Elevated heart rate/blood pressure is often cited as a benefit of working out but a negative side effect of many vices such as nicotine. Why is it healthy in one scenario but not the other?
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There’s a lot of things that happen during exercise that don’t happen when your heart is beating hard from other sources.
There are changes physiologically, i.e. you increase your hearts ability to deliver oxygen to your lungs capillaries, increasing efficiency of how you deliver oxygen to your tissues.
There are changes cellularly, like increasing the number of mitochondria (the things that make energy in your cells), and increasing how efficient those work.
There are transient changes in your vasculature in terms of endogenous hormones and metabolites that can change your blood lipids and prevent atherosclerosis and other changes from happening (or slow them or even reverse them).
In general, we want to keep our heart rates and blood pressures in a normalized range, because otherwise our tissues and our bodies can’t handle the drastic changes. Long term, our bodies adapt to stresses and that presents as disease states like ASCVD, neurodegenerative diseases, metabolic dysfunction, and other problematic processes over the course of our lives.
I hope that answer is helpful in some way.
Also, it should be noted that exercise, like nicotine, is a drug and the dose needs to be correct. Healthy is a relative term and that needs to be taken into account as well.
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