How youthful is your heart?

[Joan]

I was listening to a very interesting podcast yesterday. The important lesson was for people in "late middle age" (50-64), which could replace this website's tagline.

The first lesson, that doesn't apply just to oldies was about a study on healthy young men in 1966, where they put the men to bed for 3 weeks, and then trained them for 8. In 1996, they found the same men, and ran the tests on them that they had done 30 years earlier. "Most notably, 3 weeks of bedrest in these same men at 20 years of age (1966) had a more profound impact on physical work capacity than did 3 decades of aging."

The important lesson for my (our?) time of life is the importance of exercising 4 to 5 times a week, with at least one high intensity workout and one long workout. He was focusing on the importance of heart flexibility/stiffness, which is a indicator of heart youthfulness and the underlying cause of many instances of heart failure late in life. He found "masters athletes" aged 70 still had flexible hearts, while their apparently healthy non-athletic contemporaries did not. A year of training of the more sedentary group changed many things, but did not reverse the heart damage. He found that the stiffness started some time over 50, and by 70 was present in the sedentary and those who had consistently reported that they exercised aerobically 2 or 3 times a week for most of their lives. In a further study over two years, he found that intense exercise 4-5 times a week (including a long and a high intensity session) reversed the aging of the heart.

So, for your consideration.

[Rutabaga]

Hearts are mysterious things. I know two people in late middle age who seemed fit and active but suddenly discovered they had serious heart problems. One was a "silent" heart attack that had occurred some months before; he has since died of heart failure. The other person found out they had a "baggy heart", which is a form of gradual failure, possibly caused at some unspecified time in the past by a virus.

[Rocky]

My father contacted rheumatic fever as a child and had a damaged heart valve as a result. He lived till he was 85 and died of heart failure after a minor op for another ailment. He knew he had heart problems but was grateful as he’d been turned down for flying by the RAF in 1941 because of his faulty valve. He spent the war in the Air Sea Rescue where his risk of premature death was somewhat less than that of a Spitfire or Lancaster pilot.

He always argued that heart disease could be good for you.