Exercise Could Be The Heart's Fountain Of Youth

Wrong...but read on.

"Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but endurance exercise seems to make it younger. According to a study conducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, older people who did endurance exercise training for about a year ended up with metabolically much younger hearts. The researchers also showed that by one metabolic measure, women benefited more than men from the training."

The T-word!

TRAINING!

OMG. Maybe the folks at Wash. U. are finally beginning to understand what they are reading at Fitness Watch.

"The study is described in an article that appeared in advance online publication on June 20, 2008 in the American Journal of Physiology. The participants were six men and six women, ages 60 to 75, who were not obese but who had been living an inactive lifestyle. They were put on an eleven-month program of endurance exercise under the careful guidance of a trainer.

For the first three months, they were required to exercise to about 65 percent of their maximum capacity. After that, the program was stepped up so participants reached about 75 percent of maximum. Soto says the volunteers enjoyed the experience and told him they felt in the best shape they had been in years...

Next, the research team will investigate exercise training in individuals with heart failure. 'In the past heart failure patients were told to limit their activity,' Soto says. 'Now more and more we're seeing there is potentially a benefit to getting them as active as possible. We want to know if heart failure patients will experience the same benefit in heart metabolism with exercise that we saw for older people.'"

We'll see where this leads.

As I have written and said before, cardiac rehab is first and foremost about the malpractice insurer. The patient comes last after the doc's career, his/her creature comfort needs, family expenses, etc.

My fitness program is the cardiac rehab regimen I developed following my open heart surgery (bad anatomy, not clogged vessels) and which was not fully successful, i.e., they could not repair me completely.

These are my results:




You can likely do better since, statistically speaking, you are not saddled with a mechanically/anatomically, leaky, suboptimal heart.

It will be interesting to see how the researchers approach their study subjects.

In any event, improved fitness is and always will be a result of training, not exercise.

To understand how to train properly, go here.

To understand how to eat healthily, go here, here and here.