nickwhite wrote:
dtoce wrote:
old news, been known for decades...
Then you should take it up with the NYT author who is writing about a study published this past November.
I don't need to 'take it up' with any author of an article targeted by the lay press to the layman. I've been studying this since my cardiology fellowship 20 years ago. This study ends with a tag-line asking if swimmers hearts function differently than elite runners=click bait. All they did was recruit people and then did VS and an echo on 32 elite athletes and showed that elites have cardiac changes that are quite different than a 'normal' person and very subtle differences between each other.
In fact, swimming and running are both 'endurance' sports and are far more similar than different. There are notable differences between 'strength' sports and the changes on the heart there are very different than 'endurance' sports. Now that our echo capabilities have improved, we can look at diastolic function (basically how the heart relaxes) much better and the authors expected similar LV function but were more curious about diastology, a less clear and less well studied phenomenon. That's because it's, well, still incompletely understood.
They used modern echo testing and looked at usual and newer parameters; like E/E prime,filling times/velocities, strain and other fancy measurements of diastolic function. What it all means is still largely unknown.
This particular study showed that these elite athletes had the expected changes of an 'athlete's heart-compensatory dilation and increased stroke volume and lowering of the resting HR.
Not new. There also was marginal 'enhanced' diastolic function in runners over swimmers. They offered several theories as to why this is: body position/blood volume, breathing pattern and training stimulus etc. But again, why? Not known. And it wasn't specifically stated what the actual training stimuli were-ie what were they doing for training-hours per day; and effort (easy; tempo; sprint etc).
But to return to the original comment-
It is very old news that exercise changes the 'look and workings of the human heart'. I remember reading about so many studies done in the late 70's and 80's comparing the different sports and changes that were noted. Check out the references in this article-most are from that time period.
https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/...xrqa&type=client nickwhite wrote:
Quote:
But there were interesting if small differences between the swimmers and runners, the researchers found. While all of the athletes’ left ventricles filled with blood earlier than average and untwisted more quickly during each heartbeat, those desirable changes were amplified in the runners. Their ventricles filled even earlier and untwisted more emphatically than the swimmers’ hearts did.
Quote:
Since swimmers exercise in a horizontal position, he says, their hearts do not have to fight gravity to get blood back to the heart, unlike in upright runners. Posture does some of the work for swimmers, and so their hearts reshape themselves only as much as needed for the demands of their sport.
Pretty interesting stuff, thanks for sharing.
This is what they
theorize. It is not fact at all.