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Smart Heart Seminar posted in the group Smart Heart Seminar
We undergo Cardio Training to strengthen the heart, but if we don’t follow a proper schedule, are there any chances of harming the heart instead of strengthening it?
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Yes, I mean, if you do it wrong, you can damage yourself, I mean, you’ve got to do something pretty crazy to do damage to yourself. But more likely, you might damage yourself from a musculoskeletal point of view before you even damage yourself from a heart point of view, if you do silly stuff. In fact, Tim Hutchings and I were talking yesterday, and there was a slight correlation between athletes who train incredibly hard, let’s say world class or extreme, and athletes in high high level training programs and the preponderance of some issues with the heart. So sometimes they have things like scarring of the heart muscle, which might give rise to things like atrial fibrillation. However, the long term impact of that is poorly understood. So as of now, the jury is out there. But in general, athletes live healthier and longer lives than not athletes, we know that for sure. So I don’t think that we need to be unduly alarmed about these things at this point, but they are under study.
I think people have to appreciate that being a high-level professional athlete is an occupational hazard, and people take on those risks and they put their bodies through extreme cases, but usually, they stop doing them by the time they get to thirty-five when the body decides that it can’t cope with that level. So, you know, but on balance, their benefits outweigh the risks. But people should stop behaving as if they want to be world champion after the age of thirty-five because their body does take longer to recover and they can’t perform as well as they used to. Often we see people having acute cardiac events, say, on the squash court because they haven’t played for 20 years and their mindset is age twenty-five but their body is 50 and they don’t realize that they’ve got some plaque in their arteries and they push it too hard. So again, there’s two ends of the spectrum, the carrot and the stick, and we have to find a good balance between the two.