No matter if you’re a pro athlete or a weekend warrior, maintaining cardiovascular health is essential for achieving your fitness goals and reducing injuries. As an athlete, your heart works especially hard during training and competition, so keeping it in top condition is a priority. Understanding how to balance intense athletic pursuits and cardiovascular wellness will help you thrive on and off the field. It also has the added advantage of potentially staving off health issues such as hypertension.
How Exercise Strengthens the Heart
Exercise leads to favorable physiological adaptations that allow the heart to pump more blood with less effort. As you continue training, your heart grows bigger and stronger to meet increased oxygen demands from working muscles.
The extra workload triggers tiny tears in the heart muscle that heal, resulting in a larger, more powerful organ. Moderate to high levels of physical activity also help control blood lipids, blood sugar, blood pressure, and body weight — all protective factors for heart health.
Warning Signs of Cardiac Issues
While routine activity strengthens the cardiovascular system, warning signs can indicate when something might be wrong. Warning signs include:
- Chest tightness, pain, pressure or discomfort
- Unusual shortness of breath and fatigue during exercise
- Lightheadedness or dizziness
- Irregular, racing, or skipped heartbeats
If you find yourself experiencing any of these symptoms, see your doctor. They will perform an EKG and potentially order further cardiac testing like an echocardiogram or stress test.
Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Risks
One of the main reasons young athletes below the age of 35 suffer sudden cardiac fatalities is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a genetic disorder where the heart muscle thickens. Warning signs unique to HCM include shortness of breath unusually early on in a workout and exercise intolerance, where you fatigue quicker than normal.
HCM may only cause mild symptoms, so athletes require screening. Your doctor listens for heart murmurs and orders an ECG and echocardiogram to check the structure and function of your heart.
Mitigate Overtraining Risks
Pushing too hard without adequate rest and recovery also strains the heart. Signs of overtraining include chronic muscle soreness, increased injury rates, insomnia, irritability, weakened immunity, and performance declines.
Overtraining stresses the nervous system, depletes energy and nutrient stores, causes inflammation, and can trigger irregular heart rhythms.
By carefully monitoring training loads, emphasizing rest and nutrition, cross-training, correcting poor movement patterns, and supporting mental health, you can improve your resilience and effectively balance performance and cardiac health.
So, if you’ve been feeling fatigued for weeks or your improvements have been slow to manifest, it’s time to reevaluate your training regimen.
The Athlete’s Heart Controversy
Some research indicates more athletes show signs of heart damage versus heart health, fueling debates over the effects of intense training. For example, athlete’s heart (AHS) is a condition in which the cardiac mass increases, and in some cases, it can cause life-threatening stress on the cardiovascular system.
Evidence from advanced imaging indicates long-term endurance efforts cause scarring and stiffening associated with dysfunction. However, separating the changes resulting from aging versus sports remains complicated, which is why you should talk to your doctor about what heart protocols are right for you.
Best Practices to Protect Cardiovascular Health
Follow these tips to keep your heart robust through sports:
Commit to Cardiac Screenings
Get clearance from your primary care doctor before you start training with a physical exam that pays close attention to the heart and lungs. They may order tests like an ECG, echocardiogram, or stress test, depending on your symptoms. Repeat screenings every two years if you are healthy, or more frequently if you have cardiac issues.
Adopt Heart-Healthy Nutrition
Proper nutrition is essential to great performance. It also promotes faster recovery from your exercise and reduces cardiac strain. So, adopt a healthy diet that emphasizes produce, whole grains, lean proteins, nuts, seeds, beans, lentils, healthy oils like olive and avocado, herbs, and spices.
Also, limit sweets, refined flour, sugary drinks, excess sodium, and saturated and trans fats that negatively impact blood pressure and lipids.
Stay Hydrated
A major problem many overlook is dehydration, as it thickens your blood, forcing the heart to work harder, thus elevating your heart rate. So, you need to hydrate properly before, during, and after activity to keep your blood volume and flow healthy.
One way to avoid severe dehydration is to keep track by weighing yourself before and after long training sessions. If you lose more than 2% of your body weight in a session, you need to hydrate better: you have likely lost significantly more fluids than you have consumed.
It’s advisable to drink 16 ounces about two hours before activity and sip another 4-8 ounces every 15-20 minutes during exercise.
Allow for Adequate Recovery
Recovery is just as important as the training itself, if not more so. Balance intense training days with easier sessions and rest days. It takes one or two days for your body to bounce back completely. Also, make sure you sleep at least eight hours per night so the micro-tears in your muscles can repair themselves.
Also, it’s wise to incorporate a recovery week every four to six weeks, during which you take it easy so your body has a chance to adapt and heal properly.
Use Caution With Intense Endurance Regimens
Moderate activity protects the heart, but excessive training ages it prematurely. Ultra-endurance athletes exhibit higher calcium deposits in their arteries, along with irregular heartbeats and scarring associated with increased cardiovascular events.
So, if you’re preparing for an endurance event, consider gradually building the volume of training over several months without drastic spikes.
Boost Athletic Performance While Keeping Your Heart Health with Imperial Center Family Medicine
While exercise is great for your heart, as with anything, too much of a good thing can be problematic. However, that leaves the question of how you can still achieve great athletic performance while keeping your heart healthy.
The above guidelines are a great start. But everyone differs in terms of health, circumstances, and more, which is why personalized guidance is imperative. Imperial Center Family Medicine’s team of experts in Durham, NC will work with you to devise a comprehensive, custom plan to help you protect your heart while achieving the performance results you want.
Contact us today at 919-873-4437 or online and let our team assist you with balancing cardiac health and athletic performance.