I’ve even seen “increased risk of stroke” caused by this increase in heart rate. Something is not adding up here, why such a big difference?
In: 20
From my understanding, a sustained high heart rate is worrisome, but a brief burst of activity is not. Think of how doing push-ups can be easy but holding a plank position isn’t.
If you do sport the heart work in his normal condition and need to pump more blood in order to supply your body with the needed oxygen. If you do drugs the heart will expand and the ability to pump enough blood to supply your body with oxygen will decrease, therefore it will increase the heart rate in order to pump enough blood. A not *expanded* heart can pump blood way better than a expanded one, thats why you train your heart in a healthy way with cardio and stress it for no benefits with drugs.
You can slow down or take a break if your heart is going too fast from exercise, but chemicals are going to keep going until they’re out of your system.
Increases heart rate always increases the chance of stroke or heart attacks. When out of shape people join aerobic classes and push themselves too hard they often have medical issues. It’s a very common thing in cycling classes because the out of shape people are too embarrassed to stop or slow down. Increased heart rate from panic/stress are a similar issue to doing drugs. You aren’t physically exerting yourself so it’s not like you can just stop running to lower your heart rate. Someone panicking and having a heart rate spiking can suffer from a heart attack due to the increase in heart rate.
The better shape you are in aerobically, the more efficient your heart is. Your resting heart rate my be 70-80bpm while mine is 60bpm. If we both ran on a treadmill for 30 minutes at the same speed, my heart rate could be 100bpm and yours is 180bpm. Even after stopping, a more conditioned person’s heart rate will lower back down to their resting heart rate quicker.
In terms of doing drugs, your heart rate isn’t increasing due to your physical exertion but due to chemicals in your body. If my heart rate gets too high from exercise, I can slow down or stop to get it back to a healthy range. If you’re sitting on your ass not moving at all and your heart rate is spiking to over 200bpm, you’re pretty fucked because there isn’t anything you can do to slow it down except maybe meditating/calming yourself if it’s due to panic.
Another thing to keep in mind is increasing your heart rate regularly through exercise is strengthening your heart so it’s more acclimated to the stress of high heart rates. Some out of shape person who doesn’t doing any sort of exercise especially aerobic exercise is going to have a weaker heart that isn’t strong enough to sustain a high heart rate for an extended period of time.
Here’s an article that kind of goes into target heart rate ranges for running. Doesn’t really give much of a scientific explanation to your question but it might give a better idea of good and bad heart rate ranges: https://www.healthline.com/health/running-heart-rate#ideal-rate
The problem is quantity of exercise.
Aerobic exercise like running is beneficial *in an appropriate amount.* Cocaine forcing your heart to beat as fast as if you were running isn’t good when you’re only healthy enough to run for a few minutes **but the cocaine forces it to keep going that fast for 5 hours nonstop.**
Aerobic exercise is good because you can stop once you’re reaching the end of your stamina and there’s potential for damage. A chemically-elevated heart rate doesn’t care about that. Once you do a given amount of drugs, you can’t turn off the effect. And the effect probably lasts WAY longer than you’d exercise with zero breaks. When’s the last time you exercised with zero rest for as long as a high lasts? Unless you’re in insanely good shape you probably can’t if you tried.
The increased heart rate in exercise is a byproduct of needing more oxygen. This need for more oxygen through exercise causes your body to slowly adapt by doing things such as:
(1) *widening your blood vessels* (why athletes have lower blood pressures)
(2) *increasing blood vessels to organs* (which decreases the work your heart needs to put in, lowering your resting heart rate)
(3) *building certain muscles to increase efficiency in energy usage* (increasing endurance).
Obviously this is far oversimplified and these various exercise benefits depends on what type of exercise you’re doing.
The heart rate increase itself is not necessarily the healthy part of exercise but rather it’s a sign that your body is being pushed enough for the healthy things to happen.
Drugs by themselves don’t do any of this “good exercise stuff” and only chemically increases your heart rate. Increased heart rate always puts strain on the heart, but in exercise, at least the blood vessels widen so you get more blood flow to the heart to keep up with the increased demand. That doesn’t happen with drugs.
Instead, another effect of some drugs (like cocaine) is that it “tightens” the blood vessels including the vessels to your heart and to the brain. This decreases blood flow to the heart. The increase in heart metabolism from the high heart rate but decrease in blood flow causes increase risk of heart attacks.
The tightening of blood vessels also causes decrease in blood flow to the brain which leads to increase risk of stroke.
As anything in this subreddit, I had to oversimplify things a lot so feel free to ask questions if something doesn’t make sense.
Source: Medical degree and bachelors in Human Biology
Your heart can be unhealthy enough to exercise, first of all. Second of all, ussually chronic stimulant abusers don’t actually do cardio and eat well, and those to 2 factors combined with an elevated heart Rate equal disaster in the long term.
Many points have been answered but it’s also worth noting that it’s not just rate that’s important, it’s rhythm as well. The 4 chambers of the heart need to be precisely co-ordinated together for it to work best as a pump. Each of the two ventricles is filled by its corresponding atrium and it’s possible for all kinds of things to go wrong and they can get out of sync. For example, a ventricle won’t do much useful work if its atrium hasn’t just filled it with blood. It’s even possible for individual muscle fibres in the chambers to go out of sync with each other so it just sits there “fibrilllating”.
Many drugs (and cocaine is a biggy here) can cause this kind of thing. Not only is the heart *rate* raised with cocaine, the heart is more likely to develop an abnormal *rhythm*. Some abnormal rhythms might make you feel funny and increase the risk of a stroke. Some will cause you to have a cardiac arrest.
Your body is a car, your heart is the engine. Revving the engine as much as you can while holding the breaks will put wear on the car more than if you were revving it but moving because the car is using the energy to move instead of just sitting on it.
I have no medical background, but taking a guess I would say, if your heart rate goes up while exercising, then that’s a normal bodily reaction – it’s expected.
If your heartbeat goes faster due to drugs -unexpectedly – you might think you’re having a heart attack, panic over it, get it to increase even more due to the panic, and actually get a heart attack. This is why you never ever ever slip anyone drugs without them knowing.
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