There are many different workouts out there and it can be hard knowing which wones will benefit your health problems. Why not determine this now and get yourself using useful, heart improving workouts.
Exercise your way to a healthy heart and life.
It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that the hearts of athletes are stronger than those of people who don’t exercise. But scientists have been studying it nonetheless, and have learned that there are substantial differences in the size and thickness of the heart chambers of athletes, attributes that support the value of regular exercise for a healthy heart. Further research is revealing that there are specific relationships between the kind of exercise you do and how it affects the heart, which may one day lead to prescription of exercise routines to address individual cardiovascular needs.
HOW & WHY EXERCISE HELPS THE HEART
“Up until now, the studies have just looked at a single snapshot of the heart function of athletes,” Aaron Baggish, MD, lead author of the study, told me. So researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital studied the effect of different forms of exercise on heart function and structure.
The researchers selected student athletes from Harvard teams at the start of the fall 2006 semester. From the crew team, they enrolled 20 male and 20 female rowers in a trial testing the effects of endurance training, and from the football roster, they recruited 35 male players to test the effects of strength training. The researchers looked specifically for athletes who werenot at an elite level of performance and fitness, so change could be measured over time. The athletes’ training routines weren’t altered for this study — they simply followed the regimen and practice schedules that had been developed by their coaches for their individual sports. Researchers took daily data on how long the young men and women trained and what type of training (endurance versus strength) they did, over a 90-day period.
For the endurance athletes, training consisted of long-duration open water sessions and indoor rowing machine workouts at 70% to 80% of maximum heart rate. Strength athletes did tackling drills, sprint training, weight lifting and plyometric (power jumping) exercises. All participants trained five or more days a week. They were questioned in private about previous steroid use, and those who had a history of using the drugs were excluded from the study.
IT’S ALL GOOD
At the start and end of the study, participants were given an echocardiogram to measure changes in heart structure and function against baseline measures, which led to the finding that both groups exhibited change. What was especially interesting was that there were considerable differences between the cardiac changes in each group. The endurance athletes experienced significant increases in the size of their left and right ventricle chambers (the large pumping chambers in the heart), while the strength athletes showed thickening of their left ventricle wall.
“Observations that the heart responds to exercise in a sport-specific fashion points to how exercise can be used for the treatment of different types of heart disease,” Dr. Baggish said. He said future work will reveal more about the optimal combination of endurance and strength training for heart conditions such as congestive heart failure, hypertension and coronary heart disease. For now, however, this much is clear: “Exercise that includes both aerobic and strength training is beneficial for health,” said Dr. Baggish.
Source(s):
Aaron Baggish, MD, division of Cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and research fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston.
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Reprinted with the permission of:
Bottom Line Publications/Daily Health News
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