What The Heart Wants
‘More, more, more’ is the call your muscles are putting out to your heart when you work out. The heart can deliver the extra energy and oxygen they need in two ways: it can pump more quickly, increasing your heart rate, or it can pump more blood each time it beats. Every time you exercise, both of those things happen, but which prevails depends on whether you’re focusing on cardio or strength.
Increased demand is one reason why exercise is so good for your heart. The greater volume of blood going in and out of the heart causes the muscle to stretch and develop tiny tears, like your other muscles do during training. ‘This then stimulates the repair process, which makes the heart grow,’ says Dr Aaron Baggish, director of the Cardiovascular Performance Program at Massachusetts General Hospital.
How it repairs itself and gets stronger hinges on the workouts you do – endurance athletes’ and lifters’ hearts look different. In a sport like distance-running, the heart has to move larger quantities of blood to keep up with the legs’ demand, so it dilates to accommodate that. This is why pure endurance athletes have bigger hearts with thin walls.
In a strength sport like powerlifting, the heart doesn’t need to pump that much more blood. But it does have to withstand surges in blood pressure for short periods of time, thanks to the vigorous muscle contractions and bursts of adrenaline. You need thick heart walls to manage that, so that’s what it builds. This mild bulking up is protective, and it’s reversible when no longer needed, Dr Baggish explains. In fact, exercising lowers your blood pressure and heart rate for the rest of the day.
Your heart loves exercise so much, in fact, that people who are physically active have a 20% lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease than people who don’t do any exercise. Aim to spread 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous aerobic exercise throughout each week. Interval training is great, especially if you keep the interval periods to more than 60 seconds. Also aim to include two or more weekly sessions of strength training.
HELP YOUR HEART: Do everything you can to keep your arteries clear and flexible. Not smoking is critical; how you eat is fundamental, too. The Mediterranean diet is one of the best ways to feed a healthy heart. That means filling up on fruit and vegetables, complex carbs from legumes and whole grains, and healthy fats (like those in salmon, nuts and olive oil), as well as consuming a moderate amount of wine.
And don’t shy away from cardio, particularly as you age. If you have high blood pressure or plaques in your arteries, keep in mind what Dr Baggish calls the exercise paradox. ‘You’re more likely to have a bad event happen during exercise than rest, but the more you exercise, the less likely you are to have a bad event overall,’ he says.
When you’re sitting at your desk writing an email, scrolling through football stats or catching up on Succession, your heart is on something like cruise control. It’s beating roughly 60 to 100 times a minute – less often if you’re fit, more if you’re not. The better shape you’re in, the larger your heart is, especially the right and left ventricles. These are the chambers that blood goes through before it’s shuttled to your lungs (right) or the rest of your body (left), to get oxygen and nutrients where they need to go. A more powerful heart can push out more blood with each pump. The increased efficiency means your body gets the same amount of blood with fewer beats, allowing the heart more time to rest between each one. ‘When your heart’s beating at 30 beats per minute versus 150, there’s no change in how long it takes for the heart to pump blood. What changes is the rest period in between beats,’ says Dr Baggish. ‘At a lower heart rate, there’s simply much more time that the heart muscle is not activated, and that’s when the repair and recovery mechanisms are most effective.’
Just don’t assume that sitting is helping your heart get this rest. That position forces your heart to work harder to pump the blood back up from your feet, increasing your blood pressure. Staying planted for extended periods of time can cause serious problems over the long term, including stiffening of the artery walls, which can limit blood flow to your heart.
HELP YOUR HEART: Move your legs, says Dr Bethany Barone Gibbs, head of the Gibbs Sedentary Behavior Research Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. ‘One of the amazing mechanisms your body has is called the muscle pump. Every time you flex the muscles in your calves and legs, it squeezes the blood back up the veins,’ she says. ‘That’s a huge, huge load off your heart.’ It’s probably fine to be seated for six to eight hours a day – ‘but not all at once’, says Dr Gibbs. Try to move around at least once an hour. Even just fidgeting or flexing your calves can help.
Major moments of stress – road rage, a row with your partner – trigger your body to release chemicals such as adrenaline and cortisol. These drive up your heart rate and blood pressure. That’s great when you’re working out, but terrible if you’re in a meeting, for instance. After you exercise, various biological repair mechanisms kick in to heal any damage caused by the extra strain on your heart. That doesn’t appear to happen after stress. Your stress response also puts the squeeze on your heart via inflammation, a problem that can constrict the arteries at the exact time your system wants more oxygen-rich blood. This raises blood pressure, which may cause any plaques in your arteries to rupture, resulting in a heart attack. Chronic stress does damage, too. ‘The wrong set of hormones bathe the heart,’ says Dr Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in the US. Those hormones instigate changes that promote hardening and narrowing of the arteries.
HELP YOUR HEART: No surprise –cardiologists emphasise stress-reduction tactics (such as meditation, deep breathing, yoga, walking and talking to someone who’ll listen). The key is recognising when stress is rising and then doing something about it. Dr Yancy says this lesson comes in part from studying people who live to be 100. ‘They meditate, they nap, they pray. They have ways of balancing stress so that it can be dissipated appropriately.’ Best not to wait till you’re 100 to get started on that.
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