Exercise Stress Test and Why it Matters

Taking a heart stress test is obviously very important, and it is imperative that you realize just how important it is to keep your health in check. With an exercise stress test, the basic purpose here is for your doctor to be able to see whether or not your heart is strong and if not, your doctor can work with you to make sure that you are going to get the treatment that you need to feel better.

Before the Test

There are a few things that are important to know before you ever go through with an exercise stress test. For one thing, you should not be drinking, smoking or eating anything before the test. This is really important, and so if you are hungry you want to make sure that you have something to eat at least three hours before the time of the test.

As well, before this stress test, you are going to need to let your doctor know whether you are presently taking any medications or whether you have any underlying health conditions, because these are things that are likely to have an effect on your health and on how well you are going to do on your stress test so you need to let them know ahead of time.

Of course because you are going to be walking on a treadmill and otherwise being physically active, you want to make sure that you wear some comfortable shoes and loose clothing for the test.

Why it’s Done

The exercise stress test is a type of screening tool that is used to test the effect of exercise on the heart. This way doctors are able to see how much exercise your body can take and how well your heart is able to keep up. With the exercise stress test, the test is going to continue until the doctor has you reach the target heart rate.

This way they are going to get the results and are going to see how much exercise your body is able to handle without struggling. Obviously the better condition your body is in, the better you are going to do on your exercise stress test. But even if you come out with bad results from your test, you don’t need to worry because there are a lot of different things that you can do which, over time, are going to help to improve your health and make sure that you do better on your stress test the next time around.