Intense Exercise & Potential Heart Damage (aka Athlete's Heart)
5/13/20261 hr 45 min
In this episode, I cover "athlete's heart" — the paradox where the same cardiovascular adaptations that make endurance athletes exceptional can also mimic, and sometimes mask, real risk. I trace the history of what’s now known as exercise-induced cardiovascular remodeling (EICR), and walk through what's actually happening structurally, functionally, and electrically in a trained heart. I separate adaptive changes like left ventricular dilation and increased stroke volume from genuinely concerning issues such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, atrial fibrillation, coronary calcification, and myocardial fibrosis. I also answer the question, "is too much exercise bad for the heart?" This episode is for endurance athletes, lifters, coaches, along with anyone who might have a family history of heart disease. Show notes: https://www.performpodcast.com/episodes/athletes-heart-intense-exercise-heart-damage Sponsors Momentous: https://livemomentous.com/perform TrueMed: https://truemed.com/perform Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/perform Chapters (00:00:00) Introduction & the Athlete's Heart Paradox (00:07:11) History of Athlete's Heart (00:09:24) Heart Anatomy & Physiology Primer (00:28:03) What Goes Wrong: Heart Attacks & Arrhythmias (00:32:54) Genetic Causes: WPW, LDS & Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (00:39:59) Exercise-Induced Cardiovascular Remodeling (EICR) (00:53:12) Endurance vs. Strength Training Adaptations (01:08:00) When Exercise Goes Too Far: AFib, Calcification & Fibrosis (01:27:06) Screening, Testing & Interventions (01:37:37) Summary Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAndy Galpin· Host0:00
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. Today, we're gonna start with a story. In fact, it's a ghost story with a character by the name of Caballo Blanco. For those Spanish-speaking friends out there, that of course means The White Horse. And Caballo, as he was referred to, terrorized and mystified the Copper Canyon range of the Sierra Madres in northern Mexico for the better part of twenty years. Many years later, of course, the story would be unraveled as an individual by the name of Micah True, which was also, in fact, not his real name. But as the lore goes, Micah, or Caballo, lived most of his life in this desolate canyon region, and he would live running between thirty and sixty miles from village to village, gathering up resources, and then running back to his hut, and no one really knew what the heck he was doing. Micah himself was running somewhere between one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy miles per week for nearly two decades. And again, keep in mind, he was doing this in an area where he had no access to running shoes, medical care, or really any advanced technology, nutrition, hydration strategies, so simply surviving by running large amounts every day for decades on end. Micah's story was made famous by the best-selling book, Born to Run. You can read more about it