Battling Heart and Stroke

The heart and physical exercise

What happens to the heart during exercise? A lot of things go faster - breathing rate, heart rate, blood flow. Now, imagine an endurance athlete such as a marathon runner, a Tour de France cyclist, an Iron Man triathelete. Their body and their heart perform faster - for hours and hours almost non-stop.

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We all know that our diet is a key factor to being and keeping healthy. It is the food we eat that provides us the energy to perform our daily activities - it is what keeps our heart pumping. Now, we get to wonder, what do high performance athletes eat? What gives them the energy, the power to run, swim, jump or lift weights faster and better than non-athletic people like you and me?

Here are some examples of what Olympic athletes eat on a normal day. More →

When I and my family went mountain walking last weekend, I observed a young man donning on protective gear as he gear as he prepared for his downhill bicycle ride down from the 1400-meter mountain we were on. Helmet, elbow pads, knee pads - and pads around the torso. I’m not a mountain cyclist myself so I’d only imagine the dangers of such a sport. And I wondered - can his protective gear protect him if he falls?

Commotion of the heart

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Let’s continue with our Olympics special this week and look at what exercise can do for you.

If you want to stay active and live longer, running seems to be the sports for you. A study showing the health benefits of running is being published this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association.

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Many of us look to up to successful sports people and we can’t really imagine that some of them may also be fighting against heart disease like the rest of us. After all, physical exercise is supposedly the key to cardiovascular health.

Yet, there have been sudden deaths in past sports competition. According to Dr. Barry J. Maron of the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation, “about 125 athletes under 35 involved in organized sports die of sudden death in the United States each year…” The institute keeps a national registry of such fatalities and the majority of cases recorded were due to cardiac-related events.

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The Summer Olympic Games in Beijing have just started. What better way to start this week than talk about athletes’ heart rates?

There are certain tests that professional athletes have to go through before they can complete. I am not only referring to those tests that detect the use of performance enhancing drugs. Athletes also have to go through tests to determine their health status. A major determining test in the preparticipation screening of athletes is the electrocardiogram or ECG which reads the heart’s electrical activity and look at the heart rate patterns. ECG measurements are usually done while at rest. Athletes who have abnormalities in their ECG are disqualified - for their own safety. Many cardiac events happen during sports competition.

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