Legendary football coach Bruce Arians on his winning strategy for heart health

Paid for by Leqvio (inclisiran).

Please note Bruce Arians is not a Leqvio patient. Continue reading for safety information.

Football coach Bruce Arians is known for perseverance, on and off the field. Not only has he led teams to victory, he has also assembled one of most diverse coaching staffs in football. Arians says he’s continually modeled the importance of prioritizing well-being for his coaching staff, as well as his players. Now, he’s opening up about his heart health journey for the first time to encourage others to prioritize their heart health, consult with their doctor, and establish a game plan to manage bad cholesterol.

“My father passed away from a heart attack when he was 79,” Arians says. “And I thought I was having a heart attack in 2017, which landed me in the hospital. I was OK, but since then, I’ve tried to stay on top of things. Using the right medications, exercise, diet, everything.”

Arians says the 2017 hospitalization after a game in Minnesota was where he learned that he had known heart disease, also known as atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease or ASCVD, and high levels of LDL-C, commonly referred to as bad cholesterol, that needed to be managed with medication, diet, exercise, and regular checkups. Known heart disease is the most common type of heart disease and is caused by consistent high levels of bad cholesterol in the blood.¹ While the diagnosis wasn’t a surprise, the hospitalization was the wake-up call Arians needed to prioritize his heart health.

And he couldn’t do it alone. Here, Arians shares his journey to lowering his bad cholesterol, advice for other people who might also be facing challenges with managing bad cholesterol, and why he has decided to speak out about his heart health now.

Making heart health a priority

Arians is known as a hands-on coach who also makes sure his staff and players can maintain a work-life balance. And he practices what he preaches, enjoying the off-season at the golf course and spending time with family. But he also knows that the grueling on-season schedule can take a physical toll on anyone — including him.

“Coaches tend to just forget their health. It’s all about the job, the job, the job,” Arians says. “Pretty soon, you could end up hospitalized with a serious condition. When you start dealing with heart health, you need education, and you need someone to just kick you in the butt to do something about it.” For Arians, that meant improving his diet and exercising, in addition to working with his doctor to figure out what medications were the right fit. “It has been a long journey of knowing and taking care of myself and finding out what’s best for me, because we’re all so individual. It’s a lot of, ‘OK, let’s make sure we’re doing everything right,’” he says.

“I was working out, but I had gained a lot of weight after my 2017 hospitalization. Recently, I started losing weight with exercise and just eating better,” Arians says. “I even tried to be a vegan. It only lasted six weeks. So I was like, ‘Nope, I’m going back to eating meat, but I’m going to eat meat right.’” Working with a trainer and nutritionist helped with accountability, so did being able to eat the foods he liked, such as morning protein shakes or grilled meat and vegetables for dinner.

A winning perspective on heart health

After his 2017 diagnosis, Arians realized that he needed to put just as much drive and passion into his heart health as he did on the field. But that drive needed to look different. “The way I coach, ‘No risk-it, no biscuit,’ doesn’t necessarily lead to the best health. I’ve had enough road bumps now to know I have to stay on top of it. I force all of our coaches to make sure they’re getting their physicals and make sure they’re taking care of themselves,” he says.

This message — that your life is worth more than anything else that might be on your to-do list — is one he wants to underscore. Arians has seen friends who have felt minor chest pain and discovered they had major blockages, even when they were technically feeling “fine” enough to ignore any twinges of discomfort. “See a doctor and get the help you need to just take care of it,” Arians says.

Arians follows his own heart health game plan incorporating recommendations from his health care team — a key roster of experts that he credits for helping him stay on track. As part of a new program called Coaching Cholesterol, Novartis, the makers of Leqvio (inclisiran), is partnering with Coach Arians to help raise awareness about the importance of managing high levels of bad cholesterol and encourage people to never give up on making it to their cholesterol goal.

What’s next on the horizon for Arians

Even though he’s retired from coaching, Arians feels more vibrant than ever. “I just feel so much more alert and on top of things all the time. I was getting a little dull. Now, I feel really good.”

And Arians is excited about what the future holds. “My goal is to keep my hand in the pile and try to win a championship in the role that I'm in now, and stay healthy. And enjoy my kids and my grandkids. Really, it’s just to have a lot of fun every single day, because you're not guaranteed another one.”

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From Novartis:

LEQVIO (inclisiran) is an injectable prescription medicine used along with diet and other lipid-lowering medicines in adults who need additional lowering of "bad" cholesterol (LDL-C) and have known cardiovascular disease and/or heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HeFH), an inherited condition that causes high levels of LDL-C. It is not known if LEQVIO can decrease problems related to high cholesterol, such as heart attacks or stroke. Talk to your health care provider about how Leqvio works differently than other cholesterol-lowering treatments. Click here to view LEQVIO full prescribing information.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION

The most common side effects of LEQVIO were: injection site reaction (including pain, redness, and rash), joint pain, urinary tract infection, diarrhea, chest cold, pain in legs or arms and shortness of breath.

These are not all the possible side effects of LEQVIO. Ask your health care provider for medical advice about side effects. You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch, or call 1-800-FDA-1088.

To learn more about coach Bruce Arians’ story and for additional resources to help update your heart health game plan, visit CoachingCholesterol.com.

This article was paid for by Novartis and created by Yahoo Creative Studios. The Yahoo Sports editorial staff did not participate in the creation of this content.

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