I was watching the newest Chubbyemu video recently and he talked about some bodubuilders using diuretics to lose as much water as they can and he said this makes your heart grow larger and why that’s bad. So recently I was thinking, if that’s bad then why is cardio good for you? Shouldn’t it also make the heart grow larger and make it worse? I feel kinda stupid asking that but it makes sense to me, since it makes your heart pump more blood faster, therefore making it grow?
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Your heart is a muscle, train it and it’ll get better at what it does by being more efficient, like any other muscle.
why would I put miles on this ticker when I’m saving my heart for love?!?! LOL!
Cardio doesn’t make your heart larger, it helps your heart run more efficiently.
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/the-many-benefits-of-a-cardio-workout
A big heart doesn’t mean a strong heart. If you force your heart to be larger like that it grows without becoming stronger, which puts significantly more stress on it.
Cardio on the other hand makes your heart work naturally and causes it to grow a *bit* in size but much more in strength, which is what you actually want.
Like anything, it’s all about moderation.
The heart is a muscle, muscles need exercise to stay strong. So cardio increases the strength of the heart, allowing it to beat easily during important times. Even small things, like standing up, change your blood pressure and the work required from the heart. If the heart is too weak, then you get heart failure.
On the other side, it’s still a muscle. Train it a lot and it gets bigger. Once it gets too big, it struggles to operate normally as there isn’t enough room for the blood to properly fill the heart and be pumped.
So, you want to do cardio to keep your heart healthy, but you don’t want to overwork it that it becomes too strong. Moderation is key.
This is why you get a lot of athletes having heart problems. They have to constantly train for their sport, meaning they’re constantly working their heart hard.
There was a lot more focus on it during COVID. A couple of high profile athletes had heart issues and all the antivax people started blaming the vaccines. But the truth is, a lot of high end athletes have complications from overexercising their hearts. If you look at the numbers, it’s a lot more common than people realise.
The bodybuilders have low blood volume because of the drugs so their arteries constrict to maintain adequate pressure so organs function. This puts strain on the heart in a bad way and over time it will adapt by thickening its muscle inward. What you end up getting is a smaller volume pumped really hard, this is bad because your heart doesn’t pump as much blood and it is a form of heart failure. If you looked at their hearts they’d have big thick muscle and almost no space inside for blood to fill/be pumped.
In exercise (cardio) the opposite happens, your arteries actually dilate (get wider) to let blood get to the muscle. The heart pumps more blood but it doesn’t thicken in the bad way that reduces volume. It actually gets better at pumping blood and will not have to work as hard when you are resting.
cardio improves all sorts of things the heart is only a portion of what changes your body will go through when you train aerobically
so just big heart = good/bad or high heart rate = exercise is a vast oversimplification and over focus on one part of a system
training your cardiovascular system is the lungs take up oxygen, the heart pumps the oxygen to your muscles and the muscles burn oxygen+carbs+fat to do work focusing on heart and heart alone is kind of like asking why a better fuel injectors aren’t going to make a Toyota Camery into a Ferrari
(well ok maybe that’s extreme the heart is more important its just not the MOST important)
but likely large heart due to exercise is fine because its a big muscle you use it a lot.. and you rest it a lot.. a heart that is large because of inflammation is bad or has to work hard all the time because of stress or high blood pressure is bad since it never gets a break
Cardio is good for you because it helps the heart train to be more efficient at delivering blood, helps develop stronger arteries and veins, and lowers cholesterol and lipid levels which helps keep atherosclerosis (cholesterol plaque in the arteries) in check.
It has nothing to do directly with your cardiac muscle. Larger cardiac muscle makes pumping blood harder (smaller chambers leads to less blood pumped out per heartbeat, which means the heart needs to beat faster) which is pretty bad for living longer.