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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Theres many ways you can strain your heart:
– natural exercise. Exercises usually start from something easy and stretches. For example a lot of people i know walk on the spot for a moment. This causes your heart to gradually increase its rate, and the rest of the body also adapts. Most notable immediate effect: your blood vessels increase a bit in diameter to allow more bloodflow. Doing this over and over with spaces in between makes it clear for your body it needs to buildup muscles, and so your heart gradually grows stronger (along with the other muscles ofc)
– immediate stress. I cant think of a better term rn. What i mean for example is panic. Things like this have the same effect on your heartrate, but you didnt have that warmup face, so your heart pumps harder but the arteries didnt adept yet. This usually isnt too big of a problem, since its only a temporary situation, but can cause heart failure.
– drugs: im not sure about nicotine and caffeine in particular, but the problem is usually that they increase the heartrate while at the same time decreasing the diameter of the blood vessels, causing an increase in blood pressure and strains your heart. The heart didnt have any time to adapt to the new stress, and if you have a particularly weak heart it could fail from the pressure
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