t's common knowledge that exercise is good for our muscles. Regular workouts help tone the muscle we have and build more muscle on top of that.
But the heart is a muscle too. When you exercise, your heart "remodels" to accommodate the body's increased demand for more oxygen-rich blood to feed those muscles.
But does this remodeling affect Olympic athletes differently?
Not exactly, says Dr. Vincent Sorrell at the University of Kentucky Gill Heart and Vascular Institute. "Anyone who exercises regularly will likely have some remodeling to their heart, which a layperson can see reflected in their resting heart rate," he says. "But serious amateur and professional athletes - with Olympians being a prime example - have more extensive remodeling."
Curiously, exercise-induced changes to the heart vary according to the type of exercise. In this video, Dr. Sorrell explains what happens to the hearts of specific Olympians as they practice their sport.
This year, "Blue" will be going for the "Gold," too. We will take you on the journey with special athletes and those who support them and have insight into what makes the Olympics so special. Be sure to visit www.uky.edu/olympics and follow along on all of our social media channels by looking for #olympiCats.
Transcript:
Let me just start out by saying it's so important that we exercise, all of us, right. And so these changes that we're talking about are positive. They're really good. These are physiologic changes, because it's your heart preparing for the next time you go out and do something athletic, right. So we all are familiar with how the heart rate nicely changes. You can monitor your heart rate through activity and know that the morning heart rate you wake up with reflects how much exercise you're doing. The slower it is, that means you're really doing a great job. You're remodeling appropriately, right.
What's going on within the heart is really fascinating, as well. There's a heart that's kind of a normal range, normal size. And we measure this all the time. And when we measure the heart, we measure the cavity-- the chamber that holds the blood-- and we measure the actual chamber itself-- the walls, or the muscle.
And the muscle itself has a certain thickness it's allowed to be. And if you're outside that, we get worried that it's too thick. There's a certain size that it can be as far as the cavity, the balloon that holds the blood. And if it gets outside a certain range, of course, that worries people as well.
The athlete, however, gets bigger and also gets thicker. And they do that all in preparation for what they're about to be asked to do at a later time. So the heart dilates. The heart walls thicken. And, in the absence of anything else, if you're just looking at that, you might think that it was a diseased heart, a pathologic heart.
When we think about athletes, we sort of think of the fast-jumping sprinter athlete, and then the more endurance type, who may not be the fastest in a short term, but just continues at that speed for very long term. So the endurance athlete modifies their heart in a different pattern than, say, the sprinter short term jumper athlete. And then, of course, there's the mixed type of athlete, as well, who has a little bit of changes that, you know, simulate both of those types of categories.
If we think about the Winter Olympics, ice skating is one thing that comes to mind where the male athlete is very physical and has to be really strong and is probably doing a ton of weight lifting to be able to do the double ice skating and lifting and all the things they have to do. But they also skate probably 10, 12 hours in a day. And they're getting the endurance activity. So my guess is they're more like a mixed type of remodeling.
The endurance is really easy to think of, because we have all of the skiers-- cross-country skiers-- that go for hours at a time. And they have to have the most incredible dilatation of their heart. That's probably the biggest of any of the hearts that I would look at.
As far as a sprinter or something like that, maybe, you know, the bobsled and the downhill and the pushing and jumping, because they're doing a lot of riding, but everything is really boost to get that initial take off. They sprint and then they just glide down the rest of the course. And so, maybe, they're going to be more like a sprinter jumper.