so let's talk about endurance exercise and your heart okay there's a
really good book if you do endurance exercise you need to get this book
it's called the haywire heart how too much exercise
can kill you and what you can do to protect your heart
by chris case in john manderola one third of marathoners experience
dilated ventricles okay so you have the heart is four
chambers there's two primer pumps they're called
atriums then you have two major pumps which are ventricles so what happens
with athletes is they start to develop dilated ventricles or in the large
ventricles on one side so it starts getting
bigger there are indications of heart muscle damage
and cardiac fibrosis that scar tissue within the heart
and that can develop in all sorts of problems with the heart one would be
ventricular tachycardia which is one type of arrhythmia
it's kind of a short circuiting what the authors talk about in this book
is mainly doing exercise for over one hour
every day sustained endurance exercise five days a week week after week after
week what happens is it creates structural
and functional changes within the heart now because the heart is becoming
stronger and more efficient and it pumps up more
work and oxygen the heart rate comes down and
that heart rate can come down from a normal heart rate which is like 72
to 60 to 50 to 40 to sometimes even 30. because the heart doesn't have to
work that hard everything is very very slow
okay and that's healthy right well what happens is you also get
cardiomegaly so the actual size of the heart can get bigger one
side of the heart can become bigger than the other side
depending on certain variables and the name for
something getting bigger is called hypertrophy so the problem is
having an imbalance from the left side and the right side
because the heart has various things in it that create
rhythm they're called pacemakers you have two primary pacemakers
but you also have a backup system and even another backup system i don't
want to get into the details of that but you just need to know that there are
certain pacemakers of the body that are all supposed to be coordinated
the problem is when the heartbeats start going down too
low that can trigger or alter
certain secondary pacemakers in the heart
and that can create extra beats okay you have
premature atrial contractions or premature ventricular contractions
so we have this situation we have this real strong healthy heart
which is not pathogenic that's giving these
arrhythmia problems so in the book there's some great case histories of
many people that have gone through this actually it's very very common
and what they did to handle these extra beats
the biggest thing is to cut back on the exercise the problem with
sustained endurance exercise is you're working
against the body's natural rhythms because anything sustained is very very
stressful on the body if you're an athlete and you're noticing
some of these extra beats what's recommended is you start to cut
back on your exercise you may even want to do interval
training because that's erratic and it works with
the body it's less stressful than sustained
exercise and get the book read it there's a lot
more details to talk about in this video i mainly wanted
to communicate to the endurance athletes to bring up some awareness on the fact
that even though they can have a very healthy heart
you could have a problem with arrhythmias and there is something you
can do to reverse this if you have the
knowledge i'll put a link down below of this
book check it out and thanks for watching