Can I exercise with Atrial Fibrillation?

Atrial fibrillation and exercise depends a lot on a number of factors. It depends on your heart rate because in atrial fibrillation your heart rate can go very fast. In general, we would encourage patients to continue to keep an active lifestyle even with a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation. For a lot of patients this may be walking, wrist walking or running and we would certainly encourage patients who do have atrial fibrillation to continue to exercise. It is however important to be very careful to make sure that the heart rate does not go to very high dangerous levels and your physician will be able to give you a guide as to the types of exercise that you can do specific to your own particular case. The general principle is you must try and keep yourself active because exercise will help with a number of risk factors. Keeping yourself physically active will be good for your overall cardiovascular health. It will help you control your weight which in turn will help with control blood pressure and may also have an impact on other conditions like diabetes. So we would encourage regular moderate levels of exercise even in the presence of atrial fibrillation whilst keeping a very close eye to make sure that the heart rate does not get to high dangerous levels and your physician will be able to guide you depending on your individual factors and it may be that you require medication to help keep your heart rate under control.