Endurance exercises

Simon Gama

Why they reduce blood pressure

A few years back I attended a presentation for lawyers at a medical school by a professor of anatomy who had completed the Boston Marathon only days earlier.
A strong runner, he delighted in relating his experience so I took the opportunity to ask him what effect endurance exercise has on the cardiovascular system.

His response was short and to the point. It makes the whole system stronger, he said. Your blood pressure of course is part of that system.

Endurance exercise opens your arteries.

The much publicised autopsy of Clarence Demar who was still running marathons at age 70 showed that he had very large coronary arteries, probably developed as a result of his lifetime of vigorous exercise.

Regular exercise also opens the large networks of tiny blood vessels connecting the arteries with the veins. All of these factors results in lower blood pressure.

Think of your circulatory system, a hose with many branches increasing the diameter of the hose, reducing the pressure in the system. Likewise adding hundreds small connection rubbers or capillaries into which blood escape reduces the overall pressure.

In untrained individuals the hose is smaller and the connecting branches are constricted or closed which leads high blood pressure.

Endurance exercise also makes the heart bigger and stronger so that it can pump more blood with each stroke. That is why well-conditioned athletes have low resting heart rates.

Only a fraction of their capacity is required to supply their capacity. Roger Bannister’s resting heart rate was in 70s before he trained to become the world’s first four-minute miler.

At the time he set the record, his resting heart rate was less than 40 beats per minute.

What about bodybuilding?

The double berated effect

To be effective exercise should involve a lot of muscle, that’s where bodybuilding comes into the blood pressure picture.

No other form of exercise systematically trains all the muscles and blood vessels like bodybuilding.

This is especially true of the upper body muscle that are often neglected in endurance exercise like running and biking which involves mainly the lower body.

Bodybuilders develop the capillary system in each body part they work.

The total effect is to enlarge the capillary system throughout the body.

This allows the blood to spread out which lowers the overall pressure.

Weight training builds and maintains muscles tissue and muscle tissue burns calories even at rest. Fat tissue is inactive and burns very few calories.

This makes a tremendous difference. Exercise physiologists estimate that one pound of resting muscle burns the equivalent of five pounds of body fat over the course of a year.

– The writer, Simon Gama is a fitness trainer at Body Works in Bulawayo.