Why is it healthy to strain your heart through exercise, but unhealthy to strain it through stress, caffeine, nicotine etc? What is the difference between these kinds of cardiac strain?
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The simple answer is that bodies are complicated. Exercising doesn’t just make your heart pump faster, it also effects your veins and lungs and brain and pretty much every part of your body in a different way than just getting the heart pumping fast from a stimulant. Really there are a lot of tiny biological processes, hormones and various chemical reactions, that exercising causes that end up directing your body to strengthen the heart, among other things, in a good way. People often think of getting healthy in some way, like exercising, as if they’re doing something to specifically improve their body in some way, like a blacksmith tempering or hammering metal or something. But really you’re mostly just tricking your body into thinking that it needs to use more resources and have more robust systems to survive. All of the things that are ultimately responsible for improving cardiovascular health or muscle gain or fat loss technically have no need for the body to be running or lifting weights to work. If we could remotely trigger those processes somehow you’d still get all the beneficial effects without ever needing to lift a finger. Unfortunately bodies are way to complex and variable for us to do that yet, so for now we gotta keep tricking our body to improve itself!
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