By exercising, you are helping to eliminate/reduce several common risk factors for heart disease. By incorporating exercise into your normal routine, you remove sedentary lifestyle from your list of risk factors. Also, regular exercise can help with weight loss, therefore helping to reduce/eliminate the risk factor of obesity/overweight. Regular exercise can also improve cholesterol levels. It has been shown that exercise can assist in increasing HDL (good cholesterol) levels in your blood. Exercise can also aid in lowering blood pressure, helping to lessen that risk factor. Regular exercise can cause adaptations within the heart muscle itself. Exercise allows the heart to become more efficient at what it does, thus, lowering the overall workload of the heart.