The 'athlete's heart' phenomenon describes how the same cardiovascular adaptations that make endurance athletes exceptional (such as left ventricular dilation, increased stroke volume, and enhanced vagal tone) can also create risks including arrhythmias, coronary calcification, and myocardial fibrosis; however, the net benefit of exercise remains overwhelmingly positive, with studies showing that even extreme endurance athletes (exercising 35 hours/week for 28 years) show no increased cardiovascular mortality, and the key distinction lies in whether cardiac changes are exercise-induced (EICR) or genetically driven (like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy), with the former being potentially beneficial and the latter requiring medical intervention.
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Intense Exercise & Potential Heart Damage (aka Athlete's Heart)Added:
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist and the executive director of the human performance center at Parker University.
Today, we're going to start with a story. In fact, it's a ghost story with a character by the name of Cabayo Blanco. For those Spanish speaking friends out there, that of course means the white horse. and Cababayio as he was referred to terrorized and mystified the Copper Canyon range of the Sierra Madres in northern Mexico for the better part of 20 years. Many years later, of course, the story would be unraveled as an individual by the name of Micah TR, which was also in fact not his real name. But as the lore goes, Micah or Cabayo lived most of his life in this desolate canyon region. and he would live running between 30 and 60 miles from village to village, gathering up resources and then running back to his hut. And no one really knew what the heck he was doing.
Micah himself was running somewhere between 160 to 170 m per week for nearly two decades. And again, keep in mind he was doing this in an area where he had no access to running shoes, medical care, or really any advanced technology, nutrition, hydration strategies to simply surviving by running large amounts every day for decades on end.
Micah's story was made famous by the best-selling book Born to Run. You can read more about it there. But really he became one of the most central and legendary figures in the ultramarathon circles. This launched of course an entire generation of ultra runners. But where the story is of use today is the fact that Micah himself while running those again 150 to 170 m per week for decades eventually end up dying at age 58 during a very routine 12mile jog. And if you're from the running community or world at all, you probably know this exact story. If you don't know of Mike himself, you know the bigger plot here.
And that is this juxtaposition or paradox between really incredibly highly cardiovascularly fit individuals, oftentimes runners, who then end up paradoxically dying in mid to early age of cardiovascular disease. And so if you looked at the title of this show and were kind of wondering what it meant, this is really exactly what I'm talking about. It's this phenomenon of trying to understand well how are these people who are elite in this physiological area also at extremely high risk. The story itself is really as old as we've understood cardiovascular physiology.
And so when we actually get into what's happening here, we don't know cabio story itself. It took them several days to actually find him. He was lost in the middle of a canyon somewhere and by the time they got to him, it was too difficult to perform a proper autopsy.
But the prevailing wisdom here is he likely died of something called left ventricular cardiac myopathy. I'll get into what all that means here very momentarily. Where this has gotten more difficult is then cardiologists and other medical professionals have tried to inspire and help the world in the sense of preventative care. Here we've also led to confusion and concern about really what is this relationship between exercise, extreme exercise and cardiovascular health. And so I think the best way to think about this is to split it into two broad categories. The first is the classic case of cabio. what I just described. These are the folks who are typically between 30 to 50 or so years old. It's generally men, though it can occasionally happen in women who have this paradoxical extreme cardiovascular fitness and then they suddenly die in the middle of a race or an activity from cardiovascular disease.
You also then have what people are probably potentially more familiar with and that is the young athlete. So this is your again typically 12 to 20year-old who has no apparent signs and symptoms and then unfortunately passes away during physical activity. I'm bringing this up today for the unfortunate news the fact that I have personal experience with this. A friend of mine Mike Osuna recently lost his 15-year-old son Lucas to a similar event. And so I think it's really important to me to cover this topic because some of this is preventative. We can do something about this. At the same time, we're causing unnecessary confusion in it. And so, what I really wanted to cover today with this athlete heart idea is what do we really know about this situation? Why does it happen? What's causing it? How do we prevent it? What do we look for?
And so, we can separate the fact from the fiction as much as we know the information. I'll skip to the end here.
We don't know everything right now. We certainly know plenty of things that I think are very actionable and helpful, but we have way more to learn. And so I believe it's personally important for all of us to understand what do we look for again? What is preventable? How do we do that? And that we can hedge people against the two major pitfalls.
One being unnecessary risk. So when are we putting ourselves in a situation where we probably should reconsider that or at least understand the true risk that we're in and not be overconfident?
The other side of that equation is the opposite where we're inducing unnecessary fear of exercise or running on people when it is completely unnecessary. I think once people have that information, they can make whatever choice they would like. That's not up to me to decide. That is entirely up to you. But I believe it'd be helpful for us to truly understand what do we know scientifically, what do we know clinically right now about this really interesting paradox of the athletes heart. The presenting sponsor of this podcast is Momentus. Momentous makes the highest quality supplements on the market, period. I literally spent years vetting their products, company, and leadership team before officially partnering with them in 2023. Every single one of Momentous's products is third party tested to ensure quality, and many are even NSF certified for sport. Now, while I love all their products, I'm incredibly excited about their new fiber plus prebiotic. Almost everyone is seeking more energy, improved recovery, and better performance. But most people are missing a key foundation to their overall health, and that's getting enough good fiber. In fact, 95% of Americans are failing to hit the recommended daily amount of fiber. Fiber powers gut health, which we know drives long-term performance. Proper gut health allows for better nutrient absorption, energy stability, recovery, inflammation control, and much more. I personally simply mix a scoop of their cinnamon flavor and some water every night. And by doing so, I make sure I'm covering any gaps I might have in my daily fiber intake that I try to get through eating a balanced whole food diet. If you'd like to try Fiber Plus or any of Momenus' best-in-class supplements, just go to live momentous.com/galpin and use the code galpin for up to 35% off your first order. Again, that's live momentous.com/galpin and use the code galpin for up to 35% off your first order. In 1899, we see this term athlete heart officially coined by a Swedish physician. What he started noticing was cross-country skiers had these enlarged or larger than normal hearts. Did not know if this was something they were born with. That's what allowed them to be good skiers or endurance athletes or something that they acrewed as a result of their exercise. Well, about a decade or so later, since people were noticing this was happening mostly in runners, not because of anything special to running, but just because these were the events people were doing. And so, athletes heart got turned into runner's heart.
You'll still hear this today. If you ever hear those phrases, athlete heart or runner's heart, you can think of them as basically interchangeable. I will in short moment just tell you what the true scientific term for this phenomenon is.
But in pop culture, runners heart, athletes heart, it's basically the same thing here. And where we really first get our entry point to the scientific literature is in 1910 with a guy named Clarence Demar who eventually won the Boston Marathon like seven or eight times was famously standing at the start line of I think one of the Olympic games and a crowd of physicians were standing next to him begging him to not run the race. I think at that time, and I don't know the exact details of the story, they knew he had some sort of irregular heartbeat or heart murmur, and they were all concerned that he was going to die and they're begging him to not do this race. And he runs the race and nothing happens. In fact, he lived until he was about 70, eventually dying of cancer, I think. And so now everyone's really confused. They're like, "Oh my gosh, we thought we had our ringer here, and this guy runs for decades and decades, runs tons of medals, and has no issue whatsoever.
But they were able to autopsy him after he eventually died and they found that he had exceptionally large coronary arteries and the heart itself was large. And so now they had their first description of a longitudinal study. They had a real athlete who they knew did real cardiovascular exercise and then they got his heart in a good spot after he died and they started to confirm yes indeed he had these enlarged areas but it wasn't detrimental. Before we go any further though, I need to give you a little bit of a detour and help you understand some basic physiology and anatomy of the heart because that's going to help you understand what is happening in response to exercise, what's happening in response to other situations that are maladaptive like chronic high blood pressure. But we got to know a little bit of the physiology to understand what's going on here. And we also need to know this when we get to the end of the discussion today so you know what to look out for and how to ask for tests and interpret them when you get that information. Okay. So how does a heart really work? It's got four specific chambers. Two on top and two below. The two on top are called the atria. The two on the bottom are called the ventricles. And so the way blood flows through your heart is it starts in your right atria. It drops down to the right ventricle which is directly below it. The right ventricle then squeezes and contracts and pumps blood from the ventricle to the lungs. It heads into the lungs to pick up oxygen, deliver its waste products and etc. And then it comes back from the lungs and goes into the left atria. Just like the right side, it goes from the left atria, drops down to the left ventricle. And now when the left ventricle squeezes, instead of sending the blood to the lungs, it sends it to the rest of the body. The left ventricle is probably 80 or 90% of the discussion of athletes heart because that's the place that has to overcome pressure that comes either with things like chronic high blood pressure or exercise. And what you're going to see unravel here is it's actually incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for us to determine positive versus, again, I'll keep using the term maladaptive or bad adaptation in the heart. Looking simply at what's called morphology. So morphology being what does the structure look like? What's the anatomy? Because the adaptation itself, we don't know how it got there. And so there's something special and unique to not just the eventual result, but what caused the adaptation to occur in the first place. So when it leaves the left ventricle, it's going to go out via the aorta. And this is our first major artery.
I love this and I remember learning it when I was an undergraduate. But when things go away from the heart, they are arteries. When they come back to the heart, they are veins. Now, one thing people mess up a lot is they assume all arteries mean they are oxygenated and all veins mean that they are not oxygenated or deoxxygenated. That's not necessarily always true and the special cases when it's not true are don't matter right now. But I think it's better to understand these things as away from the heart away with an A is an artery with an A. Coming back to the heart is a vein. In the middle are the capillaries. And so I know I'm going to go through this in painful detail, but it's very important to understand because we're going to look at the different aspects of adaptation here momentarily. When it leaves the left ventricle, it goes out that aorta. This is a giant artery that goes to the rest of your body. It then distributes all over your body depending on where the blood needs to go. And when it gets to the tissue that it wants to get into, whether we're talking about skeletal muscle or your organs or what have you, it's going to be switched then from arteries into capillaries. And there's a bunch of other small things here I'm I'm glossing over. What we call the place of of of fuel and and nutrient exchange is in those capillaries. And so you can just imagine in this case oxygen coming into a muscle bed. It goes into a capillary. The oxygen then goes into the muscle. Waste products then leave the muscle and go back into the capillary, go out the muscle bed and then come back up to the heart via the veins. So the aorta is our major one. And in the case of heart disease, chronic or otherwise, this is a major place where we have issues. But some of the other ones that are important to pay attention to are things like your corateed arteries.
These of course are the the arterials or the arteries that send blood flow to your head, brain, and neck. Other ones you've probably heard of are the coronary arteries. Now, I can say you probably heard of them because that's what I mentioned a few moments ago. Now, these are special and unique because the coronary arteries and veins are the ones that actually deliver oxygen to the heart itself. People gloss over this one. I know I did forever. In fact, I remember being an undergraduate learning this and be like, "Oh my god, I'd never thought about this in my life." We always describe the heart as being necessary to pump blood throughout the rest of the body. But we also have to have blood flow to the heart itself.
Remember, it is a muscle very similar to skeletal muscle. I covered this in detail in an episode in season 1. We'll put a link that episode in our show notes. You can go check that out. But the heart itself needs to contract. It has measin and actin and ATP requirements. It has to have carbohydrates and all those other things. So you have to have blood supply to the heart. So we need to have those coronary arteries and veins that pump into the heart itself. From the Venus side, the kind of equivalent to the aorta are are two separate ones that are called the inferior and superior vennea.
So those are the main ones that bring blood supply back to it. I glossed over a lot of gross anatomy there, but that gets you a rough idea of what's happening.
This matters because the left ventricle unlike the right ventricle has to supply the entire body.
In other words, when the right atrium, remember, think about the top right hand corner, the top four of your quadrant, the right atrium just has to drop blood into the right ventricle, which is right below it. It's also got gravity on its side. And so it actually separates all these chambers are a bunch of valves that we won't discuss today, but basically just open up the valve and if you had to let the blood drop from the atria to the ventricle, but the right ventricle has to then pump it actively to get it all the way into the lungs.
But the lungs are pretty close to the heart. In fact, sometimes they're above it or below it. And so I just kind of have to move things a few well inches really horizontally. But the left ventricle has to in one single pump get it out the aorta all the way through the entire circulatory system and then back up to the heart against gravity. And so the contractile strength needed in that left ventricular pump is unlike any of the other three chambers.
This is also why when you look at your heart and when we draw cartoons, we see this nice symmetrical vertically aligned heart. But in reality, it's often well, it's almost always tilted to the right because the left ventricle is much larger than any other of the four chambers because of exercise induced adaptations.
What? Well, that's what we would call it in my world. In this particular case, you have to have more force, more output because of what I just mentioned. And so that muscle grows larger. This is why you're going to see this term hypertrophy all over this literature. Hypertrophy is muscle growth. And you keep thinking like why are we mentioning this when we're talking about heart disease?
Because it is a direct result of both exercise adaptation as well as heart disease.
that muscle will grow when it is chronically stressed or acutely stressed.
You're starting to see the relationship here. It's really confusing to figure out. I can look at your quadriceps muscle groups. Pick any one of them. And if that muscle is larger afterwards than it was before, there's almost no chance that a disease is happening.
There are some extremely rare ones, but almost always I can simply look at a before and after picture and say that person is healthier.
When we do that at the heart, that is not true.
So, hypertrophy has a different connotation in the heart than it has anywhere else. Hence, this term enlarged heart.
Now, we've got a basic understanding of gross anatomy and morphology. We got to go back a little bit in our stories to a gentleman named Paul Dudley White. He was at Harvard, one of the absolute pioneers of preventative cardiology. In other words, a guy really ahead of his time hundred years ago advocating for exercise as a way to prevent cardiac disease. Phenomenal work. Awesome. What he started to unravel was the fact that athletes or exercisers were experiencing something called brady cardia. So remember tacoc cardia is an elevated heart rate. Brady cardia is a lower heart rate. Remember put yourself in their shoes a 100 years ago. We did not know that a lower resting heart rate was normal or good or bad because the vast majority of time if you're a physician and you see somebody that has a higher or lower than normal resting heart rate, something bad is happening. And so the community did not know if this was the case. But because of Paul Dudley White's work, we started to realize that this lower heart rate or bradic cardia was not pathological. Again, pathological meaning it's bad. there is a disease occurring or something similar. And so the narrative started to shift. Now in combination with a couple of his research partners, Lewis Wolf and John Parkinson, they were the ones that really promoted and of course got the naming rights to something called Wolf Parkinson's White Syndrome, WPW.
We're going to come back and talk about this more later, but almost all of you, I would be willing to guarantee, are familiar with Wolf Parkinson's White, even if you don't recognize the name.
More on that later. Fast forward about three more decades, and the 1960s and 70s, our story is darn near complete because we have again another boom in running.
First one, the Olympics are reintroduced. The second one came in the 1960s and 70. Marathoning and running in general exploded. I've covered this in other episodes. I actually this to me is one of the most fascinating if not most critical time periods in in all of exercise science and I would argue exercise physiology and modern health 1960s and '7s. But nonetheless, we started just getting research on this.
Uh there was interesting data sets coming from big groups of athletes out of Italy and we started to see what I've already described left ventricular hypertrophy and enlarged chamber size in all these elite athletes but no diseases they weren't dying. We're also getting a host of what's called sudden cardiac death in young athletes where we're seeing hypertrophic cardio myopathy.
Hypertrophic again meaning large, cardio meaning heart, myo meaning muscle, pathy meaning disease. So enlarged heart resulting in disease. And so no, we are smack in the middle of controversy. At the same time, we're getting data on athletes who are extremely healthy with larger hearts and then seeing young athletes with larger hearts dying.
What the hell is going on?
hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or I'm going to use probably the acronym HCM for that is the clinical disease effectively what we're doing is we're labeling some the exact same morphology differently if it resulted in early disease we call it HCM if it didn't we call it exercise induced adaptation but nonetheless and so the dual thread here of normal adaptation versus what we will call in the field mimicry of disease begin and this is again that classic case of sports or athletics or exercise mimic mimicking disease without the pathology.
Where this gave it the last final modern twist was in 2012. There was a conference in San Francisco called the American College of Sports Medicine. I was at this event. I remember this and we're talking barely just over a decade ago. And what happens at conferences is it's supposed to be an opportunity for scientists to share insights that are beyond their research papers. Right? There's no point of going to these things and just giving a talk on the paper that you wrote because everyone can read that. And so often times we generally give people a little bit of liberty here. Share us some unpublished data. Let us know what you're working on, some insights you think are happening and then you know next year, the year after that when the paper comes out, we'll read it and we assume you're going to make some mistakes. Well, this happened in 2012. a group I think they were out of South Carolina epidemiologist had an unbelievably cool uh presentation they had data from a place in Dallas called Cooper's clinic and so they had data sets from 1970 all the way to that about 2000 about 30 years and that included 50,000 people who had done cardiovascular tests with them now of those 50,000 they had about 14,000 runners now I don't know if these were competitive athletes or just the occasional jogger but these are p basically people who self-identified as I run for exercise. So that's amazing. I mean, just think about this. 14,000 people with cardiovascular tests who run. This is incredible. And the average followup for these people was about 15 years. So, not only do you have their baseline test, but you can see them before and after 15 years of this exercise, which again gives us incredible insights into what happened in response to the exercise because we have a pre and post on each individual person.
Well, not surprisingly, kind of the first data set here was the fact that those runners had about a 20% increase in life expectancy than the non-runners.
No surprise here, right folks? Exercise is good. It will keep you alive much longer. But where things got twisted, and I actually want to be clear here, I'm not blaming the authors here because I don't remember the presentation being like this. My framing at the time was different than what actually happened later. But the reality of it is they also shared insights that said, "Hey, there seems to be this protective effect of runners up to about 20 miles per week such that people that are running up to 20 miles in a given week are having an increase in lifespan. But if you run more than 20 miles per week, we potentially have problems. In fact, what you're seeing is those people had no increased risk of survival or no increased likelihood of survival rather than the people who didn't exercise at all. So you can imagine yourself an inverted U such that you start running and you're increasing your likely survival. You're doing better. But once you get to that 20 miles per week target, if you continue to run more miles past that on average, that your benefit goes down, which is almost indirectly or directly saying more than 20 miles per week is actually disadvantageous.
It's dangerous as another way to interpret this. And you saw an explosion of popular media. I won't name the articles or the magazines themselves, but this took off everywhere. And if you've been in this field long enough, like I have or many of the people that came before me, of course, you've seen this wave come and go. It seems to be every 3 or four years, we get an explosion of the is exercise actually bad for you? Is too much exercise bad?
Is it actually dangerous? And we're in that moment right now. just in the last part of the reason I'm doing this episode now is I saw another set of articles come out in the last month and I'm like oh my gosh and it's the same story every time. It's rarely ever updated and I think you can actually cover the entire thing in in one set and in the next few years when this comes up again barring any new information you're probably going to see the same story repeated over and over. So it's frustrating because what happened in this was you actually had a a few cardiologists who are extremely famous publishing in journals like the Mayo Clinic Proceedings which are highly reputable in the medical community of course saying that exercise is inflammatory to the heart causes things called fibrosis and scar tissue and is not only delletterious but dangerous but here's the reality those authors when they finally published that paper a couple of years later in the journal of American College of Cardiology did not, and I will repeat, did not conclude that that running was dangerous or disadvantageous. What they actually concluded was most, if not all, running exercise is excellent for your health.
Past 20 m per week doesn't seem to be more advantageous, though. But it didn't hurt anybody either. And I'll give you more data on this point directly. But this is very very very very different than how those data were portrayed two years ago and especially by other folks in attendance of that meeting and then people that wrote about it a little bit later. I'll reiterate something I said at the beginning. I want to share the data as best as I can interpret and I think that is the fair way to justify it and then you can decide if that risk is worth it or not. That's not up to me.
But I think it is up to scientists to make sure that the data are being portrayed accurately and appropriately and that the conclusions match the actual results. And in this particular case, I'm going to make a strong argument here in one moment that that was not the appropriate interpretation of those data. And we got to be careful with jumping to conclusions. Today's episode is sponsored by EightLe. Asleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, sleep tracking, and more. I've personally been sleeping on an EightLe mattress for more than 3 years now, and it's absolutely glorious.
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If these adaptations seem to be somewhat similar, where are they at specifically and what do the data tell us? Well, let's start by understanding if we do have cardiovascular disease, what does that actually look like? What part of the heart is failing and why? Because this will tell us our answer. The very first stop in this train is like I said earlier, and that's the coronary artery side of the equation. If the vessels that give your heart blood itself become blocked or damaged, you're going to have or likely to experience what's called a mocardial infarction. Again, my meaning heart, cardial or being tissue rather, it's a heart attack is how you've heard this. Very simple to understand. If you were to stop providing oxygen and nutrients to any of your skeletal muscle, they would stop working because we can't go through normal metabolic processes. The heart is the same. So, if you have an oxygen block, your heart itself becomes hypoxic. The heart will stop contracting. this will cause necrosis or damage or if severe enough you will die because the heart will die and then we don't pump anything throughout the whole world. So the first thing we're always paying attention to is the coronary arteries themselves. Are they healthy? The second broad category here are what I'm going to call firing issues. And this is the electrical signal that causes contraction. And this can look a lot of different ways. I'll give you two rough ways to think about this. But the first one is what's called cardiac arrest. This is simply your heart stops charging. It stops firing.
It stops contracting. It's not the fact that you were necessarily blocked by oxygen delivery, but something got screwed up in the electrical conductivity that caused the problem.
The most deadly here is called VIB, ventricular fibrillation. So remember, the ventricles sit on the bottom. They squeeze, do the most work, and they push blood either to the lungs or to the rest of the body. VIB is incredibly dangerous. In fact, it's I won't go as far as to say it's a death sentence, but it's pretty close. If you have VIB, you're likely not going to be exercising. You're going to probably have a surgical intervention.
Something's going to go on. This is really, really nasty. It's also very uncommon, but it is particularly difficult to deal with. The left ventricle does not pump. And well, you can finish the story there. The fibrillation part is a way to think about misfiring. It is fluttering. So instead of that left ventricle beating strong, relaxing, refilling with blood, beating strong again, it's kind of sputtering. You can imagine your car kind of like and shooting some smoke out the back occasionally. Well, what happens with that is number one, you don't get a strong contraction. And so blood doesn't get out. That's, you know, problem number one. The other problem is you have things like because the valve system is working quote such that we open up a valve from the atria to let blood into the ventricle then we close that valve. Why? Because if it wasn't closed and the left ventricle pumped, you would actually just be shooting blood right back into the atrium. And so you have to have this open, close, open, close, open, close to create pressure in the system and not shoot blood the wrong direction. Well, VIB kind of defeats that purpose because things are firing at the wrong time. And so you're kind of shooting blood into chambers the wrong direction, which again further reduces blood going out and so forth. So it's a real problem. If you've heard of things like a heart murmur or an irregular heartbeat, often times they're describing this fibrillation. Okay, I'll reiterate. If it's a ventricular or VIB, that irregular heartbeat is very dangerous. If it's AIB or atrial fibrillation, it is much more common, still serious. It can absolutely result in death, but it's it's way less likely to be problematic. In fact, many people will have this and either not have any concern, not ever know it, or it will be checked out, be cleared by a cardiologist, and they'll return to sport. If you've ever seen an athletes where and this happens every single year, they show up to training camp at the beginning of the season, then all of a sudden they're sidelineed for several weeks because something going on at their heart, and then they're back in the game. A lot of times it's because someone picked up an aphib, they've thoroughly checked it out and they said, "Okay, you're fine and now you're back in the game." And so mostly, I won't say benign is the appropriate term here, but they're they're not nearly as dangerous.
And you can live a full competitive athletic life with AIB and be just fine.
And I'll walk you through the data on that specific point a little bit later.
But where these do become dangerous is similar to what we just discussed with VIB but in the fact that if your atria is not completely dumping blood into the ventricles that blood can pull. When you pull blood it tends to clot. If that clot is then moved to the to the ventricle it is pushed out into the system. A clot can develop anywhere which of course especially if it happens in your brain will lead to a stroke and that's why it can become extremely dangerous. So those are the problems we're typically dealing with. Why do these things happen? Well, the first stop is genetics. And so I know that a lot of the discussion around sudden cardiac death or athletes that die tends to be like, well, it was something genetic. And and that is in large part true, but the genetic side of the equation can cause issues with firing.
That's the Wolf Parkinson's White thing I talked about earlier. Remember, Professor White, I told you, and we come back to that. Effectively what what wolf Parkinson's white is is a genetic disease that causes Aphib. Okay. Now it's more complicated than that. I don't mean to diminish that topic, but that's really what we're looking at. And I remember in the 1990s people were terrified. This is why everyone started talking about well Parkinson's white.
But then we actually started to realize well again it can be deadly and certainly people have died from it. Most of the time people are fine. It's okay.
It's not great but it is it is manageable.
There are many, many, many of these, you know, genetic dispositions, especially with firing sequences. I don't have time to cover them all, but one I do want to point out is called LDS. This is Louise Deetsz syndrome. And this is exactly what happened, unfortunately, to my friend Mike's son, Lucas. And so, I wanted to bring that up because I know they are raising funds for that. And I'm going to put a link in the show notes uh for the fundraiser they're doing for that. But LDS is a situation that causes connective tissue issues particularly in the heart blood vessels uh and other surrounding areas and this leads to what are called premature atrial uh aneurysms and so effectively we have issues in the vasculature around it.
Young, lean, healthy Lewis himself passed away while swimming. He was actually doing a cool down after practice even though they were tried to revive him and perform CPR because there's aneurysm there. There was just nothing they could do about it. So, I wanted to make sure I call that out for for Mike and Lucas. And again, I would encourage you to consider donating to that cause uh of course to provide more research there. I will personally be making a donation to that as well have already but wanted to call that out for those folks. On top of that or going past the genetic side of the equation, another one that happens is that HCM, you could have a potential issue with the firing side of the equation. It is also known that some people are simply born with an enlarged heart. Again, hypertrophic cardiac myopathy. This is problematic because it is the most common cause of sudden cardiac death in young individuals. I'll go over some of the numbers and and how frequently it is a little bit later, but this is not necessarily a firing issue. is simple the fact that you have an enlarged heart. And the enlargement comes not from the left ventricle being bigger, but because it actually often almost always or frequently comes with a reduction of chamber size.
So imagine the left ventricle itself.
You've got a thick wall. Well, when you strength train, you gain and you grow muscle. That's muscle hypertrophy. Same thing happening here. But in this particular case, the hypertrophy occurs internally. So the chamber itself the area that can hold blood gets smaller and so then when you exert phys you go through high physical exertion this becomes a problem because you can't match your output the ventricle doesn't have enough time to refill with blood to pump again and this leads that again sudden cardiac death. So while we can't prevent at this point any of these genetic abnormalities, we can do things about it in terms of screening. And in the case of HCM, there are some some medications that are possible which we'll get into a little bit later.
We need to differentiate that genetic based concern from chronic heart disease. So this is maladaptations or pathology that occurred as a result of a lifetime, not as a result of a genetic predisposition. What we're talking about here in the analogy or the example I've used several times and we'll continue to use are things like chronic high blood pressure.
What this can do is it mimics exercise, but instead of giving you a little bit of exercise for a few minutes or hours a day, your aorta are under resistance every single minute of every single day for years on end. If I told you you were going to do that for one of your skeletal muscles, you would think, well, that's probably going to be bad for the tissue. Well, the same thing happens with the heart. It's bad for that as well. So this is in fact what high blood pressure is because we have either a number of different issues but that cause the aorta to either stiffen or become what we call less compliant more rigid or the pressure itself is too difficult to overcome. That left ventricle has to squeeze so incredibly hard to get the blood out for every pump.
The vascular itself can become damaged.
So you just imagine the aorta being a a fillable hose, a rubbery hose. Well, instead of being a hose where when you put more pressure in it, it expands and then when you reduce the pressure, it will go back to its normal size. Now, that turns into a brittle concrete. And so, the pressure in the system is higher because the vessels themselves don't the vascular does not move. And in fact, if you do it too much and there's too much turbulence, that's kind of like the the blood smashing and slamming up against those walls, you can actually cause issues with that, if not rupture them entirely. And so we lack compliance there. This also induces scar tissue in the left ventricle. This is technically called fibrosis. It's not exactly scar tissue, but this is an equivalent for our conversation today. Just like if you overuse skeletal muscle like this, you wouldn't be surprised to develop some scar tissue there. The exact same thing happens in the left ventricle. And so the true problems here are again lack of vascular compliance. You also now have an increase in scar tissue of fibrosis.
This induces that left ventricular hypertrophy specifically a reduction in chamber size. It's an inward growth. You also then because of all that that compiles to reduce contractile strength.
The heart is physically weaker. The individual muscle fibers themselves do not contract with enough force to push enough blood out. You become weaker and now you're actually in a cycle of problem. All this combines to reduce blood flow and make life more challenging. So why this entire topic becomes so difficult is because the people that are suffering from these issues I just mentioned outside of the chronic high blood pressure, it's typically asymptomatic. And in fact, the ones that are dealing with the athlete heart or the runner's heart generally have no symptoms and no other core mobidities. They don't drink. They don't smoke. They're not overweight. They're typically lean. They're physically active. They stress manage. They do all the things right.
And they still deal with this issue. And so this is why we often call this stuff the silent killer.
Oftent times if you have multiple coorbidities, you're not surprised to learn you've got cardiovascular heart disease. You know you're overweight. You know you smoke, so on and so forth. But in this case, you don't know that because you're probably doing all if not most of the right lifestyle things, but you're still dealing with this concern.
And so the term we use to describe this now instead of calling an athletes heart scientifically is EICR, exercise induced cardiovascular remodeling. And this is an important term because we're saying the remodeling or the change in size and function is exercise induced. That front flag there of exercise induced is there a way to distinguish the same end result because it came from exercise is now not pathological but potentially even advantageous and so it's really difficult to identify looking at this stuff as I mentioned just as a screen if you were to run in and get say some imaging of your heart you may not necessarily see what's going on here in fact there was some data that I came across showing that even if you were to run like an ECG you probably would miss 50% of these issues because there's not one single place to go and because you don't necessarily know if this is maladaptive or not. And when it comes to HCM, I told you I'd share with you some numbers earlier and here you go. About one in 500 people have HCM, but very few will be dead from it. And the vast majority will never even know that they have it.
And so typically in this show, I like to cover it in the format of the three eyes. The first eye being investigate, which is how do I measure it? Second being how do I interpret those results?
And the third eye being how do I intervene? What do I do about it? I'm going to switch that order a little bit and I'm going to cover the second eye, interpretation first and then I'll get into investigation or what do I measure?
What tests do I run a little bit later and that's because you really honestly we've been covering interpret for the vast majority of our conversation already. And so I just want to finish polishing that part off and then I'll share with you what tests you can run and and what you can do about it a little bit after that. So let's start that second eye right now. In the preparation for today, I read a lot of papers and found a ton of excellent resources. And I'm going to put the vast majority in the show notes and that's because it's really very technical. I just didn't want to spend the time covering the millimeters of thickness of the left ventricle and things like that where you just don't really know what that means. But I do want to include all those in the show notes. But the exercise induced cardiac remodeling EICR has three main components. The first being structural. We've described a number of the things already. The second being functional. How does the heart work? And the third being electrical.
And we can go through this pretty quickly because we've laid the foundation already. Overall summary here from a structural side. We're going to hone in mostly on that left ventricle.
And we're looking at the overall size or mass. We're looking at the dilation or the chamber size. This is described a bunch of different ways, but that's what we're referring to. So, how big the ventricle is itself, how much space it has to fill up with blood. And the third one is called supernormal diastily. This is basically saying when we have exercise induced hard cardiovascular changes, the ventricles themselves get an excessive ability to relax. Now, we actually see the same thing happening in the skeletal muscle. One of the fastest ways that you can increase your strength is when you start to actually learn how to relax your muscles faster in between contractions. I know this sounds counterintuitive. Go check out our muscle episodes there. But the same thing happens here in the heart. The faster your arteries and ventricles can relax in between beats and the more they can distend, the more blood you can fill them back up with, which means more blood can come out of them. And so that's something we really want to pay attention to that left ventricular um both filling space as well as relaxation speed if you want to think about that way. So those are the big structural ones. From a functional perspective, it really is honestly kind of this simple.
If the adaptation induces greater stroke volume, it's almost always positive. If it induces reduced or less stroke volume, it's almost always negative. And you could basically full stop there.
Now, what's stroke volume?
Every time your heart pumps, it kicks out a certain amount of blood. The amount of blood that comes out of that is the volume of the stroke or the heartbeat. That is what we're talking about. So, the more blood that comes out, your stroke volume, however it got there, it's almost always assured to be a good thing. Or if it reduces it, it's generally bad. And this makes so much sense once we think about how the left ventricle works. If the net result is you pumping more blood out per pump, it's probably good. If it's the opposite, it makes sense that that's a bad thing. Think about this from the perspective of V2 max. Everyone is excited and talking about how you need to maximize this to live as long as you can. Well, we need to realize and understand the fact that one of the major determinants of your V2 max is your stroke volume. You can go look up the full equation and I've described it elsewhere, but for right now, if you maximize or increase your stroke volume, you're going to increase your V2 max. In fact, one would argue pretty well that that is the single biggest way to improve your V2 max is to increase that stroke volume. And that's because things like your heart rate, which is another part of our V2 max equation, is fairly fixed. You really can't increase your maximal heart rate. Your age, your sex, and genetics, and things like that are going to tell you where you're at there.
In fact, your max heart rate's only going to go down as you age. But your stroke volume is extremely plastic. And we have gosh 60 plus years of research on stroke volume increasing with exercise. It's incredibly robust. It does not take running. It does not take aerobic exercise, high intensity, low intensity, blah blah blah. It's non-specific responder, but a very very fast and eloquent responder to exercise.
So that's our place of improvement. What ends up happening there is you get two things. You get an increase in ventricular filling. So the ventricles fill up with more blood. More blood in there means there's more blood to pump.
You also have what's called lower end diastolic volume which just simply means after the end of the pump you have less total volume. Fancy way of saying or similar I I guess of describing a phenomenon called ejection fraction. We don't need to go into the details here but just think about it. If you had I'll just say 10 units of blood in your ventricle and you pumped out five your ejection fraction would be 50. In other words, of all that was possible there how much was left after the beat? if you can improve that and so now your ejection fraction you you only have two or three units left you've pumped out seven or eight then again you can do the math there that makes general sense so more on all those potentially in a future episode but that's basically what we're talking about so we describe the different structural changes the functional or the outcome changes are the ones I just highlighted and the third electrical are things like an increase in veagal tone so remember the vagus nerve goes directly to your heart when you ramp ramp this thing up, you lower your heart rate. And this is one of the things that happens with chronic endurance exercise that allows your heart rate to lower is because the fact you don't have to pump as often because you're getting out more blood per pump. The mechanism here is again an increase in veagal tone. Now the vagus nerve is what regulates this drive between your sympathetic and parasympathetic system. And so what also happens here because you have a lower or increased veagal tone, you have a more relaxed heart which allows it to fill more. It's also then what causes the problems with things like AIB. So I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but since we're right here, if you have a just think of it as like a more relaxed and zen heart, and so remember those valves are supposed to be shutting tightly after the pump. Well, when you're more relaxed and you're chilling, they don't have as much urgency to shut and they don't slam all the way. So then when you have these nice big hard contractions, a little bit of blood kind of shoots back up to the atria that causes this heart murmur. That's effectively what we think is happening with exercise induced aphib is you actually get such an increase in veagal tone and such an increase in overall uh plasticity of the heart. In this case, it dilates more that we just get this little bit of extra kind of fluttering and flickering there. And so it's at this point not necessarily known how dangerous that is if it is exercise induced. It's also not known if this just happens to be noticed more in people who exercise because they are not always but often times a little bit more in tune what's happening in their body.
So they might feel this a little bit more. So you can kind of blame this a little bit on your heart being a little bit too relaxed. Maybe we should like ease up a little bit on the veagal tone there. Pay a little bit more attention.
But it also may not be pathological.
highlighting everything right there.
Worthy of a little bit more discussion of each one of those three areas in detail right here. So, let's start with the left ventricle. I've mentioned this stuff already, so we can recap this, but remember, if it enhances stroke volume and it enhances exercise performance, it's probably good. We talked about that chamber dilation. Remember, this is the inside getting larger. a lot of research from large cohorts of athletes. One in particular that's uh used quite often here is a group of Italian athletes.
They've done similar things with athletes here in the US. And in general, we're hearing about the same things in all these papers, but a large percentage, in fact, I've seen some studies that have even indicated up to 80 to 90% of endurance athletes are going to have an increase in chamber size. So I think it's fair to say this is a very common adaptation that you'll see routinely if you want exact numbers there you going to depending on the paper something about you know 5050% will have an increase in left ventricle diameter of more than 55 millimeters if you're a cardiologist that will make sense to you if you're not fine um and then you know you somewhere between 10 and 20% will be even greater than 60 millime so those numbers don't matter to you fine move on you get the point? If they do, interesting tidbit in terms of the left ventricular size or the or the midwall thickening, if you will, it doesn't necessarily happen that often in strength training athletes. And in fact, I'll share with you why exactly this happens in a second. So, we're mostly talking about kind of endurance aerobic or, you know, cardiovascular training.
It's why we call that cardiovascular training. And most of the time when we see this, we do see an increase in that wall thickness. you know, 12 to kind of 13 14 millimeters is the range there.
You start getting past 15, you might want to do some additional testing, but those are kind of where the numbers generally lie there. A number of other things may pop up that are worthy of note here. Things like asymmetrical hypertrophy is a particular problem. So whether this is you know excessively a larger left ventricular size relative to right size fibrosis as I've mentioned contractile reserve or ejection fraction being poor and there's a whole host of things you can look at again if you're in the cardiology side that you'd want to pay attention to. But the point that I'm making here is something we've said several times now and that's the fact that that left ventricular size alone can't differentiate the EICR from cardiomyopathy unfortunately. But it can leave us clues and it can tell us where we want to go from there. Some terms you're going to hear here routinely and I know again we're going to get a little bit technical here so stay with me. And I'm bringing this up though because these are common in exercise science but they have a different meaning in cardiology.
Eccentric versus concentric. When you say those in exercise, they mean something different. When you say them with a heart, concentric remodeling is generally the bad thing. Here's what they're referring to. Remember the high blood pressure example I've given earlier. If you have chronic high blood pressure, your left ventricle has to squeeze concentric like it's a squeezed contraction all the time. This often results in that reduced chamber size.
However, when you're chronically exercising, because when you exercise, most of your arteries and veins dilate to increase blood flow. That actually doesn't cause the left ventricle to overcome higher blood pressure acutely.
What does happen though is you're pushing way more blood out and so you have a lot more blood coming back in.
This is called preload, right? Or Venus returns. the amount of of blood returning from the veins going back and slamming into that right atria that all slams into there. So, what you're actually seeing is pressure coming from blood pushing outward on the chamber.
So, instead of the chamber having to contract to push the blood out to the body, it's filling up. And just imagine me dumping a bunch of water into a balloon and the balloon expands inside because of pressure from the water pushing inside pushing outwards. That's why they call it eccentric. It's it's extending. It's not causing the fibers there to contract and shorten. It's actually causing the chambers to lengthen or widen because of internal pressure because so much blood flow is smashing back into the arteries and ventricles. This is why that quote unquote eccentric stimuli tends to result in a greater chamber size. Folks, this is as said principle as it gets.
specific adaptation to imposed demand.
The demand is different between these two things. So, while they both result in your quote unquote heart getting bigger, they are getting bigger differently based specifically on the way that they are being stressed. And this is why I felt appropriate to take the time to walk you through both this anatomy and a little bit of this technical jargon because it actually hopefully makes this less confusing and is now like, well, why is this? Well, this is why it's not actually identical.
Even though it feels identical, it is quite different. And so, we have a different physiological response.
Now, we could do the exact same thing here with actual exercise. So, again, in the heart, they call it isotonic exercise. This is your endurance stuff.
This is your running, cycling, swimming.
When you do that stuff, I mean, think about what has to happen. You have to have a lot of volume of blood sustained for a long period of time. And you don't have a lot of what's called peripheral resistance. In fact, often times it's less. You've dilated vessels. You're not squeezing a ton of muscle, right? When you squeeze muscle, that squeezes the blood vessels that makes it harder to pump blood. You're not doing that a ton with this classic endurance style of exercise. And so what you generally or commonly see in response to this isotonic cardiovascular exercise is a fairly even distribution of dilation between all four cardiac chambers. So the atria get bigger and ventricles get bigger. This is a a balanced hypertrophy if you will. Now there are some differentiators there within like subgroups of exercise. For example, there's some literature on rowers who tend to develop a little bit more eccentric left ventricular hypertrophy just due to more pressure where distance runners are going to be looking more like um eccentric left ventricular hypertrophy with normal left ventricular mass. So, it gets larger but not the same. If that blew past you, don't worry about it. But if you're in those groups of athletes, you might have found that interesting. This differs from strength training or resistance exercise where we would generally call this again isometric. Again, not at the level of the skeletal muscle. It's isometric for the heart. This is lifting. This is wrestling. Things like that. Well, now it's the exact opposite of what I just described. you have a huge increase in peripheral resistance because as I just mentioned, in fact, if you look at some of the literature, you'll see blood pressure during a maximal effort deadlift be as high as 450 over 300 or even higher potentially, which basically means you're full blood occlusion. No blood is pumping anywhere because all of the muscles or most of them on your body are squeezing so hard blood can't move.
So, it's a different stressor to your heart, but it's still a positive stressor. And so you combine this with a little bit of a pressure overload. This is when you tend to see that mid left ventricular wall thickening, but you don't see chamber dilation. We're not getting a ton of preload back. We're not causing a lot of blood to be moving a ton when we're strength training again in general. So we're not seeing a ton of blood returning. We're not seeing that increasing diameter size. And so if one were to want to maximize their cardiovascular health, this is why in general, you know, strength training, speed training, power training are probably not our best bet to maximize cardiovascular health. They have some benefits, but to really see those increases, improvements in chamber size, which is again, as we described, a really positive thing, we're probably going to have to do some sustained effort at some point.
So now that we've got that understood, we can kind of move on and talk about some of the things that will determine how much of that adaptation occurs and how much does not. I've mentioned really quickly earlier and I and I I just honestly don't have enough data to go off of here, but there does seem to be sex specific differences in the amount of exercise induced cardiac remodeling that occurs. There are some excellent studies done with several hundred elite athletes and it just doesn't seem to be moving as much in females as it does in men, though it does move. And in the show notes, you can look at the papers I'm talking about and look at the specifics there if that's of interest.
But there's also things considered like ancestry and genetics. And this is actually where the field is moving. But it's really early. I've seen a number of people jump, I think, to what are are unfair conclusions at this point.
But I can tell you right now, we are really almost in the dark ages here.
Here's what I'm getting at. I'll share some more differences towards the end of of today. But what we have seen now is most of the research that has even looked into genetics are trying to identify single point mutations. And while it does seem that much of these cardiamopathies maybe have a single place of error, it's not consistent. And so unfortunately we can't run a single genetic test. We can't look at a single nucleoptide polymorphism and tell you you have one of these issues. I'm saying that because I've seen this now purported several places and people are selling these things and it doesn't match with the literature. It's just not consistent. We've also seen a little sprinkling of this being different between folks that are quote white versus folks that are quote black. And I'm saying it that way because that's really all the literature does. You'll run studies like this. They'll often use questionnaires and they'll say, "Are you white? Are you black?" But as we all know at this point, there are a a enormous number of differences between all white people and all black people. So, we need to break these into subgroups because that that almost tells us nothing. And so this is actually where I hope the field will move to is is saying let's move to more appropriate and more specific ways to categorize folks to see are there subops that are at a higher risk of either the genetic predispositions or the exercise induced or otherwise. Um, so we have some information there, but again, we don't have a crystal clear understanding of what that means because of I'll just say suboptimal or or lack of precision with even how we categorize different ancestries and genetic groups for this particular topic. Third thing to consider here, and this is the big one that we can get into, and this is what we call training exposure, and this should be fairly intuitive. Depending on how long you train, how hard you train, how often you train, this will determine how much adaptation actually occurs. I don't have exact numbers to give you, but I'll do my best here. What it looks like is happening is that initial cardiac remodeling is happening in that concentric phase. After that, the eccentric starts to to occur. And this is again what we're looking for with sustained exposure. the minimal thresholds there seems to be a breaking point at about five hours of exercise per week.
Okay? So depending on what paper you're going to look at, again a little bit different, but somewhere in the neighborhood of four to eight hours seems to be the breaking point. So if you're doing less than that, you might experience cardiovascular adaptations, brady cardia, lower heart rate, V2 max go up. But in terms of the structural remodeling, you know, ventricular size, so on and so forth, you probably need to be acrewing again in that four to five hours per week range consistently for many months if not years before the heart itself will start to change its actual size and structure. Past 4 to 8 hours is when we start to see some of these other adaptations that we've described. So again, remember here we're not talking about functional changes V2 max or stroke volume. Those happen really quickly. Those can actually happen with even minutes of exercise per day. In fact, I recently uh posted on social media some new data actually on not only aerobic or endurance exercise snacks, but there's some research now on strength training snacks. So these are things where you basically break out and do as many push-ups and sit-ups as you can body weight and then go back to exercise. These things have been shown to improve V2 max. Now, a small amount in untrained people, but it highlights the point. You don't need hours and hours and hours of exercise to see an improvement in function, but you probably need several hours per week for a long time to see changes in anatomical or morphological uh positions of the actual heart itself.
That number probably is leaving a little bit higher in older individuals. And that would be consistent with everything else we see in exercise science.
probably just takes a little bit longer for those adaptations to occur, but it does seem to occur. So, even if you are an older individual and you haven't been doing your cardiovascular training for some years or maybe longer, it's not too late. You can still do it and we still would expect to see positive morphological changes in the body.
So, I think that is a fair summary of what's happening in the left ventricle.
I spent the most time there for the reasons I've described a little bit earlier. I will hit a couple of other things real before we leave this position, but I'll go much quicker through them because there's less data for us to cover and it's a little bit less relevant. Today's episode is brought to you by TrueMed. Lately, I've been thinking about what actually drives performance. It really comes down to two things. The quality of your training and how well you recover from it. And both sides of that equation matter. And the tools you use to train and the tools you use to recover, highquality fitness equipment, sleep support, recovery tools, can get expensive. And that's why I love what True Med is doing. Their whole mission is to make health more accessible by helping you use pre-tax HSA or FSA dollars on eligible health products. So instead of thinking about this as extra spending, you're using money that's already set aside for your health. For a lot of people, that means saving an average of 30% on those purchases depending on your finances and eligibility. I always thought HSA and FSA funds were only for doctor's appointments and certain medical products. What's amazing is that you can use TrueMed to pay for eligible products that can improve your health as medical expenses under IRS guidelines, fitness equipment, sleep support, recovery tools, and more. Go to truemed.com/perform and check what qualifies. It takes just a couple of minutes. This is hands down the best way to make the most out of your health dollars. True is for qualified customers. HSA, FSA tax savings vary. So starting with the right ventricle, it's honestly pretty similar, but really it's more difficult than the left ventricle because we don't have normative data. So while I was able to give you pretty good information about the left ventricle in terms of actual size, we don't know what that looks like from the right ventricle. And so we're going to lean heavily on what we understand from the left side at this point and then actually just go ahead and move on to the atria. There are really well established adaptations here. Aerobic exercises, endurance side of the equation. These folks almost always have a larger left atria. And if we remember the anatomy from several moments ago, this should make plenty of sense. Some good studies have been done here. You're talking about research on several hundred, you know, sometimes up to five or 6 hundred athletes and we really consistently see this finding this left atria volume just being much bigger than age and body weight matched controls. So, it's very very similar conclusions between the right atria and the left atria. And I think we know our story. And so we'll go ahead and move on. Other stuff to pay attention to that I will also go quickly over are the things that I've mentioned before with the ejection fraction. So some papers have shown, you know, up to 90% of endurance athletes will have either the same or an elevated or increased ejection fraction. So a reminder, this means you're getting more blood out of the left ventricle per pump. That's a good thing. We don't need to waste our time pumping it, leaving half the blood still in the ventricle. And so an elevated injection fraction is generally good, but at the same time, you actually then see about 10% of athletes that have lower than expected ejection fraction.
You know, lower than 50% if you will. So something to pay attention to. You're going to expect positive results there.
But if you don't see or you see actually lower than standard, this may be something you want to look into for further investigation there. It could be completely irrelevant. It could be a sign of early cardiammyopathy or it could be actually some other thing that we just don't have any idea about especially if we know that the net result is increase in exercise function overall cardiovascular fitness. We need to take all these things into context before making a clinical evaluation.
Right? Some other stuff to pay attention to here. Some data suggest that this ejection fraction is actually particularly genetically driven. I don't know how good that stuff is at this point in terms of quality of evaluation, but I did see some stuff there and so I wanted to flag it as something to potentially pay attention to. Probably more specifically here, we're looking at a different number of polymorphisms that have been identified in these kind of large genetic testing pools.
To me, when I read those papers, I kind of walked away going maybe I don't know.
Okay, I see something here. But this was a too early uh signal for me personally.
If you read it, maybe you feel differently, but I'll leave that up to you. So, I'm waiting for more evidence on that particular point before I draw any further conclusions. But, uh, something to pay attention to. Want to highlight a couple of of really landmark studies in this area, there's a series of them called the Proheart studies. And just to summarize them really, really quickly here, one of them in particular had 280 or so participants. These are early, you know, 18, 19 year olds. But what's interesting is they're elite athletes. So you're talking about mostly males, but these are national and international level endurance athletes.
I think the average V2 max here was 63 or 64. And these folks were exercising 15 to 16 hours per week. And when you looked at that, you started seeing things like a large percentage of them, you know, somewhere up to 15 to 16% had that reduced ejection fraction or either in either the left ventricle or the right ventricle. And then some other smaller percentages had, you know, maybe reduced ejection fraction in the right side only or the left side only or some of them had both. And so the overall findings were again like I described earlier the fact that the while the majority of endurance athletes have an improvement in e injection fraction a non small amount sometimes up to 10% actually see worse but now several times have said this we actually just don't know if that's bad or not but we're going to call that good for our understanding of this part and move on to the next thing I want to discuss which is kind of a way of saying when it actually goes bad what is really happening here as As a reminder, exercise is almost always a good thing.
But the real question on this particular topic is if we take exercise to an extreme, what could plausibly happen?
What are the maladaptations? You can really boil them down into three particular things. The first is ahythmia risk. That's that AIB I'm talking about.
Ahythmia being you're out of rhythm or out of sequence. So that's the firing or the electrical or the signal part becomes weird. Another one we have not discussed yet is called coronary artery calcification. So remember the coronary arteries the ones that pump to your heart become calcified.
If those things either burst or rupture then we've got our mocardial infarction.
And the third one which we've mentioned several times now is this myioardial fibrosis or scarring tissue. So if we do have an exercise induced problem that is not just genetically HCM or something else, these are the three big things that'll actually happen.
And so there's a lot of debate on these particular topics and a lot to be said.
I will say this, the arrhythmia risk is there. It is very real. It is documented. Aphib will be seen very consistently. If you look at the research, it seems most prevalent in people that combine both high intensity and high volume for long periods of time. Again, you're talking years to decades. This should not stop anyone from doing meoc cycles or months of intensified training in both volume and duration. What we're talking about here are the folks that do this consistently for years if not decades. And I'll I'll share with you what that actually means numbers wise here right now. Really classic example, probably the one of the more infamous studies in this area out of Sweden cross-country skiers. there was you know 50,000 or so people in this database and they found that of these cross country racers the people that are finishing you know at least in the kind of top half of those groups so the the generally the better skiers the faster people which is a way of inter you can kind of interpret that as probably people who are training more a fair way to summarize that those individuals had a 1.3 times greater risk of having a other studies have found an even higher number. So you're talking about people in this particular database when they sub analyze this into people who have done this race more than five times. You saw an additional 1.3 risk on top of those other individuals. And so 1.3 is that a lot? Is that not a lot? Well, I'll leave you to decide that. But that is a number and you will again see things like that really consistently across the literature. And so why this becomes very interesting is the people that present with AIB that are from databases like this have almost always zero other health risk factors that are known to cause AIB. So in a normal person if you see Aphib you're almost always going to see either hypertension, apnea, you'll have some sort of valve disease or cardiammyopathy.
But these people don't have that. And so it's presenting itself in a different way. This is why it's that silent killer. This is if it is or this is why it's difficult to see. I would say that if you if you were to circle up the experts in this field, it wouldn't be crazy to say that you have upwards of a five times higher risk of aphib. If you are engaging in a lot of highintensity exercise over, you know, many many many years, that number would not, you know, some might disagree on that, but it wouldn't be crazy to put that out there.
Why this is problematic is the risk of fibrosis.
It's the risk of the scar tissue actually developing because as we mentioned when you actually do this stuff you you actually actually doing some of the exercise adaptations that lead to more stroke volume. And so the functional outcome is actually higher that veagal tone is higher and it's the exact same thing that leads to the extra adaptation. So the thing that's giving you more ability to pump blood is the same thing that's also giving you the risk for AIB. And so you see it really really really commonly. And this is where the detractors here the too much exercise is bad for you are are going to lay heavily is on this set of data. And again they're not wrong. You you will see this really consistently. It is a real thing that happens.
But it's really a function of risk predisposition versus too much high-intensity exercise.
One of the things we're starting to learn is it's probably not that combination of exercise. It's probably that combination of that exercise in a subset of people who have some genetic predisposition that we are not yet aware of. That's what seems to be happening.
And so hopefully in some short time we'll start to figure out more what that looks like. That could then lend to development of potential screeners or something. But we don't know what that stuff is quite yet.
So I don't want us to lose the plot.
While there is a slight bump in AIB in endurance athletes, it's also done in exchange for a massive drop in basically everything else. So your risk of mortality, your risk of heart disease itself and almost anything else you throw at it, aerobic and endurance exercise is on net very very positive.
So this is a matter of how are we twisting the story. If you want to focus and write an article just on AIB, sure we can do that accurately. But we're not seeing people dying from aerobic exercise. In fact, almost all the research will point to the opposite. So, we got to be really clear with how we're describing this risk and what it means.
I will also reiterate on Aphib, the vast majority of the research is in men.
Like, it it just really is. we just don't see it as much in women and there hasn't been enough research in female athletes. Um it tends to be a little bit less in them for the data that we have but I don't think we have a fair complete picture of that. So there's a couple of papers again I'll leave for you to read one that I think is very interesting called athletes heart or heart at risk cardiac remodeling and exercise induced ventricular arrhythmias in elite athletes. And I'm bringing this up because what we described at the beginning, I just talked about Aphib, but VIB, ventricular ariththma is a different thing entirely. If we see VIB in athletes, it's probably not a good thing and it's probably not exercise induced. Recent study was just published on this looking at over 200 athletes and it does not seem at this point that VIB is something that happens as an exercise adaptation.
So when we do see this and this paper again was in really high level athletes I think Olympic level athletes it does not seem to be detrimental. So more in that particular area but that's something we want to pay attention to.
We've had a plenty of discussion about the fibs side of the equation but I want to move on to something we have touched lightly and that is the calcification stuff. If you're interested at all in the heart you've probably have thought about discussed or heard this calcification idea. I won't go into all the the pathophysiology at this point, but one thing you will consistently see is athletes very frequently have an elevated coronary artery calcification score. What's really interesting though is how bad is it? Is it actually detrimental? Almost always if we see calcification or plaque buildup of any kind in the coronary arteries, this is a problem. But we're seeing it a lot and we in athletes, we don't know if that really is the issue. So the pathology here is unclear. It can happen for a lot of different reasons. Inflammation, I mentioned earlier this this hemodynamics where the blood is just smashing into the the arteries themselves and causing uh like vascular tears and all kinds of other things like that. Tons of other issues. But the the maladaptive process of aththeroscerosis in this particular example, is it benign? Is it vascular remodeling? Is it something else? It's really quite on the table. In fact, I I can share I've had plenty of discussion with a number of radiologists and cardiologists in the last three or four years on this and those that have seen plenty of athletes come into their clinic. Everyone's kind of confused here. Like we really actually don't know what's going on, but it calcification is such a scary thing. You almost always opt to just let's treat it. Let's take like there because until we know clearly it's not a problem with you.
It's fair to say that's kind of risky to just leave it by itself. and and so at this point I would default to the people who are saying hey look I actually don't know if it's normal for athletes but I'm not willing to run on that risk so let let's you know use a statin or uh some other form of medication to to address that specific issue.
So really I think the most compelling research on this another Cooper Clinic study you know 20 plus thousand I think it was actually closer to 26,000 people followed some folks for a couple of decades and yeah sure found that those with higher calcification scores were associated with more heart attacks and other detrimental revascularization processes but and I'm going to be talking out of both sides of my mouth here because this is kind of the story of this topic You also saw those people with lower all-c cause mortality risk.
So the interpretation of that would be pro likely to have a higher calcification score likely to then have a higher risk of heart attack but less likely to die from it.
I I think if you have a different interpretation of the data at this point I I couldn't push back on you. I would say, okay, fine. Like, we're kind of doing some jumps in logic there. I think it's fair though to say this does indicate that fitness, cardiovascular health will offset some of the anatomical changes that happen.
Another way of saying that would be its potential. You could interpret this to say your fitness allows you to get away with some anatomical changes that are otherwise problematic.
I'll reiterate this is a risk tolerance issue and you can interpret these how you'd like to do there. But that that's really where the field is kind of arguing I think fairly at this point.
The stuff I talked about earlier I think was an unfair way to position it from the ACSM meeting. This I think is a fair way to to have controversy. Like we that's a very fair argument back and forth here. Um Ben Lavine really really classic uh scientist in this area has done lots of work also published some compelling data here and I and I think this is really interesting. I want to highlight it because their evidence actually suggested that higher levels of physical activity um being defined as more than 3,000 minutes per week which I'll describe a little bit later. These are associated with increased prevalence of this calcification score but those are not associated with an increased all-c cause all cause or cardiovascular disease risk even after a decade of follow-up even in the presence of what's called clinically significant coronary artery scores. So what you're talking about here are people who are doing on average of 30 miles per week of running at about a 10-minute pace.
They're not being harmed. They're not dying. They're there. So again, those are the data. You interpret that how you will. And one more time, just to put the cherry on top, this seems to be a bigger problem for men than it is for women.
Women certainly show uh typically no additional coronary artery problems in female athletes versus controls. So for some reason seems to be happening in men, if not exclusively, certainly more predominantly in them.
We will give some final thoughts on this calcification stuff at the end. But I want to move on right now to the myioardial fibrosis. Again, the scarring of the tissue there. There's some new evidence that suggests this might be happening with high intensity exercise more so than lower intensity exercise, which fits with the previous theme that the problems really happen when you combine high volume with high intensity for a large portion. That scarring process can cause a bunch of problems from mechanical stress to inflammation to eskeeia to oxidative injuries and uh making the chambers more stiff and less compliant and so forth. We see it happen in the atria, the right ventricle, um the septum kind of the the spot in the middle of the heart and a bunch of different areas. But that said, I think this is would be argued as of the three things we've just discussed, this is the area of most unclear data. And I can give you a highlight of this um from a very specific study that that dove into this and uh they examined in in their analysis uh a whole bunch of veteran endurance athletes. So these folks were over 50 years old. They had cardiac fibrosis and they were at about a 5x risk of non-benign ventricular arrhythmia. But that said, this group was averaging not only 12 hours per week, but they were doing it for 20 plus years and all of them competed about 20 times per year.
So you are seeing this increase in fibrosis in a large amount and increases in ventricular rhythm. But you're looking at a whole bunch of people that are doing really high amounts of exercise and tons and tons and tons of competitions. So I don't think it's fair to interpret the same thing would then be happening for the average Joe or even the serious Joe because that's a that's a high amount of exercise and I don't think it applies to even your chronic runners because even if you're one of these individuals that amount of exercise for that long is is pretty rare. So you're talking again, if you want to break it down this way, running for two hours a day, six days a week for 20 years. There just aren't that many people who fall in that category. There are some, I know some, but it's not that many, right? You also contrast that directly with the substantial evidence that exercise related survival benefits in extreme endurance athletes have also been documented. We've seen this story play out several times now, right? So, we've got Scandinavian cohorts and lots of other groups of individuals, including some research that I did in Sweden looking at 80 and 90year-old cross-country skiers who started competing in national and Olympic and international races in the 1930s and 40s and 50s. We're still competing 50 to 60 years later.
Yeah. Had all kinds of imaging issues, but their V2 maxes were almost 40 on average as a group, which is obnoxiously high. and they're independent living 85 to 90 plus year olds. So even with these extreme endurance stuff, you will you may potentially see some of this fibrosis.
But to summarize here, we see far more evidence for the exact opposite than we do for the damage. We see far more evidence for the fact that just look at data on things like in runners who do 40 miles per week have been shown to have upwards of 25% less likely to develop coronary heart disease even relative to those who are running 13 miles a week.
So there are data that show hey even if you go from kind of the the recommendation 13 to 15 miles per week which would be equivalent to to clarify that'd be equivalent to kind of normal exercise guidelines not necessarily running that many miles per week but that's kind of the amount of exercise you should do. You double or triple that you're probably dropping your risk of heart disease by 20 or more percent.
So we also have direct evidence and if you you look at a number of the different studies that have looked at hundreds of thousands of people if not more there really seems to be no upper limit for V2 max. So we aren't seeing inverted use such that when your V2 max gets too high for too long that you have an increased risk or even reduced benefit. We just don't seem to see that.
So the higher the V2 max, the higher the survival rate. And if that were not the case here, something would be popping up and flagging and we just aren't seeing that. Um, survival rates again studies I'm thinking of some that are, you know, 100,000 plus people from Cleveland Clinic over a 15 or 20 year span. These are, you know, articles published in JAMAMA and you're seeing, you know, of 125,000 people, you know, 10 or 15,000 people are dying after 10 years. But the greatest risk is in the people who have the least fitness. In fact, in those particular papers, when you subdivide and look at the people that are in the, you know, 98th percentile of fitness, so the upper upper upper limit, you're still talking like a 20% reduction in risk and mortality. And even those that are in the top 25%, so not even the elite of the elite, are also looking at 20 to 30% reductions in risk. And so when you look at the actual total death rates, we're not seeing the bodies. So, the most compelling research on these extreme exercisers I think that we can come up with, uh, really interesting stuff here. One paper I'm thinking of, you 2,000 men and women in it, average age in the early 50s. These were folks that were, and I'm I'm going to say this correctly here, that were exercising 35 hours per week on average for on average of 28 years.
So, if if if I haven't convinced you yet, that's about as extreme as we can probably get. It sounds a lot like Cabay Blanco.
10-year follow-ups on these people.
There were 66 in this particular trial of those 2,000 that met this type of exercise range. At the end of the 10 years, two of the 66 had died. And neither of those two died because of heart disease of any kind.
And so yes, that is 66 people out of entire population. I get it. But that's the best data. I mean, do you know how hard it is to find people who exercise 35 hours per week for 30 years and to have none of them dying of cardiovascular disease? Again, I'll let you infer and draw any conclusions you'd like from that. But I know what I think.
In fact, I can summarize my thoughts on that very similar uh to what Dr. Paul Thompson said many years ago. and that this entire topic is quote intellectually interesting.
It is clinically worth knowing but it is not worth worrying about. So that being said because it is clinically meaning and worthy of paying attention to I do want to move into our last couple of sections here which is investigate. What should you actually measure if you are concerned have reason to be concerned or you just find it interesting? You can go about this a number of different ways. I always like to start from the most affordable, most reasonable thing and work our way up. And so I'll start with this. I think it's reasonable to suggest targeted screening. If we look at the data as it stands now, the most susceptible to issues here are from the sports of rowing, running, cycling, swimming, and skiing.
If you're in one of those sports, we should it's reasonable to say maybe we are putting more resources into that as overall screening purposes. You also have an increased risk of certain cardiac death in specialized sports like basketball. I remember as a kid uh it seemed like it happened I think it was actually in backto-back years Reggie Lewis and Hank Gathers like 1992 93 both died of this sedd and there's not a ton of information on sports pasties endurance ones I just mentioned but we are seeing things like this if you look at the rate of this occurring in black male college athletes it's about 1 in 16,000 If you go past that and you look at male basketball players, it's one in 9,000.
If you look at male black basketball athletes, it's about 1 in 4,000 or so.
So, these rates aren't actually extremely high, but it is see it's some signal. Maybe that's just an artifact.
We have no idea. Is it something specific to basketball? is I actually have don't have any idea but I think I'm bringing up here is to say it's reasonable to conclude there's potential accelerated risk in this group of individuals. So maybe we do some additional targeted screening, you know, prior to participation or every couple of years or something like that. And this screening can look a lot of different ways, but I think this is how we could start because as I'll share in a second, it's not feasible to run a full cardabolic panel on every single athlete, not in the US. And so maybe just targeted screening at those most at at risk groups. And right now, the only data we have on that would be these particular groups that I've just described. A third criteria would then be literally any human being that has a family history of early heart disease and I cannot emphasize this point enough.
If you have anybody in your immediate or I would even say secondary family who has died of heart disease earlier than age 55, I would deeply and strongly recommend you get some sort of cardiovascular screening because remember it's not going to present any symptoms. You're probably not going to have any of the co-orbidities. You can be exactly like my dear friend Joel Jameson. I've spoken about him many times. He is a world-renowned expert in cardiovascular exercise, endurance training, and he's spoken about this story so I can share it here today. He himself does not smoke or drink or party. He sleeps well. He manages stress. He's lean, loads of cardio exercise, probably has a V2 max upwards of 55, if not higher. A couple of years ago, he went and got screening done. I think he was 40 years old and found he had a 50% blockage in his widowmaker in his heart.
That is as close to death sentence as you can possibly get. 50% blockage. Zero signs symptoms. Once he thought about it, I think his mom had a stroke at age 60 or something like this. His dad died, I believe, early. His uncle died early.
His I think brother has had a triple bypass before age 50. And so we had every sign and signal in the world. And as I started off saying the probably biggest signal we have here is familial or genetic inheritance. And so if you had had anybody even close to your immediate family die of this I myself I have I've had multiple uncles um direct uncles and and other ones great uncles. And so I have I've gone through the screening myself and and my wife pressed me for probably about a decade to go do it. And I didn't because I'm like, I'm young, I'm healthy, I'm doing all the things, I'm fine.
And if if you're leaving this podcast with one thing, uh I hope it would be that. That is a very poor attitude. It's probably a mistake to do that. If you've got this kind of early signal in your family, regardless of anything else, it's worth doing some some assessments.
And even in my case, I had to pay out of pocket for this. I mean, if you can at all afford it, it in my opinion is worth the risk.
Another thing you can do here that is completely free, the American Heart Association has a free screening program. It is a 12step screening process. It's a questionnaire. You can take that or you can administer that to your friends or co-workers or whoever you're with. And it asks questions like, "Do you faint? Do you have chest discomfort while exercising?" Uh, in fact, what you'll see a lot really happen often is the symptoms look like asthma. And so you'll ask a lot of questions about did you have asthma as a kid? Sometimes that's asthma and sometimes that's actually cardiovascular stuff that you're seeing because it is these heart murmurss and things that make you feel like you can't catch your breath. So those are things that I would recommend starting with. Getting back to what I mentioned a second ago, which is you know what I personally did. Take this for what you will. I'm only bringing this up and sharing it so that you can have something tangible to grab on to. I'm not indicating this is the best or anything else. Um, but I went through something called a coronary CT angiogram. So, this is when we're imaging the heart itself and those coronary arteries. So, CT angiogram is the phrase you're looking at. Pretty easy, pretty simple. I think it was a 20 or 30 minute scan that also came with a calcification score. I think hard cost is around $1,200. So, that is a lot, but you know, many people hopefully could afford something like that if you flag for one of those things I described earlier. There are other companies.
Probably the most famous one is called Clearly. This is an FDA cleared machine that does a bunch of non-invasive stuff that looks at atherosclerosis and plaque and stenosis and likelihood of eskeemia and a bunch of other stuff using AI and a bunch of other learning models. I have not gone through clearly yet myself. I know many people who have. I think that's a little bit more expensive, maybe close to 2,000 or 2500. Uh, and again, I can't vouch for it other than what I just shared for you. But this is a potential option for those of you that are more at risk, want maybe a more in-depth analysis or just have particular interest in those areas. So that said, there are some other things we can do right now from an intervene perspective.
And this looks a lot like the following.
The easiest and cheapest thing you can do is a classic Drain method. So if you get some imaging done and your cardiologist or physician is concerned about abnormal size, the easiest protocol and the most common one is they'll just tell you to stop exercising for 3 months. Now I know for some of you are like, "Oh my god, that sounds horrible." Like the worst possible thing you could ever hear is to not exercise for three months. But come on, you're potentially at risk of dying of sudden cardiac death.
three months of your life like to answer that question. I think we can handle it.
And so the reason they're doing that is because that's really the only way we can establish cause and effect. If you don't train for 3 months and then you get imaging done again and you see a reduction in size there, this gives you some indication that the increase in size was exercise induced.
But if you don't, so you don't see a drop in size after not exercising for 3 months, then it's most likely this is genetically driven and now you're probably in that pathological situation. Doesn't mean you stop exercising or can't, but we're at a different risk stratification and we have some potential different techniques and other solutions we need to come up with. So, it's certainly not perfect, but I think it is a very reasonable thing that everyone can do because all it requires you is just just not exercise for 3 months. And you can't do it for 3 weeks. You have to do it for a long enough time where morphological changes, anatomical changes will actually occur.
That said, something like 20% of people, athletes rather, even if they stop exercising, won't see a reduction in size. In fact, there was one paper that found that up to 5 years later, you're still at the same size. So, it's not perfect, but it's something to try. Another thing you can try that is also free is you can hedge towards that lower level of exercise. The threshold seems to be about 5 hours per week. So, if you limit your exercise to an hour a day or so, if you want to, you could make an argument that you might be reducing risk if you have, you know, some genetic predication for this stuff. At this point, that seems to be the safe zone. So, unless you've got one of the the real real struggles genetically, we seem to be okay. risk an hour or so of exercise and and friends don't be nuts about that number hour, hour 75 minute like who like plus or minus.
We're trying to differentiate that from you know the 30 hours per week kind of thing but that seems to be the number around an hour of exercise or so per day which in reality is probably about the most extent that most people do anyways.
So most of us are probably fine there.
However, if you choose a different path, fine. For whatever reason, I think you just need to be proactive about your health monitoring.
You can't just assume because you're lean, have a high V2 max, you don't do all the other stuff that you're going to be okay.
You can't just assume also because your blood work looks good, you're okay.
This is something that happened to Joel.
He monitored his blood every six months or so for decades. Cholesterol, all that stuff is being measured and it all looked good.
Not making any comments here about the relevance of cholesterol, the heart disease, anything like that. I'm simply saying just because those are good, it doesn't automatically mean your heart is fully good either. Again, back to these things being silent killers. We have to have multiple forms of analysis. So, I think we should wrap ourselves up here with a nice summary and conclusion of what we talked about.
When we see these articles pop up and we get this idea of, you know, quote, "Too much exercise being bad," it irritates me. I think it's flatout wrong and it sends the wrong public message. I understand what people are trying to do here, but the idea that too much exercise is inherently bad for humans is, I'll just say it kindly, most of the time misguided. It comes and goes every few years. It'll be back again, I'm sure. But what typically happens is unfortunately somebody dies of high profile. It makes headlines, a case study is published or something is put out in a medical journal and it gets recycled. I have really enjoyed reading David Epstein's work here. There's another writer, Alex Hutchinson, Mike Jer who's renowned in this field have all written extensively about that. You can go read all their articles. These are easy to read things. We'll put them in the show notes. But these people have been really important voices to me in these field of centering this on. Again, what do we know really and what do we not know? And so what do we know in summary? The same mechanisms that confer benefit can also confer risk. The general mechanisms here we're looking at is cardiac enlargement particularly the left ventricle vascular compliance so being really you know ability to expand and contract and and not break and get damaged as well as enhanced metabolic flexibility. The things that are the the risk are the arrhythmias, the AIB in particular, VIB being very dangerous itself, potential coronary class calcification increases and myocardial fibrosis or the scarring.
Those things are occurring. Is it worth the risk? Then you can probably tell by my tone of voice this entire thing. I think it is.
But that's ultimately I truly mean this up to you. If we look at this on aggregate, we know that longevity all the way back to, you know, the classic London bus studies to plenty of other ones you want to pick your poison from.
V2 max, cardiovascular fitness, a low resting heart rate, a high stroke volume. You you pick your poison here.
It's almost always associated with longer health, both length and life quality. We also know that just honestly as a human, V2 max is one of the things that makes us special.
We have like a five times higher V2 max than our closest primate relatives. It's a defining characteristic. You know, in the book I mentioned at the very beginning, born to run, he makes the strong argument that this is an inherent human property that we are quite literally born to run and we're not necessarily built for strength, but we're built for endurance. So, I think to dissuade people from something that is as natural as running specifically or even exercise in more general terms, I think it's misguided. As I've said before, we also have another line of evidence that I haven't got into yet, but I'm very familiar with, and that is called cardiac rehab programs. So, imagine taking people a few days after having some cardiovascular event and getting them back to exercising. In fact, this is a the predominant thing that happens for rehabilitation program.
You want to get the heart back to work.
So that alone should tell you this is a good thing. And and I remember actually being in a large program, one of the best programs in the country honestly for cardiac rehab and then actively using as much high-intensity exercise as possible and people really quickly after cardiovascular events because they're seeing better outcomes. So I think you tie all this stuff in together and my conclusion is look, we shouldn't negate the profound physiological and psychological benefits of exercise. They're so pronounced, they're so robust, it would be silly to throw all that all away.
If you're of the type that likes to do the extreme exercise, in this case, tons of volume for a long period of time, it's probably reasonable to pay more attention. Get imaging done, get testing done, get multiple types of it. Don't just get an ECG and think you're clear.
Don't just get blood work and think you're clear. You need a robust set of testing to really understand your your actual true risk. If you're exercising more than an hour per day on average, consider that, right? Consider your family history.
Uh it's very limited reason to firmly think this is bad for you. I hope you should not interpret the the data that way. I don't think you should cut it back for no risk if if you have no reason to do so. You also should acknowledge it could be risky for you.
It is possible you're doing that. It's fairly rare, but it's not a promise I can tell you that you can exercise as much as you want. You'll never be a risk because that would not be consistent with the literature either. Lastly here, the testing itself is not simple. There is this promise in the field of the genetic testing to kind of cure all solve all. Um, but it's just quite frankly not there yet. So, I'm going to end today on my soap box. This is why we have to study elite performers.
We would not know the basic physiology of how the heart works if we weren't looking at people like Cababay Blanco.
If we weren't studying these individuals who are pushing the limits of human ability and does that come with some risk? Well, in the case of Cabayo, it did. I don't know if he regrets it or if he ever would. Who knows? But that's not for us to judge. That's not for us to decide. The exercise science field is critical and needs to be thought of as not something for sports as something necessary for human health and understanding because as I've said always and we'll say one more final time here today.
Friends if you have a body you are an athlete like it or not. Thank you for joining for today's episode. My goal as always is to share exciting scientific insights that help you perform at your best. If the show resonates with you and you want to help ensure this information remains free and accessible to anyone in the world, there are a few ways that you can support. First, you can subscribe to the show on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.
And on Apple and Spotify, you can leave us up to a five-star review. Subscribing and leaving a review really does help us a lot. Also, please check out our sponsors. The show would not exist without them and their exceptional products and services. Finally, you can share today's episode with a friend who you think would enjoy it. If you have any content questions or suggestions, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I really do try my best to read them all and to see what you have to say. I use my Instagram and ex-profiles also exclusively for scientific communication. So, those are great places to follow along for more learning. My handle is Dr. Andy Galpin on both platforms. We also have an email newsletter that distills all of our episodes in the most actionable takeaways. We have newsletters on how to improve fitness in V2 max, how to build muscle and strength, and much more. To subscribe to the newsletter, just go to performpodcast.com and click newsletter. It's completely free and we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you for listening and never forget in the famous words of Bill Bowererman, if you have a body, you are an athlete.
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