. So a little bit of that will seep back in through the veins a few percent. But most of this is going into the lymphatic system. So we have lymph vessels that are going to pump this and pump it up against gravity and dump it back into the vein so that the vein can take it back into the heart and start all over. And we'll talk about some of these details. So we really understand the difference between the two and which exercises address which one and when is it appropriate. And now when you're walking what happens is first of all you're increasing circulation because you're making your heart work a little bit more. But the thing to understand about this whole system is that the heart is a whole lot higher than your feet are. So gravity is going to pull all this liquid down towards your feet and the question is how does it get back up? And this is partially why we have blood pressure because the pressure has to be high enough to return the blood to the heart. But that's only half the story because with the veins it doesn't have enough pressure to get it all the way from the veins back to the heart. So in these veins in your calves you have little valves that assist the pressure so it can't backflow as much. But that's not enough. We need a pumping action from the muscles in your calf. Your calf muscles can create very tight pressure that pushes on these veins and on these valves and propel the blood upwards. And that's the beauty of walking. That let's say that you walk for an hour you probably take in the neighborhood of 5,000 steps. So that means this pump the muscle pump and the squeezing is helping the blood return 5,000 times during that walk. Another great exercise would be calf raises. So if you just stand flat on your feet and you raise yourself up lifting the heels you're also contracting this calf muscle and you're doing it much more forcefully than when you're walking. So on the one hand you get more force in the pumping action but on the other hand you can't do 5,000 reps. So do as many as you can but you're not getting as much effect. You're getting more force but less repetition. And you can also do these calf raises as a form of resistance training to improve your muscle mass and your muscle tone. And then you can do them on both feet. You can do them on one foot at a time. And if you really want to push it you can also get on a wedge. Put your toes on a wedge. That way you get more dynamics. You get more amplitude on that muscle work. Another great exercise is squats because you don't have to use any equipment. You can just use your body. But what's really important is to position yourself so you don't hurt yourself. And the key is to keep your whole foot on the ground and try to put a little bit more weight on your heels than on the front of the foot. A lot of people feel that they're too stiff so they put more weight on the front of the foot and then you're going to be hurting your knees. You're going to be putting too much pressure on the knee. So you put the whole foot flat down and then as you go down you can lean forward a little bit but make sure that you keep your back straight. So keeping your back straight doesn't mean you can't lean forward. It's all right to lean forward a little bit. Stick your butt out but keep the weight more so on the heels than on the front of the foot. A fourth exercise is to ride a bike. And here again it's sort of like walking. You can keep this up for a long long time. You can do thousands of repetitions and just like the walking you're getting a nice long extension with your foot. You're pumping that calf and you're also engaging the glutes and the quads. You're getting a lot of circulation through the whole leg. And of course this could be done on a stationary bike or if you have access to the outdoors then feel free to go outside. It's always nicer to ride in the open. Number five is stretching and here you want to stretch the back of the calf and the back of the knee and the back of the hamstring. So some of the things that you can do is you can stand on the edge of something and just let the heel drop down or you can put your leg up on something and lean forward. And when you do this if you bend the knee a little bit now it's going to take mostly the hamstring but if you straighten the knee now you're going to get the back of the knee as well. And if you want to stretch the whole chain of muscles all at the same time now you can pull the toe towards you. You can straighten the knee and you can straighten your back and lean forward a little bit. Now you're going to get that entire muscle chain all at the same time. Number six is foam rollers and they're great. They can come in different hardness so if they're a little bit softer then they don't push as much depending on how much pressure you can tolerate and you can just use these on any muscle group and roll back and forth and they act kind of like a massage. There's like a squeegee. They just push the blood in the direction that you're rolling it. But remember how we said that gravity is the challenge here because as we're trying to get the blood back gravity is pulling it down and this is why so much of the circulation problems happen in the legs and the feet. And most of these exercises we're going to have gravity working against us which is okay for most people who are healthy but once we start having some challenges this may not be enough. And this is where we need to understand how edema relates to circulation. So a lot of people talk about edema as being the same thing as circulation but it's not really poor circulation can lead to edema because gravity pulls down and then we get a pulling if we don't return the blood properly we get a pulling of the blood in the lower extremities and then over time this can lead to leakage and eventually a edema. So again here we have the heart pumping and we have now the blood pumping into a blood vessel and then we have these cells and if we get this pulling gravity pulls down we get the pulling of the liquid. Some of this liquid is going to seep out in the interstitial fluid and now if we don't have that proper return if we don't have enough muscle tone and a few different factors we're going to cover then we can get leakage and edema. So edema looks like puffy skin like there's a swelling of the skin and oftentimes they call it pitting edema because if you push on it then it leaves an indentation that could take several minutes to go away. So now a great exercise to deal with this is called ankle pumps and what you want to do now is you want to do them laying down and if you lay down in your back now you don't have gravity working against you so much and if you also raise your feet a little bit above heart level now you actually have gravity assist. Gravity doesn't work against you but now your feet is higher So gravity helps return this fluid to the heart. And then you move your ankles, you can pump them up and down, you can move them around in circles. And now this pumping action in the vein kicks in, but you have gravity assist. So you have a much greater chance of returning the fluid to the heart if all of those things aren't working as well as they showed. Another thing you can do for edema is called compression stockings. So basically what's happening is the heart creates pressure. That's called blood pressure, which means the pressure is literally higher inside the blood than it is in the surrounding tissue. And if liquid has pressure on it, it's going to have a tendency to leak out. But if you add a compression stocking, now you're adding an external barrier. You're pushing this together from the outside. So therefore there is less of a tendency for this liquid to leak out. And you can also with enough pressure, you can assist the lymph drainage, the lymph vessels to return it up to the vascular system. And if you need a little extra help with your edema, of course, you can do the combination of the compression stockings and elevating your feet. So now you have the pressure and you get gravity assist. So if you already have a demon, this can be a good thing to do. It helps to reduce the edema. It helps return the fluid to circulation. But we want to realize that this is more of a symptom treatment that in a sense you're improving circulation by returning fluid from the edema into the vessels. But you're not really helping the body with the root cause. There was a reason that this stuff leaked out in the first place or that it's not being returned properly. So we want to understand some of the other factors that can cause poor circulation and edema. And obesity one of them, well very often they blame all sorts of things on obesity, that the fat gets in the way and so forth. But obesity does not cause these problems. Instead, obesity is caused by insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. And if you have insulin resistance, that leads to elevated blood glucose and high insulin levels and high blood pressure. And these things are the actual causes of poor circulation. Because the extra blood pressure obviously can increase the leakage of fluid into the tissue. And then the high blood glucose tends to seep out. It leaks into the tissue so we have higher blood glucose levels in the blood and around. That blood glucose is going to bind. It's going to attract some fluid to it. And now we get a little bit of a swelling and that interferes with the circulation. So one of the things that's very common with type 2 diabetes is called macular edema. And what happens here is that the tiny, tiny blood vessels in the back of the eye and the retina, they swell because of that high blood glucose. The circulation is interfered with and now the retina doesn't get the blood supply and the oxygen that it needs. And there's why type 2 diabetes is the leading cause of blindness. But just like the tiny blood vessels in the eye can swell, we can also have other blood vessels, other capillaries swell up. So we get vascular swelling and a d-min other places as well. And other couple of organs often involved with type 2 diabetes are the liver and the kidney. And the kidney has lots and lots of little micro vessels also. And the kidney is of course responsible for fluid regulation. So kidney with the minerals and the kidney filtration is the organ that actually filters and regulates fluids. So that's super important. And the liver is who makes albumin and what's that? It's a protein that is the main blood protein and it kind of acts like a sponge. It floats around here inside the bloodstream and it holds the fluid back inside. So that's one of the factors that resist this leakage of fluid. If we didn't have the albumin then there would be virtually nothing holding the fluid back in. So if our albumin drops too much, if the liver can't make it properly or if we have severe kidney disease, then this albumin is actually going to leak straight out of the kidney filter. And we're going to lose albumin that way. And again, if we don't have enough albumin in the bloodstream, then we're going to increase this leakage dramatically. So the vascular swelling can interfere with the actual circulation, the cardiovascular circulation inside the blood vessels. But all the rest of these factors are more about how edema develops. But then if we get back to the actual circulation of blood in the blood vessels, one thing we need to understand is vasoconstriction. And this is the primary mechanism that the body uses to determine how much blood is going to what part of the body at what time. So vasoconstriction means tightening or narrowing of a blood vessel. And this happens because arteries and arterials, which are tiny arteries, have muscles built into the wall. So they can tighten up and narrow the lumen of that blood vessels. And the thing that causes vasoconstriction is called stress. So we're going to talk about two types of stress. One is acute and that is happens. Short term, it happens quickly. And it's usually going to be very intense, but not last so long. So that could be exercise or it could be running from a tiger, for example. So now what happens is the heart is going to pump harder and faster. The heart is going to squeeze much harder. It's going to increase that blood pressure. And we do have the vasoconstriction. So the heart is pushing against an increased vascular tone. So the blood vessel narrows down, but the heart is pushing much, much harder, which increases the speed of the blood and it's going to increase the circulation. So because the heart is pushing so much harder, it's still, it's going to overcome that increased muscle tone. And that's how we get increased circulation. And that's what we need with an acute stress, because we're exercising or running away from something. But what happens with chronic stress now, if we are just sitting in traffic or if we're at work or we're just feeling bad in general, but there's no increased physical activity going on. Now the heart is going to pump at a baseline level. It's not going to increase. It's not going to pump significantly harder. But because of the stress, we still have increased vasoconstriction. We still have increased tone. But now the blood vessels are tight and the heart is pumping the same. So now the blood can't get through and now we get decreased circulation. So the same mechanism of vasoconstriction can cause an increase or a decrease in circulation. And obviously what most people have trouble with is the chronic stress. So if chronic stress is contributing to vasoconstriction and poor circulation, there's a pretty good chance that you're going to have cold hands and feet. And one of the best ways of dealing with that is breathing exercises. And there's all kinds of different breathing exercises. But we're going to talk about a very specific one for a very specific reason. And that's to improve the balance between your fight flight and your feed breed system. So here's how that works. When you breed in, your heart speeds up a little bit. Because your body is so smart, it knows when there's more oxygen in the lung, it makes more sense to speed up the heart, send a little bit more blood there to pick up the oxygen. And vice versa, when you breed out, there is less oxygen there. So let's slow down the hearts. We don't waste resources. And when you breed in, your heart speeds up. And that can only happen if we get a little bit of stimulation from your sympathetic nervous system, from the fight flight branch of your nervous system. And at the same time, this fight flight response creates a tiny little bit of vasoconstriction. So on the other hand, the opposite happens when you breed out, now your heart slows down. And we fire off the parasympathetic nervous system, the feed breed. And we get vasodilation. Now the problem is that people already have a lot of stress in their lives. But when you breed wrong, you make it worse. So most people, they breed in for a couple of seconds and they breed out really fast. And we breed 18 to 20 times per minute. And that doesn't give this system any time to balance. So what you want to do is you want to breathe in from. about five seconds and then you want to breathe out for about five seconds. And that's the part that people miss. They don't breathe out slow enough so they don't allow enough time for the parasympathetic to balance out the sympathetic. The feed-breed, the relaxation system, doesn't work long enough to balance out the stress system. But by practicing this five seconds in five seconds out for five to ten minutes a day, you're entraining your system. You're building up some long-term plasticity, some long-term automation in the system to balance it out. So it's not something that just works when you do it. It's a skill in your nervous system that you condition if you do it consistently. And the tenth thing that you can do is you can assist your body with some supplement. There are some excellent, excellent supplements that we use a ton of. And standard process will put a link down below. They have a product called circuitplex which has nutrients that assist the body with vasodilation to improve this circulation. And the specific one is called cataplex E2. This one is more for the heart. So if people have angina from vasoconstrictions in their coronary arteries, very often the cataplex E2 can be enough to handle that angina. And then we have ginkgo forte. It's a very concentrated strong form of ginkgo which helps improve circulation. Also especially with brains. If you have brain fog or if you're trying to get some more nutrients in circulation to the brain, ginkgo can be a good option. And then there's a couple of more, which is liverplex and rena food. So these two are for liver support and for kidney support. So these would be if you have reason to believe that part of your problem of circulation is that your liver has a lot of stress that your liver is not functioning optimally, then liverplex can be a good one. And likewise, if you think that your kidney is the source of the problem, if your kidney filtration for on the blood work, they have something called EDFR. If those values are kind of low, then you might want to get on some rena food. So these don't directly improve circulation. But if you have some liver or kidney stress that contributes to it, then that could be a great idea. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications. So you never miss a life-saving video.