Will Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt’s heart be healthier? We don’t know for sure, but scientists actually did a study to compare the hearts of top swimmers with those of top runners.
The results show that there are differences in their hearts, even if mild, this difference can also happen to your own. So are you more of a swimmer or a runner? That will partly determine the shape and function of your heart.
Regular exercise can change the shape and functioning of the human heart.
Cardiologists have long known that regular exercise can alter the shape and functioning of the human heart . In particular, the left ventricle is the heart region that is particularly sensitive to exercise.
This chamber of the heart receives oxygen-rich blood from the lungs and pumps it to all the rest of the body. When the left ventricle is working, it uses a very hard and strenuous twisting motion, as if the chamber were a sponge squeezed out of water, before it elastically returns to its original shape.
Exercise, especially aerobic exercise, requires a large amount of oxygen to be delivered to the working muscles. Therefore, aerobic exercises will definitely make your left ventricle work hard.
As an adaptation to that need, the left ventricle of athletes often becomes larger and stronger than the average sedentary person. It also has more blood reserve, faster filling and dilation, and detorsion. This allows the heart to pump blood more efficiently when the athlete is active.
Even for the average person, any type of exercise can help you develop your left ventricle over time. But it is true that different types of exercise exert different effects on the heart, in very subtle ways.
For example, a 2015 study found that rowing athletes, a sport that combines endurance and strength, had greater left ventricular myocardial mass than runners. A rower’s heart is both agile and resilient as it twists and turns to pump oxygen-rich blood.
Both swimming and running will keep your heart healthy.
Many previous studies have also compared the hearts of athletes, but few have examined this in swimmers.
Honestly, swimming is a very special activity , requiring you to lie on your side on the water, hold your breath to float. All of this activity is not often seen in land athletics, and it affects the heart in a very different way.
To find out that difference, a team of researchers from the University of Guelph, Canada recruited 16 swimmers from their country to compare them with 16 other track and field athletes, in a study. The new study was published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology.
The goal is to understand their heart structure and function after training and competition, to see where the differences occur. The scientists asked the athletes to rest for 12 hours, before visiting their laboratories.
Here, they continue to be laid to rest, while their heart rate and pumping pressure from the heart are recorded. The researchers used an ultrasound machine to look at the athletes’ heart structure and function.
Preliminary results show that both runners and swimmers have very healthy hearts. Their heart rates fluctuated around 50 beats per minute. A runner’s heart rate will be slightly lower than a swimmer’s.
But 50 beats per minute is already a much lower number than the heart rate of a normally sedentary person – a low heart rate is indicative of a very strong heart.
Then, the echocardiogram revealed that all the athletes had large and very efficient left ventricles. But it is true that there is an interesting difference in the left ventricles of swimmers and runners.
While all athletes pumped blood into the left ventricle earlier and dilated faster than average, this phenomenon was amplified in runners. Their ventricles fill with blood faster and de-twist more definitively than a swimmer’s heart.
In theory, those differences should allow blood to move out of and back into runners’ hearts faster than in swimmers.
Swimmers lie on their sides on the water, so their hearts have a gravity advantage over runners.
” But this difference doesn’t necessarily suggest that runners’ hearts are working better than swimmers, ” says Jamie Burr, a professor at the University of Guelph and lead author of the study.
“Because swimmers train in a horizontal position, their heart doesn’t have to work against gravity to draw blood back to the heart, unlike runners in an upright position. The position has provided an advantage. and help a part for swimmers, and therefore their hearts only meet as much as they need for their sport.”
Not only does it answer an interesting question for us, Professor Burr’s research has highlighted how sensitive the human body is when we practice different types of exercise or movement.
This also helps sports science, as it proves that swimmers who want to develop their hearts further should incorporate land running into their training schedule. This can help strengthen their hearts, and create decisive advantages when they return to the water.
For most ordinary people like us, Professor Burr’s research highlights the fact that exercise of any kind improves both heart shape and function. He hopes future experiments can tell us which type of exercise produces which subtle reactions, thereby helping individuals choose the right form of exercise for themselves. me.