You always hear it said that exercise is one of the major preventive measures you can take to help prevent heart attacks. Even your doctor will tell you that exercise is important for this as well as for many other reasons. But it is rarely ever mentioned that exercise can play a major role in the prevention of strokes also.

Being that heart attack and stroke are born of some common physiological occurrences in the arteries, it would only make sense that if exercise can help prevent one, then it should help prevent the other. Let's see just how exercise works to help in the prevention of these two life threatening conditions, which are the number one killers in the United States.

The first measure to take in preventing stroke is keeping high blood pressure at bay. Some other factors are eating a diet low in fat, not smoking, not drinking alcohol or keeping it at moderate levels if you do drink, controlling stress, controlling diabetes, and of course, exercising. By the way, all of these measures are recommended for prevention of heart attack as well.

There have been studies done dating back to at least as early as the 1940's that have shown a connection between exercise and the prevention of heart attack and stroke. Two of these studies that were published recently in the