Exercise is supposed to be good for the heart – how does forcing a finite organ to work harder not just wear it out faster?
In: Biology
Simple terms
Conditioned runners have lower resting heart rates (beats of the heart per minute while at rest) compared to non conditioned runners this is because they have through training increased the efficiency of the heart and its ability to supply oxygen to the body.
In the long term amount of time they spent making their heart work harder is far offset by the time they spend either at rest or doing activities that don’t require the heart rate to increase much. A normal heart rate is 60-100 beats per minute, a conditioned runner could be in the low 40s per minute.
Over the course of a day of my heart rate was at 45bpm (beats per minute) and yours was 100bpm and we both spent the entire day resting my heart would’ve beat 64,800 times during the whole day compared to your 144,000 times. That would mean that your heart worked over twice as hard as mine did!
Those numbers would be if we both were at rest which means over the course of a normal day where we did things we’d see higher numbers. I run and the highest number I can find that managed to I pushed my heart rate was 184bpm and that was on a hill and didn’t stay that high when I was back on level ground. Even in a scenario where we keep those two numbers I calculated above and say we add two hours to the day where I pushed my heart rate to 184 it wouldn’t push my daily total over 100,000 and it’d still mean my heart didn’t have to push itself as much during the course of the day as yours did
Finally the more you weigh the more blood you have to move through your body. You can move more blood through the body by either increasing the amount the heart ejects each beat or you could increase the amount of contractions (bpm) the heart has. The heart in cases of obesity compensates by become bigger and more muscular (sounds good, but it’s not) it does this by increasing the thickness of its walls. This makes it harder for the heart to relax after it’s contracted. The heart continues to grow larger and more muscular as the individual grows heavier. Cycle through this a variable amount of times and we’ve got ourselves a situation where the heart just can’t keep up and
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