Practical Guide about PAD

19 ↪ Practical Guide about Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) 8. Tools to help me Walking more, pain-free, is the wish of many people with PAD. To achieve this, one of the most effective therapies is exercise sessions. This seems to be an easy intervention, but most people do not really knowwhere to start. This section will try to provide information about tools to help individuals with peripheral artery disease better manage physical activity and support them in achieving their objectives. The goal of training! For individuals with PAD, the goal of exercise is to force the body to push more blood to the legs by activating the cardiovascular system. During exercise, the arrival of blood in the legs pushed by the heart in action promotes dilation of the arteries. Therefore, active limbs allow more blood to flow and fuel the muscles at work. Moving opens a new network of small blood vessels, making it possible to bypass the obstruction of the diseased artery . In addition, regularly used muscles resist poorer blood supply longer. If we compare the situation to a road network, moving the legs encourages the opening of secondary roads when the highway is congested. It may take some minutes of movement before blood flow to the legs opens up the arteries to take more oxygen and nutrients to the muscles. If start-up is too quick, the muscles suffer and produce metabolic waste, causing pain and/or difficulty contracting the muscles correctly. That is when limping starts and you should stop the exercise 1 . The strategy is to start exercising more slowly to maximize blood supply to the muscles without causing pain too quickly. It is therefore preferable to start with exercises which can start slowly, i.e., an exercise which seems easy at the start of the session. Once an individual is moving and has been under the pain threshold for a few minutes, he/she can move on to increasing the intensity and risking the onset of pain, meaning he/she needs to stop 2 . Studies have shown that an improvement in walking distance occurs more quickly if people with peripheral vascular diseasework during discomfort. This apparently causes themuscles to becomemore tolerant and further stimulates circulation into the secondary arteries 2 .