What happens to your heart when you run

Q: How does running affect the heart?

Running reduces your risk for heart disease. Those who start running on a regular basis decrease their risk for heart disease by 35 to 55 percent,” says Dr. DeLucia. Running helps prevent blood clots in the arteries and blood vessels. It also supports healthy blood flow, blood pressure and cholesterol.

Q: Is running good for the heart?

Every mile you run – whether its a marathon or around the block – helps to keep your heart healthy and reduce your risk of heart and circulatory diseases.

Your heart is a muscle, and gets a workout during exercise. Its job is to get more blood out to the body's muscles when they work hard.

Table of Contents Show

Understanding just how physical activity benefits your heart can be strong motivation to get moving to get moving more. Here's what to know.
Exercise lowers blood pressure.
Exercise is key to weight control.
Exercise helps strengthen muscles.
Exercise can help you quit smoking.
Exercise can stop or slow the development of diabetes.
Exercise lowers stress.
Exercise reduces inflammation.
Try It Move More for Heart Benefits
What the research shows
But there are different rules for ultramarathoners
The bottom line
How does running affect the heart?
Is running good for the heart?
What happen to your heart rate after running?
What happens to your heart when you do cardio?

When you are exercising, the heart's blood flow increases by around four or five times from when you are at rest. Your body does this for you by increasing the rate of your heartbeat, thus increasing the amount of blood that goes out to the rest of the body.

Cardiac output is the rate of blood pumped by the heart. You get that from multiplying the heart rate, the rate at which the heart beats, by the stroke volume, which is the volume of blood ejected by the heart with each beat. When you are at rest, the cardiac output is about 5 liters a minute. With exercise, sympathetic nerves stimulate the heart to beat faster and more forcefully; the heart rate can actually increase about threefold.

At the same time the veins constrict due to the sympathetic nerve stimulation. More blood being returned from the working muscles, along with the vein constriction, increases the venous return, or the amount of blood returned to the heart. This increased venous return increases the stroke volume by about 30 to 40 percent.

One of the very best gifts you can give your heart is physical activity. In fact, pairing regular exercise with a Mediterranean-style diet , maintaining a normal weight and not smoking is a great protection plan against coronary artery disease and vascular disease, Johns Hopkins research has found.

Not convinced such simple steps could be so powerful? These four lifestyle factors reduced the chance of death from all causes by 80 percent over the eight-year period that more than 6,200 subjects were tracked.

“For certain heart conditions, exercise can be as powerful as some medications,” says Johns Hopkins expert Kerry Stewart, Ed.D.

Understanding just how physical activity benefits your heart can be strong motivation to get moving to get moving more. Here's what to know.

Exercise lowers blood pressure.
Exercise works like beta-blocker medication to slow the heart rate and lower blood pressure (at rest and also when exercising). High blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease.
Exercise is key to weight control.
Especially when combined with a smart diet, being physically active is an essential component for losing weight and even more important for keeping it off, Stewart says—which in turn helps optimize heart health. Being overweight puts stress on the heart and is a risk factor for heart disease and stroke.
Exercise helps strengthen muscles.
A combination of aerobic workouts (which, depending on your fitness level, can include walking, running, swimming, and other vigorous heart-pumping exercise) and strength training (weight lifting, resistance training) is considered best for heart health. These exercises improve the muscles’ ability to draw oxygen from the circulating blood. That reduces the need for the heart—a muscular organ itself—to work harder to pump more blood to the muscles, whatever your age.
Exercise can help you quit smoking.
As smokers become more fit, they often quit. And people who are fit in the first place are less likely to ever start smoking, which is one of the top risk factors for heart disease because it damages the structure and function of blood vessels.
Exercise can stop or slow the development of diabetes.
Johns Hopkins research has shown that when combined with strength training, regular aerobic exercise such as cycling, brisk walking, or swimming can reduce the risk of developing diabetes by over 50% by allowing the muscles to better process glycogen, a fuel for energy, which when impaired, leads to excessive blood sugars, and thus diabetes.
Exercise lowers stress.
Stress hormones can put an extra burden on the heart. Exercise—whether aerobic (like running), resistance-oriented (like weight training) or flexibility-focused (like yoga)—can help you relax and ease stress.
Exercise reduces inflammation.
With regular exercise, chronic inflammation is reduced as the body adapts to the challenge of exercise on many bodily systems. This is an important factor for reducing the adverse effects of many of the diseases just mentioned.

Try It Move More for Heart Benefits

How can you fit more exercise into your day, or become more physically active if you haven’t been before? Begin with small starts like these, and build up from there.

Regular moderate or vigorous aerobic activity gets your heart pumping, which in turn increases its longevity and capability over the long haul. It’s a surefire way to keep your heart healthy well into your older years.

One of the aerobic activities that many experts have long gravitated toward is running. “The benefits are overwhelmingly positive in the vast majority of people who run,” says Raul Mitrani, M.D., a cardiologist with the University of Miami Health System. “It lowers blood pressure, lower heart rate, improves metabolism, delays diabetes, promotes weight loss, and prolongs life. If you could take all the benefits of running and put them in a pill, it’d be a best seller.”

What the research shows

Over the years, a large number of medical studies have reported the connection between running and heart health. One of the largest was published in 2014 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The study, which looked at data from more than 55,000 adults over the course of 15 years, showed a positive connection between heart health and running among the study participants. Specifically, runners in the study had a 30% lower risk of death than non-runners. And if you just focused on heart-related causes of death like a heart attack or stroke, then the runners were 45% less likely to die of those causes than non-runners. Overall, runners in the study lived on average three years longer than the non-runners.

And all kinds of running, no matter how fast or how long, seemed to help, according to the study. Participants who ran slowly or infrequently showed a lower risk of dying than those who did not run at all.

But there are different rules for ultramarathoners

This massive study on running and heart health is frequently held up as proof of the benefits of running. However, another area of research has shown that ultramarathons and other extremely long-distance events may have the opposite impact on some people’s hearts and cause damage to the heart, heart rhythm problems, and other concerns.

According to the American Heart Association, it appears that some people may be at a greater risk of these problems related to long-distance running than others. For example, Dr. Mitrani, who has run multiple half marathons, notes that those with a history of heart rhythm problems or runners whose right atrium and ventricle dilate after running may have more issues with their heart when it comes to running.

“Most of the time, the heart pumps 5 liters of blood per minute when at rest, but that can go up to 25 liters a minute when running,” says Dr. Mitrani. “Generally, the heart adapts in a beneficial way, but some people may be more prone to arrhythmia.”

The bottom line

Despite this research, Dr. Mitrani stresses that running is a heart-healthy activity for most people. The key, he notes, is to approach your exercise routine thoughtfully.

“If you’re running more than 6 hours every week, you may want to check in with your doctor just to have a conversation,” he says. “This is especially true if you have a history of arrhythmia or are feeling heart palpitations.”

For those who have issues with running, Dr. Mitrani says that there are a number of other activities that can help you reach your goal of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity each week, such as cycling, swimming, dancing, and even walking.

How does running affect the heart?

Running reduces your risk for heart disease. “Those who start running on a regular basis decrease their risk for heart disease by 35 to 55 percent,” says Dr. DeLucia. “Running helps prevent blood clots in the arteries and blood vessels. It also supports healthy blood flow, blood pressure and cholesterol.

Is running good for the heart?

Every mile you run – whether it's a marathon or around the block – helps to keep your heart healthy and reduce your risk of heart and circulatory diseases.

What happen to your heart rate after running?

The rise in heart rate during exercise is considered to be due to the combination of parasympathetic withdrawal and sympathetic activation. The fall in heart rate immediately after exercise is considered to be a function of the reactivation of the parasympathetic nervous system.

What happens to your heart when you do cardio?

What it does: Aerobic exercise improves circulation, which results in lowered blood pressure and heart rate, Stewart says. In addition, it increases your overall aerobic fitness, as measured by a treadmill test, for example, and it helps your cardiac output (how well your heart pumps).