Cardio exercises are great for you, but I’m confused. Since the heart is a muscle, does exercising it make it grow bigger, which could lead to heart disease?
My father has a enlarged heart and this question crossed my mind.
In: Biology
Your heart can enlarge from cardio, as it is a muscle and can grow larger like other muscles. This type of growth isn’t usually a problem.
Hearts can also enlarged due to higher pressure, causing thickening of the heart. This is an issue as it requires the heart to consistently work harder.
I don’t think it’s the heart getting “bigger”. It’s the heart getting stronger and able to pump blood easier
It makes your cardiovascular system much more efficient like ‘Oh, i don’t need 160 bpm to climb a few stairs’.
Because regular exercise will make it “bigger” but not “too big” nor “too strong” and worse than that, with the alternative (without cardio exercise) it can become “too small” or “too weak”…
Exercise makes your heart stronger and more efficient, but doesn’t really make it bigger to the same rate like an arm muscle would get bigger. It does still happen of course but is mainly the consequence of super heavy endurance training like in high level sports, and yes that is usually a risk factor for heart problems.
Like with all things in life it’s about the balance – a strong heart helps you keep up a healthy body, an overtrained heart may cause problems. The average person working out will not really get to that point, unless you have an underlying condition of course.
There’s more than can cause enlarged hearts, from infections to genetic disorders and prolonged hypertension.
You have three types of muscle in your body.
Skeletal muscle
Cardiac muscle
Smooth muscle
Skeletal muscle is the muscle everybody is familiar with. Think biceps, chest, legs. The muscles of your body that help you move around. These are voluntary muscles, meaning you can consciously control them. And they respond to stimulus in such a way that they are prone to hypertrophy.
Cardiac muscle can also respond with hypertrophy (this can be seen when someone has high blood pressure and the ventricles grow larger to compensate for increased resistance). But it is a different type of muscle cell. You don’t consciously control your heart muscle.
Same with smooth muscle. This is what makes up your GI tract.
Exercise makes your heart more efficient at pumping blood. This is good for your body since it feeds oxygen to your muscles at a better rate. You want an efficient heart.
Yes it does. However, it takes a LOT of very very intense exercise to get to the point where your heart is so big it’s actually hazardous to your health. Like, Tour De France winner levels.
When you’re exercising, the changes exercise makes to your heart happen at pace with beneficial changes to the way your heart works and gets oxygen and such.
When you’ve got high blood pressure, your heart’s working mega hard just to force blood through skinny little blood vessels so you can function normally. And it’s got to work hard *all* the time. This means it’s got to just be strong, so it gets thicker in a way that decreases the amount of space inside the heart – it pumps less blood per beat.
When youre exercising, the bigger issue is that your hearts got to move more blood around rather than fighting against really high pressure. Physically moving also helps blood move back into the heart from the veins. This means it changes in such a way that it’s going to get thicker, but it’ll also increase the amount of space in there – it can pump more blood per beat.
When you’re fit, your blood is better at carrying oxygen around, your muscles are better at taking it up, you have more blood vessels, lower pressure in them, and you push more blood per beat, so your heart doesn’t actually need to beat as often.
Contrast that with someone who’s unfit; their heart needs to beat faster and harder because they’re not as good at getting oxygen in and out, their blood pressure is high, and their heart has less space in it so it can’t push as much blood per beat.
An unfit persons heart just never gets a break! It has to work really hard 24/7 just to do normal stuff, whereas a fit person’s heart gets to be super chill when they’re not exercising. You can tell then that the unfit persons heart is gonna wear out a lot faster than the fit person’s, even though they’ve both got big hearts.
There’s a difference between an enlarged heart caused by heart disease (dilated cardiomyopathy) and a well trained athletic heart. A dilated heart is weaker and less able to pump blood. It’s possible to do so much athletic training that changes happen in the heart but these are generally not harmful.
Enlarged hearts happen when blood pressure has gotten so high that the heart physically needs more strength to push blood through the arteries. So the heart builds more muscle and gets larger. This is not a response to activity level, it is a response to internal factors like more rigid arteries, fat build up along the inside or arteries, etc. This is a bad and inefficient compensation.
Cardio improves the way the body responds to activity. When you move large muscle groups in a repetitive way, those muscles burn through their energy stores quickly. They need more blood to restore it. So under normal circumstances your heart will pump faster and blood vessels will dilate. Improving cardio means improving those heart and blood vessel responses. They happen faster, are able to last long and become more precise (a big change if you need A LOT more energy, a small change if you need a little more energy). So the heart builds some muscle, but not in the same way as an enlarged heart does. It’s much more about the response to activity
if you’ve ever played organized sports, we call it “conditioning”
You are just getting your body used to elevated levels of work. Just like your legs get used to running so does your heart. It doesn’t need to get bigger to do so.
If your body is used to exercising…..every day activity is a cakewalk for it.
Unless you’re putting in olympic level training 6-7 days a week, you’re not gonna have a problem.
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