Medicine: Exercise & the Heart

Exercise is a good thing, physicians from a variety of specialties agreed last week at a Sports Medicine Congress held in Chicago in connection with the Third Pan-American Games. But how much exercise is best? What kind? At what time of life? To these key questions there were no sharp answers, because medical science knows surprisingly little about the specific effects of different types of exercise on the human heart. As the experts puffed toward the finish line, they reached a consensus on some preliminary findings. ¶Athlete’s heart” is an unfortunate term that should be discarded, because it indicates a diseased state that does not exist, said New York University’s Dr. Louis F. Bishop. Also: changes in athletes’ pulse rates are easy to measure but hard to evaluate, e.g., marathon runners’ pulses are slower than sprinters’. In general, the pulse returns to normal more quickly after exercise in an individual who is physically fit.

¶ Neither adults nor children can damage th,eir hearts by exercise if they are healthy to begin with. Dr. Joseph B. Wolffe of Valley Forge Hospital said that the muscles in a normal person’s limbs will give out, leaving him unable to move, before he can strain the more powerful heart muscle. Some of the rare cases of collapse and sudden death during exercise may be due to exhaustion of blood sugar rather than heart damage.¶ Exercise helps to guard against obvious obesity (a proved life-shortener), said Boston’s bicycle-riding Paul Dudley White, 73, himself as lean as a beanpole, and also against harmful fat deposits that hide in arteries supplying the legs, lungs, heart and brain.

To do the most good, even moderate exercise should be continuous throughout life. Said Dr. Bishop: “About 25, many young adults become too busy for exercise; yet in the next two decades of their lives they probably need it even more than children.”