Want to be Really Young at Heart? Exercise.

We know being sedentary hurts the heart and it’s clear that being a Master’s athlete creates what can best be described as a youthful heart regardless of age. Is there any happy medium? I mean, 6-7 Master-level training sessions per week throughout life is probably a little beyond most people.

A new study suggests a lower level of lifelong exercise has major benefits. The researchers studied healthy people older than 65 years, who were without chronic diseases, such as high blood pressure or diabetes. The participants were recruited from another study (the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study), in which they had been reporting their weekly activity for about the last 15 to 25 years.

For the study, participants had cardiopulmonary stress tests, ultrasounds of the heart and vessels, as well as a simultaneous heart catheterization and ultrasound (an echocardiogram) of the heart to determine the heart’s compliance and distensibility. (Essentially, how pliable is it? Does it keep its shape or start to lose it over time? A lifetime of living usually hardens the heart a bit, making it less compliant and more difficult to pump blood throughout the body. Heart failure is one common result to these kinds of changes to the structure of the heart.)

The greater the amount of lifelong exercise training — measured by the number of days per week exercised — the more likely individuals preserve the youthful compliance and distensibility of their heart. Specifically, for each increase in the number of exercise sessions per week, the benefits increase.

People who exercised six to seven times a week for 15 to 25 years (Masters athletes) retained 100% of their hearts’ youthful compliance and distensibility, leaving them with hearts similar to those of 30-year-olds. Those people able to exercise four to five times a week earned about 54% of the benefit observed in Master athletes, while two to three times a week achieved 42% of the benefit.

Overall, there appears to be a dose-response effect with exercise; exercise more and earn more heart health; do less, and you see less benefit – and you see it quite literally in terms of the measurable structure of your heart.