Exercise strengthens your heart and makes your cardiovascular and respiratory systems function more efficiently. It lowers your blood pressure. It decreases your LDL or bad cholesterol while raising your HDL or good cholesterol, lowering your risk for stroke, heart attack and heart disease. It reduces your risk for certain cancers and diabetes and it increases your flexibility, stamina and mobility. Smoking a cigarette after your workouts undoes the health benefits you gain from exercising.
Blood Pressure
While regular physical activity can help lower and/or maintain normal blood pressure, smoking raises both your heart rate and blood pressure. An elevated blood pressure means that your heart is working harder to pump out blood. Smoking after a workout makes your heart work harder when it shouldn't have to. According to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids Report titled "Smoking's Immediate Effects on the Body," the heart of a smoker works harder than that of a non-smoker.
Respiratory System
According to the Diet Channel, exercise improves lung function and increases lung capacity. Exercise also helps break up phlegm that occasionally builds up in the lungs. Smoking decreases lung capacity and increases phlegm build-up, the latter of which causes persistent coughing associated with smoking. Lighting up after a workout negates the pulmonary benefits you gain from exercising.
Circulatory System
Smoking increases your LDL or bad cholesterol and lowers your HDL or good cholesterol. The nicotine from cigarettes damage your blood vessels and increases your risk of developing atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. Smoking also increases the risk of developing thrombosis, or the formation of blood clots in your blood vessels. Smoking constricts blood vessels constrict, resulting in reduced blood flow to the heart and organs.
Immune System
While exercise strengthens your immune system, smoking weakens it and makes you more susceptible to illness and infections such as sinusitis and rhinitis -- inflammation of the inner lining of the nasal passages -- and pneumonia. Children exposed to cigarette smoke are more susceptible to middle ear infections.
Stress
According to the Merck Manuals Online Medical Library, during exercise your brain releases chemicals called endorphins that induce a sense of well-being and reduce pain. Thus, working out makes you feel better and relieves stress. You may think smoking after a workout enhances this effect, but what feels like relaxation to you is simply just a return to the unstressed state nonsmokers experience all of the time.
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