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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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People who look fit and feel well can be in terrible cardiovascular health without realising.
Also, the damage that accumulates while you're feeling fine is irreversible.
Reminds me of my doctor (who's a friend) telling me of a patient who's husband just dropped dead at 50 something. "He was in such a great health " the lady said, "never ever went to see a doctor!"
Well, there might be a funking correlation right there.
Care to elaborate?
First part: Lot of people who workout barely do any cardio, there's even this belief that cardio will make you lose muscle mass, but unless you're an athlete it's completely ridiculous to worry about that. The people that are in the best all around shape are very often not the ones who look the most fit or that are the strongest. We need fat on our body as an energy reserve, just doing cardio doesn't build enough muscle mass to slow down the effects of aging on it, just building muscle mass without doing cardio means your heart might be the weakest link in your body...
Second part: Not sure, I guess they mean that it takes a while to not feel fine from the damage accumulated from not taking care of yourself and by the time you don't feel fine anymore most of the damage is irreversible... I guess it's true for many things... If you damaged your knees from being overweight for a long time, suddenly losing weight won't make the cartilage reappear for example...
Now you have me paranoid. I am pretty fit and active, and I certainly have plenty of fat on my body as an energy reserve. It's 90% cardio though. My weight training is just roughhousing with two kids climbing all over me basically.
I have never personally placed value on bulking up. My legs are already huge from running/cycling and while my arms are not especially big, they're wiry and plenty strong enough for my normal needs.
Do I really need to think about weight training as well? To reiterate: I don't care about looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger, I just want to be pretty fit and active in my 80's for future hypothetical grandkids.
It's all a balancing act, without changing the activities you do you start losing muscle mass in your thirties. The good news with kids is that most love climbing so that can be a great activity to do with them if it's available around where you live and you don't like weight training.
If you already run and ride you're ahead of most, so don't get too paranoid about it!
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/preserve-your-muscle-mass
Meh, this is not a great take. Resistance training is unambigiously great for the heart, nearly as good as aerobic in isolation. A runner who doesn't do resistance training is in roughly the same position as a weight lifter who doesn't run (both seem to reduce risk by 30-70%)
However, aerobic and resistance together seem to be better than either in isolation.
Additionally, resistance training has a number of additional health benefits outside of cardiovascular health, to the point that I would say that doing resistance training in isolation is functionally a better use of time for your health than aerobic exercise.
Ideally, you should do both.
The only time this is not true really is when the individual is taking PEDs which do increase risk of heart failure.
Interesting. Thanks!
Comment edited by the way
I recently had a heart attack at 41.
I'm not obese and look and feel fit and well. I cycle regularly and don't eat a lot of refined foods (particularly carbs). I didn't think I was particularly "fit" but nor did I think I was at risk of heart disease. About 2 months before my heart attack I rode my mountain bike 150km over rough, remote, Australian terrain in 4 days.
Yes I have high cholesterol, have been a smoker in the past, and a family history of type 2 diabetes - I knew these things were problematic in some vague sense but no idea how they relate to cardio problems. Also information is very complex - there's a lot of misinformation about cholesterol for example and as someone who is not a cardiologist it's hard to know what it really means.
Basically, shit builds up in your arteries over time. You feel 100% fine until something clogs up. It's not a progressive deterioration of feeling unwell and not doing anything about it, it's fine > fine > fine > fine > dead. There's no therapy to clean the shit out of your arteries, it doesn't get reduced over time. Once an artery clogs the options are inserting an internal scaffold, or taking an artery from somewhere else to build a by-pass.
I kind of got unlucky but also lucky - unlucky with all of these contributing (mostly hereditory) factors - lucky in that my arteries are generally ok - there was only one bad spot which could be remedied with an internal scaffold. Imagine feeling fine through to your 60s and then finding that your arteries are generally fucked with many trouble spots.
I shouldn't be alarmist in that I don't think this is a problem for people generally, but in terms of things I recently learned that everyone should know - I think cardiovascular health is definitely on that list.
Suffice to say I recently learned that feeling fine does not necessarily mean that you are fine.
It really can be a silent killer. I know someone who's mother was in her 50s. She was thin, fit, active and seemingly healthy. She would enter in races and such, to give you an idea of how fit she was compared to others in their 50s. Now, she wasn't exactly a professional runner or anything, but certainly did it more than others at her age.
Well she died of a heart attack a few months ago during a workout...
Thank you for bringing this up. I'm a nurse on a cardiovascular progressive care unit, and we get a handful of young people (40-50s) who come in with "no prior history" having heart attacks or borderline heart attacks.
One of the things I'd note is that most of them have high blood pressure that they didn't know about. High blood pressure doesn't feel bad, so they never felt a need to see a doctor. But it is silently damaging arteries, particularly the delicate ones in your heart, kidneys, and brain.
The only way to know if you are developing high blood pressure is to get it checked regularly. Get an automatic blood pressure cuff for your house, or go to your primary care physician once a year. And when they tell you that 140/90 is putting you at higher risk of heart attack, take them seriously.