totalnewbie

an acquittance explains the following theory about exercise to me:

statement: just doing warm-up but not carrying on with the full aerobic workout causes more harm than not exercising at all

explanation:
each of us has a pre-determined lifetime heart beat capacity that varies between individual. Your heart fails as it approaches the limit. For example in theory: Bob with 70 beats per minute has a lifetime capacity of 2.5 billion beats (this number is made up for this example) will live: 2,500,000,000/(70*60minutes*24hrs*365days)=68 years before his heart naturally fails.

So the benefit of aerobic exercise is that it triggers the mechanism that lowers one's resting HR over a long time. So Bob, after exercising over a long period of time, may have a resting HR of 60 beats which grants him in theory 11 years of additional life. The catch is that Bob has to "invest" by getting his HR way above his normal HR before he can reap the benefit. during workouts he is actually withdrawing from his lifetime capacity at a much faster rate (say at 160 bpm), but once he goes pass the trigger point (say, 60 minutes of exercising) the benefits comes in. And since Bob is only spending 1 hour "over-spending" and 23 hours enjoying the benefit of a lower HR, overall it's a gain.

So the theory goes: if Bob only warms up or does a really short workout, he gets his HR up BUT does not hit the trigger point. He is actually just "over-spending" his HR reserve and not collecting the benefit. Therefore, his heart reaches the limit faster than if he does nothing. He heart fails earlier. He dies younger.

Honestly, I am perplexed when I hear this. But thinking about it, it seems to draw parallel from a lot of other things in life and it kind of makes sense in a way. So I am really curious, is this bull, or is there some truth to it?

GeorgeBMac

"each of us has a pre-determined lifetime heart beat capacity"

That sound like a religious opinion (as in; God has granted us...) rather than a medical one...

Number400

It's bunk! Your heart will work until it stops...how you care for it along the way counts though. As I understand it, any exercise only strengthens a healthy heart.

UtahRider

Agree 100%.

CbadRider

+2

Your heart is a muscle. Saying it only has a predetermined number of beats is like saying your bicep has a predetermined number of contractions and your arm will stop working if you don't exercise it hard enough.

Fat Boy

Incorrect

Looigi

No it isn't. You bicep doesn't have resting flexing rate that is lowered by intense exercise. The more frequently you move it, the sooner it will stop working regardless of exercise, if it has a fixed number of flexes built in. I want to ensure I have enough bicep flexes to keeping hoisting brewskies for the duration...

billh

I'm not sure we can say one way or the other. I mean, the human body is basically a biomechanical machine, and machines wear out the more they are used. I bought a washing machine three years ago. My old Whirlpool lasted 20 years. Now they guy tells me the new ones are built to last only 7-10 years. The stupid Samsung I bought conked out after 3 years . . . 1 month beyond the warrantee!

Anyway, how would this theory be tested? Simply counting heartbeats sounds a little too simplistic. Are all heartbeats created equal? maybe some beats have to push a lot harder, ie. blood pressure. high blood pressure is certainly a killer. there are probably all sorts of confounding variables with "number of heartbeats". I mean, a perfect study would attach a heart rate monitor to a group of newborn infants and follow them forward, counting all their heartbeats, through their entire life, then record how many years they live, then get the correlation between total heartbeats and years lived. Those two numbers will be highly correlated. But what is the control group? You'd have to have identical twins, and then have one twin only do a warmup routine through their lives, but the other one do warmup plus full exercise. then compare years lived. maybe you could do this with mice or fruit flies. it's an interesting theory, though.

Myosmith

Wow A lot of things will shorten the lifespan of your heart, light exercise isn't one of them. Just . . . Wow

Unlike man-made, non-living machines, the human body has the ability to continuously (though as we age, incompletely) repair itself. Exercise enhances this process, oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged more rapidly, wastes are removed more efficiently, tissues are torn down and rebuilt stronger. Our lives are finite, but not in the same way that a machine simply wears out. Even light exercise is better than no exercise.

achoo

Better never walk up stairs then....

cyclezen

wow
I always like trippy stuff like this. You know, Gulliver's Travels, Baron Von Munchhausen, flatland...
is there a whole book of little ditties like this one?

CbadRider

I am not a medical professional, so this is interesting for me and I'm curious.

Biceps aren't meant to fire constantly like the heart, but wouldn't a higher flexing rate make the muscle stronger and therefore able to go longer before resting?

hamster

Aside from the questions about heartbeat capacity, there's also this. Most people don't die because their hearts fail. Most people die because of the buildup of plaque in their arteries, leading to a number of adverse consequences including strokes and heart attacks.

ThermionicScott 

I've never read about someone dying because their heart ran out of beats. What's the official medical term for it?

Looigi

I was being facetious, but the OP was talking about a fixed number of heart beats which I was correlating with bicep flexes. In the OP's post, it wasn't the exercise that directly extended life, but the fact that the resultant lower resting heart rate meant the same number of beats would take a longer time to occur, thereby extending life over what it would be with the same fixed number of beats occurring at a higher rate. Applying this premise to biceps, they'd have a fixed number of flexes and since they don't flex at rest, there would be no corresponding lowering of resting flex rate as occurs with the heart. Therefore, exercising biceps would frivolously use up those finite flexes and you could find yourself incapable of hoisting brewskies toward the end of your life.

GeorgeBMac

In other words: We cannot test the finite limit to the number of beats because we kill ourselves first?
... That theory has some merit to it...

totalnewbie

what about people dying at an old age being very healthy? They don't have any disease and long term ailment. They exercise regularly, eat healthy, and at certain age they just die, heart stop beating. Doctors call it "dying naturally." Makes me wonder what gives? Their brain shuts down? They cells can't process metabolism anymore? Having reached their heart-beat quota? Don't know. but curious.

Of course, the majority of people will die of other diseases/ causes way before they hit that point. But if one takes out all the other factors of unhealthy lifestyle, clogging up the arteries, etc. and boil down to the essence, does a healthy heart have a maximum limit of workload/ beats where it stops at? Does it have anything to do with the fact that our max. heart beats go down as we age? (similar to how analog clocks slow down as it runs out of battery)

ThermionicScott 

I think all the cute analogies to clocks and washing machines and miles on a car don't help us get any closer to whether this is a plausible theory or not. The heart just can't be compared to those things because as Myosmith points out, the heart is able to strengthen and repair itself when needed.

P.S. I have heard this theory before, BTW, and it usually comes from lazy people who don't want to "use up" heartbeats by exercising.

rebel1916

The technical name, in the peer reviewed papers, is "listening to BSitis".

Rowan

The endocrine system and the associated hormones determine many of the ageing factors that can result in our demise.

Then there are the other major organs such as the liver, kidneys, pancreas and lungs that may stop working and cause death.

To say the heart has a predefined number of beats is somewhat fatuous when there are so many other organs whose function can influence how well the heart operates.

Besides that, how can anyone postulate this when it is almost impossible to determine the number of beats without strapping a HR monitor on to a baby as soon as it's born, and have it recording for the next 60, 70, 80, 90 or 100 years? And there has to be the control, who leads a perfect life. And there has to be an N of more than one or two... maybe 5,000 or 10,000...

late

Weight guys obsess over questions like that. One of the concepts is Time under Tension.
How much time is the muscle actually being used. With a light weight moving fast,
there's not a lot of time under tension. One rep I like is nonstop, you go up 2/3 and then
down a 1/3 until you can't stand it or the muscle gives up. You go medium or slow so there's
lots of time under tension.

At heart, its the difference between a hundred trips 10 pounds at a time
or ten trips a hundred pounds at a time or 1,000 pounds once. Obviously you
can do more trips, and carry more weight overall, with the 10 pounds.

Then there is plyometrics. There are a few tricks gym rats use to increase the
recruitment of muscle fibers, and their speed.

For most, the classic gym workout (squats deadlifts pullups benchs dips rows) would
help their cycling. But it would also help in real life when you have to move to a new place,
or push your suddenly dead car out of traffic.