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Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)
Flex Your Heart Muscle If You Want To Stay Young and Beautiful!
Keep young and beautiful
It's your duty to be beautiful
Keep young and beautiful
If you want to be loved
If you're wise exercise all the fat off
Take it off, off of here, off of there.
Take care of all those charms
And you'll always be in someone's arms
Keep young and beautiful
If you want to be loved
Annie Lennox
Annie Lennox's song Keep Young And Beautiful (CD Universe) does not mention heart flexibility as a requirement for being loved, but a case could be made for such, particularly when recent evidence is taken into account. I'll explain why.
Think "flexibility" and what comes to mind? Perhaps the sight of an Olympic gymnast executing a move that looks impossible for ordinary mortals, or a yoga practitioner assuming a pose that suggests she can't possibly have a skeletal structure. We often hear that flexibility is as important as cardiovascular, "aerobic" activity. The former keeps us supple; the latter helps us stay free of heart and other diseases. Approximately 500,000 heart failure cases are diagnosed annually in this country. Now along comes research suggesting that exercise safeguards flexibility in the heart chamber. This serves to prevent normal heart stiffening and attendant lost elasticity with age that contributes to heart disease.
The reason, as the title of a recent Wall Street Journal article suggests, is that "As the Heart Ages It Loses Flexibility -- Unless You Exercise" (September 14, 2004; Page D8). A stiff and inflexible joint can, at an appropriate time and place, be a good thing, but such characteristics in the heart are never welcome. Heart attacks damage heart muscle; the weakened organ's pumping chamber then becomes less efficient in propelling blood (in other words, oxygen and nutrients) to the rest of the body. Yet new studies have found that when the heart loses flexibility, it can have normal pumping capacity (squeeze function) but becomes too stiff to fill at optimal, healthful levels. High pressures can then build up in the lungs, leading to congestion (a characteristic of heart failure). This in turn can lead to eventual heart failure and death.
A flexible heart is a young heart, if not chronologically, at least health-wise, which is far more consequential except for getting a hot date on a Saturday night. The WSJ described a study of highly fit seniors (median age 68) who had hearts far younger (in a health sense) than youths of 29 (median) who were sedentary slobs. Yet, the most significant research finding was that a group of much more typical, inactive elderly with expected old hearts still made dramatic advances in heart flexibility with a vigorous training regimen (at least 30 minutes of endurance exercise no less than three times weekly). It is tempting to conclude that it's never too late to begin a serious exercise program. Unfortunately, it often turns out that Americans put off vigorous daily heart-strengthening fitness activity until it is indeed too late.
How do doctors describe a flexible heart, you might wonder? One of the study doctors explained: "A well-functioning heart is like a very flexible rubber band, so when you stretch it, it snaps back with vigor. That snapping back, which pumps the blood from the left ventricle to the rest of the body (the diastolic function) is the essence of good cardiac function." The author of this study is the same expert who three years earlier published an article in the journal Circulation that claimed "three weeks of continuous bed rest were as detrimental to heart and physical health as 30 years of aging."
OK, so Annie Lennox and everyone else knows that nobody can really keep young and beautiful, even if our culture makes it appear to be our duty. Yet, it IS true that you're wise to "exercise all the fat off of here and there," even if doing so doesn't guarantee "with all your charms you'll always be in someone's arms." By maintaining a healthy, flexible heart and keeping other important parts as young as possible as long as you can, you are far more likely to be well and find it much easier to always look on the bright side of life. Be well.
Domain: physicalSubdomain: appearance and aging
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