Heart risk for extreme cyclists?

In reply to KIM.

Yes when you exercise you do damage. it happens to all of us. The body then adapts and repairs and grows stronger. It's a basic training effect. With extreme you have to watch the level of damage you do and whether the body can adapt from it. If I lifted a weight that was a little more than I was used to then I would most likely have a training effect. If a lifted a weight that was monstrously heavy from what I was used to I would have an injury or I continually trained and trained with little rest and adaption I reckon you could have problems.

Cardiovascular effects the same way. I am assuming there is no hidden hereditary problems but there is no reason why you can't reach your absolute maximum over time and with proper guidance but athletes have a clinical term for the function of there hearts (its called the athletes heart). The function and operation of a professional athletes heart does not conform to standard heart operations. Typically of the medical professionals it is deemed diseased as it does not conform to standard parametres. They do the same with pregnant women because this is not a normal operation for a female body. Its terminology, as there is clearly nothing wrong with a health pregnant female

What I find strange with this report is that is does not relate to an athletes heart. There are irregular operations but it may still be healthy. They don't define excessive exertion and within which parametres they are talking about. Is it me lifting a too heavy weight for too long or training and training and training but with little rest and adaption. There is a difference.

Personally I believe every word in the report and I shall forthwith cease all lunatic-level exercise .

Now, where does that leave me? Oh yes, precisely where I already was.

I suspect that I'm not the only one who'd like to die in the saddle.

USA the country with the highest obesity levels in the world and their worried about a minute number of sportsmen overdoing it! I suggest their research money would be better spent looking for a way to lower the much larger number of obese people with cardiac problems.

The phrase “Physical exercise, though not a drug, possesses many traits of a powerful pharmacologic agent,” indicates how much notice such be taken of this load of codswallop

We are going to die anyway so you might as well do something you enjoy.

And if it was true who cares.

Confession time I cycle I have a tendency to cycle close to the limits of my physical ability. But of all the tumbles I have had cycling; only one can be associated with my heart condition and that was because I didn't take care of myself.
I constantly have to balance the risks to my health of cycling and of not cycling and being wise/aware about going on with my body/mind play a significant part allowing me to cycle and be healthy.
This research(?) if true would only apply in particular circumstance to particular people:
1.The person will have to be doing high physical stress endurance exercise.
2. The level at which a person can safely sustain such exercise will differ between individuals. This is due to nature and nurture
3 The degree of obsession and anxiety involved. No doubt obsession and anxiety play a role in over exercising as they do in athletic achievement. The root cause of that obsession/anxiety and the point at which they have a negative impact on overall well-being will be different for each individual.

If this is so, how come cyclists aren't dying of it, instead it's some drivers who appear to doing their best to reduce cyclists numbers in the UK.

Rollocks! (sorry mis-spelt that)

The idea of being so gloriously fast and fit and dedicated to my sport that I might suddenly drop dead from heart-failure on a deserted mountain pass somewhere in the back of beyond appeals to me enormously. Of all the ways to break down, this is one of the better ones available.

What a stupid predicament.

Doesn't matter anyway, because something else will get you, probably white handlebar tape or something.

appearing soon in the Daily Mail as "Cycling Causes Heart Disease". Followed a few days later by "Health Benefits of Cycling" accompanied by a picture of Kelly Brook on a bike.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yzbxwxWUz0

probably

An interesting piece of scaremongering by the Mayo Clinic.

I rowed competitively from age 17 and developed/was identified as having an arterial fibrillation (in the fom of Wolff Parkinson White Syndrome) at age 20. The cardiologist I dealt with told me at the time that sportspeople were more likely to be referred with these conditions (particulary at younger ages), but that it was likely that a section of the population were susceptable to the condition but that it never presented symptoms, or they presented when older.

I trained hard, but there were lots of people training just as hard as I did, and yet still only a very small number of people develop these conditions so there has to be more to it than just intensity of exercise. Even in those training at high intensity it is still very rare, unlike diabetes & obesity amongst inactive people.

If you catch your pulse running too fast to count, or feel lightheaded and nauseous and not-right sometimes under (or directly after) effort get it checked out. They are often quite easily fixed or controlled by drugs, especially if you are (relatively) young and healthy. My op was nothing compared to the people I shared a ward with (they were all waiting for triple bypasses, at least some of which I dare say could have been avoided by a little more intense exercise earlier in their lives).

I read as far as 'Mayo' then my thoughts turned to Frites en Mayo, and I started to drool …

I can't wait for the first person to tell me that excercise can be bad for me. I always say that I only excercise so I can eat cream cakes, McD's and Donuts constantlty and not get fat! The way that cardiac problems could affect a cyclists longevity is when some fat driver smoking a cigar has a heart attack and drives over one of us!

If you push your body beyond its limits you are going to cause it damage, but very few people have the will to push their bodies that far. At the end of the day not taking exercise is far more damaging.

I suggest folk actually read the last sentence, because pretty much ALL of us fall in to THAT category.

Indeed, few of us have the time to do enough strenuous "extreme" activity for this to be anything more than a quirky little piece about something that concerns about 0.00000001% of the population.

And THAT is probably an overestimate

Rubbish.