Last Updated on 21st January 2025 by Charlie Walsh
Increased blood flow
A healthy heart means increased blood flow, and that’s very good news for your penis, as well as your libido overall. You see, your penis fills with blood when you get an erection, and this blood needs to be constantly pumped to and from your penis if you are to maintain this erection for long. As you may have guessed, increased blood flow helps with this process, meaning that a healthy heart can keep your penis hard for much longer. The increased blood flow also means that you’re fitter, which allows you to last longer endurance-wise when having sex, as your heart is pumping blood around your body more efficiently, empowering you to reduce tiredness and lengthen your performance time.
Cardiovascular exercise
If you are to improve your heart health and thereby improve your sex life, you first need to perform regular cardiovascular exercise. Regular cardiovascular exercise increases your heart rate, which encourages your heart to strengthen and become more efficient over time. Whenever you exercise, you should aim to at least break a sweat and get a little bit out of breath – this is how you know that you’re giving your heart a lot of work to do!
When we refer to cardio, we are talking about exercises such as running, swimming, and jogging. Although it’s easy to mistake sex for a cardiovascular exercise, the intensity simply isn’t high enough for it to “really” count. For example, the average heart rate achieved during sex is somewhere around 115 bpm, while a person who is looking to raise their heart rate in the gym should be much more in the 150 bpm – 180 bpm range, depending on their age and level of fitness, amongst other things.
Having sex is good for your heart
It turns out that having sex is probably good for your health, although it needs to be coupled with things such as a good diet and regular cardiovascular exercise. One study, for example, found that men who had sex at least twice every week were less likely to develop cardiovascular disease when compared to men who only had sex once per month or less. This reasoning is likely to apply to women too, although studies of this kind often focus on men due to their high rates of heart disease.
However, don’t be fooled into thinking that sex prevents heart disease altogether, as that is not the case. Regular sex, nonetheless, is part of a normal healthy lifestyle which is good for your heart and the rest of your body too. Many physicians and sexual health professionals claim that your sex life can be a good indicator of how healthy you are in your regular life. For example, people who have sex often are more likely to be active and fit, whereas those who have sex less often are more likely to be unfit and sedentary.
Sex and heart disease
If you’re a heart disease sufferer or if you’ve had a heart attack, you may be worried about how sex can affect your heart condition. Although there is no one-size-fits-all answer, it’s generally accepted that having sex should be fine for people who suffer from heart disease. For most people, their blood pressure will peak at approximately 160/90 during sex, which is enough that most people should be able to handle it, even with a heart condition. Always be careful, though, and stop if you’re feeling unable to carry on during sex.
Strangely, there is also evidence to suggest that having sex with a partner you’re not familiar with – i.e. cheating – could be bad for your heart disease, increasing the chance of your heart developing a bad condition. This is more of a speculative result, however, so it shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Nonetheless, cheating on one’s partner is not usually a good idea, and could lead to stress down the road, which can in turn affect your heart negatively and give you further physical and mental problems to deal with.
In Summary
Put simply, having an unhealthy heart is not good for your body, it’s not good for your health, and it’s not good for your sex life. A healthy heart is the key to unlocking many aspects of health and fitness in your life, with sexual performance and erections being included. A healthy sex life lends itself to a happy and healthy life overall, so it makes sense that these two areas of personal healthcare are interconnected.
A healthy heart increases your blood flow, enabling your penis to gain erections more easily, as well as maintain them more easily too. If you’re reaching for Viagra or male enhancement pills to rectify your impotence issues, maybe you should take a look at your own fitness first. Generally speaking, there is no magic bullet solution to improving your sex health; it requires a combination of different factors which are conducive to a happy and healthy lifestyle.
Performance-wise, a healthy heart can have untold effects on your stamina and endurance, allowing you to last for longer during sex, penetrating with harder and more rapid thrusts, if that is what your partner likes! Sex is essentially a mid-level cardiovascular exercise, so exercising regularly allows you to naturally “keep up” when having sex. Your healthy heart is not only ensuring that your penis is hard and maintained; it’s ensuring that blood flows through your body quickly, stopping you from getting tired in the middle of the act.
