Important essay: Lifting and your Heart

[Mark Rippetoe]

Heavy Lifting and Heart Health | CJ Gotcher & Austin Baraki

[cph]

Thanks to everyone involved. I can't tell you how many times I heard, "lifting is great, but you really need to do cardio too!" when I started the novice program. (Mainly from concerned family members.)

[Jonathon Sullivan]

Our coaches continue to contribute with the highest-caliber materials. This piece needs to be widely read and widely shared. Nice job, guys.

[quikky]

This is a fantastic piece! Thank you to the authors for writing it.

[Matt Neilsen]

This is one of my favorite articles to-date, and that's saying a lot considering the breadth and depth of the material on this site. Probably just the right time at the right place, but this connected a number of dots for me in regards to cardiac function/adaptation.

Stellar work, gentlemen. Sharing this with several friends/family, particularly in the medical profession.

[Chris Kurisko]

This is a fantastic piece! Thank you to the authors for writing it.

This is a damn good article! Nice work guys. Will be sharing this with many.

[David A. Rowe]

Coaches:

Was there any observation for the rate of the "athlete's heart" adaptation? In other words, did the adaptation happen faster, slower or the same when considering heavy resistance training vs running?

I ask because it seems that if this adaptation occurs faster or at the same rate in strength training populations, when coupled with studies that show that running speed is largely a factor of force production (linear force velocity), then it seems like strength training for 8 months with 6-8 weeks of conditioning towards the end would produce a better runner than running for 8 months (and at a significantly reduced risk of injury) for the recent phenomenon of "couch to 5k" populations.

Or am I way off-base here?

[Mark Rippetoe]

If you think the heart adaptation makes the runner, you're way off base.

[CJ Gotcher]

To answer your first question, David, no- nothing I could find in my pubcrawl tracked the time-rate of adaptation. Most of them were observations of already-elite athletes . Consider, too, that the measurements are so small, only a few mm difference between the normal and trained populations (medically significant, but physically small), that they would be difficult to study and likely not significant in the kind of short-term view most studies are afforded.

[Bergstedt]

This was an excellent article, and one I had a special interest in reading, too, since I have HCM and have been strength training succesfully for a couple of years.

If of interest, I was diagnosed with HCM when I was 14. I mainly played hockey (6-8 times per week with gym time) at the time, and my interventricular septum was measured 38 mm thick.

I was told that I was never going to be able to train or workout in any way again, and that I would most probably die if I even tried (what a great thing to be told as a very active 14 yo and what a great thing to hear for my parents...). I was put on 850 mg of Inderal per day, capping my maximum HR to around 100-110 bpm.

When I was 20 the thickness was measured to around 30-32 mm. Around this time I changed from Inderal to Bisoprolol and also lowered the effective dose significantly.

I am now 25 and have been strength training to the best of my abilities (SSLP first and then some home-made stuffs before moving on to TM and its variants last summer) for 3-4 years, and when I went to the cardiologist for the bi-annual check-up (ECG, ultrasound and exercise test on a stationary bike) around a year ago, the wall's thickness was measured to 18 mm and I performed ~10 % better than the average population in the exercise test, with no real problems showing up on the ECG.

It is most probably due to a number of causes; but for me, personally, all my test results have continually become better since starting strength training and becoming stronger. (I have also become a lot happier, feel better about myself and can also lead a more productive and fulfilling life, since I don't have to completely exert myself just walking up a flight of stairs.)