We all know running is one of the best ways to improve your health and fitness. However, the trick to enjoying this vibrant way of life long-term, is not only keeping running enjoyable, but also doing it safely. Central to exercising safely is looking after your heart. But how? How much running is too much, how much is too little, what are the signs of heart stress, what about heart rate? So, how does running affect your heart? Let’s find out.

Exercising and heart health go hand in hand, you can’t exercise effectively if your heart health is compromised, and you won’t have a strong, fit heart if you don’t exercise.

Your heart is the one big muscle you can’t see, but just like your hamstrings or your biceps, it also needs to be exercised to maintain fitness and vitality.

Lifting weights, or other forms of resistance training come to mind when exercising the muscles of your body, but for the heart, exercising mainly comes in the various forms of cardio exercise. Running is perfect for this, but along with the good benefits, there are dangers to also be aware of.

I want you to take advantage of all the health and fitness benefits running can afford your heart, but also avoid the possible pitfalls and dangers. Let’s get started.

What Happens To Your Heart When You Run?

As mentioned earlier, the heart is a muscle. The primary responsibility of this muscle is that of pumping blood around the body, delivering oxygen and nutrients to all your muscles and organs.

The heart muscle works by contraction, which forces the blood to flow through the arteries and circulatory system. This flow of oxygen and nutrient enriched blood, also carries away the depleted blood containing carbon dioxide and waste, for purification and replenishment.

This pumping action is kept functioning by the heart’s own electrical system, the sinus node, which regulates the rate at which the heart pumps by sending electrical pulses to the heart compelling it to contract. This is known as the heart rate.

When we exercise, the body requires more and more oxygen rich blood to help your muscles respond to the demands of the workout. As your muscles work harder, your heart will respond by pumping faster to keep the muscles topped up with oxygen and nutrients. Your heart rate increases as the intensity of the workout increases.

When we run, we are working the big, powerful muscles of the legs, and the glutes. As you can imagine, these muscles require a vastly increased delivery of oxygen rich blood to effectively respond to the demands of the run.

Not only does the heart beat faster during exercise, but the contractions are more forceful to pump more blood. As a result, the heart works very hard during intense exercise.

DID YOU KNOW? According to the ABS, in 2020, heart diseases were the leading cause of death in Australia.

Getting Your Heart Health Checked.

Here at RMWA, we’re all about self-improvement through running, we aim to not only help you boost your health and fitness, but to do it in a safe, and long-term sustainably way. As part of our safety message, we always recommend new runners get thoroughly checked out by their doctors before they even run one step. And for experienced runners, to get checked regularly.

It’s so important to know before setting off on any new exercise routine if there are any health issues that may cause problems for you. And, of course, your heart is central to this. Ask yourself –

• Do you have any history of heart issues?
• Do you know if you have some form of heart disease?
• Is there any history of heart disease in your family?
• Have you ever noticed any heart palpitations or other forms of cardiac irregularity?
• Have you mainly led a sedentary life until now?
• Do you have any other health issues that may trigger heart issues?

Answering ‘yes’ to any of these questions makes it vital that you get checked out by your doctor before you start running. Remember, running is a high intensity exercise and by extension, places pressure on your heart.

It’s important to bear in mind also, that running is an excellent form of exercise, it has the inherent capability to enhance your health and fitness, and also strengthen your heart. So, even if you have some of the above issues, or are not sure of your health status, I don’t want you to be put off exercising, I just want you to be safe.

If you are not certain how to get started running, you can always follow my ‘Couch To 5k’ running plan to get you on your way, I’m here to help you.

TIP: As a long-distance and very regular runner, I do two essential things regularly to not only monitor my health, but to also nail any emerging issues. Firstly, I get a full checkup from my GP annually, including heart checks. Secondly, I get a full blood test twice a year, this is a great way to identify any emerging health issues. My tip is to at least do these two things, and you can always do them more frequently if you desire. It’s important to know what is going on in your body, don’t just ignore it and hope for the best.

5 Ways Running Can Improve Your Heart Health.

Let’s now take a look at five ways running can boost your heart health, and five dangers to be aware of.

1. Running strengthens your heart muscle. Like all muscles, regular exercise can boost your heart’s fitness and strength. Your heart will even increase in size with more intense and regular workouts.
2. Reduction in risk of heart disease. Studies have found an up to 55% reduction in heart disease risk for people who exercise regularly.
3. Lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Regular runners may see a reduction of bad cholesterol (LDL) and an increase in good cholesterol (HDL). High blood pressure can also be reduced in people who run often. Both these benefits promote a healthy heart.
4. Lower heart rate. A strong and healthy heart is a more efficient pump. This results in your heart being conditioned to deliver oxygen rich blood more efficiently to the body, and can lead to a lower resting heart rate.
5. Weight loss. Want a great way to promote weight loss, or maintain a healthy weight? You need to engage in regular cardio exercise, and running serves that purpose in an excellent way. Your heart is less stressed when you are not carrying excess body fat.

DID YOU KNOW? The body has over 600 muscles, that’s a lot of work for the heart to service with blood.

5 Ways Running Can Damage Your Heart Health.

Low intensity to moderate running can benefit the heart in many ways. Even high intensity running and long-distance events such as marathons are generally ok for the heart too, as long as there is no underlying heart disease or some other issue. However, damage to the heart can occur when the intensity is so high, excessively prolonged, or repetitive, that extreme stress is placed on the heart.

Here we list some of the symptoms that may be experienced as a result of this extreme stress placed on the heart.

1. Thicker heart walls. Fibrosis and scarring of the heart have been observed in some people who have a long history of competing in extreme events.
2. Sudden cardiac arrest. Although extremely rare, it is important to be able to recognise the symptoms of SCA and start heart massage and resuscitation procedures immediately. Usually caused by lethal cardiac arrhythmia, SCA often displays the following symptoms –
   • Inability to remain standing, may collapse to knees or sitting position
   • Dizziness
   • Eyes wide open
   • Irregular breathing
3. Heart rhythm disorders. Studies of ultra-marathoners and competitors in other extremely long and intense events, have shown an increase in heart rhythm disorders, such as arrhythmia, in some people.
4. Underlying heart disorder aggravation. The extra stress placed on your heart during a run, can aggravate or expose existing heart disease, or a heart condition. It may be something you are completely unaware of, highlighting why it’s critical to take notice of any signal from the heart that something is not quite right, stop what you are doing and get it checked out immediately.
5. Hypothermia or extreme heat causing heart damage. Prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures can interfere with the operation of the heart.

TIP: If you experience any chest pain, heart palpitations, or become short of breath, you should immediately stop running and seek medical advice, it may be a sign of something more serious. Don’t just run through it.

How Much Running Is Good For Your Heart?

Let’s start with the weekly activity recommendations of the Australian Government Department Of Health And Aged Care for adults aged 18 to 64 yrs old. These recommendations provide that adults should aim for 2.5 to 5 hours of moderate activity, 1.25 to 2.5 hours of vigorous activity, or an equivalent combination of both, per week.

This is a great place to start when thinking about engaging in a healthy active lifestyle, which, as one of its benefits, also promotes a healthy heart. Jogging is one of the recommended activities of the department guidelines.

In reality, as runners, some of us will be far more active than this, and running itself is more intense than jogging. Most recommendations from government health departments and other health related resources suggest that people should aim for around 30 to 50 minutes of aerobic exercise at least three times a week. Running is an aerobic exercise.

Putting this all together, if you lace up three to five times a week, and run at a moderate pace for 30 to 50 minutes, you are going to benefit your health and fitness, and by extension, your heart, greatly.

For experienced conditioned runners, regular more intense or vigorous workouts, race training, or competition is also going to be beneficial and safe in most cases. Just make sure you have no underlying health or heart issues, or high blood pressure for example, and are accustomed to running. If you are just beginning to run, start with much smaller workouts, and work your way up safely to this level.

DID YOU KNOW? Each day, at rest, your heart beats around 100,00 times, pumping about five litres of blood around your body per minute. However, this volume can increase up to 25 litres per minute during intense exercise, that’s a hardworking heart.

How Much Running Is Bad For Your Heart?

As we have discovered in the previous section, we have a running goal which we can aim for, to help promote a healthy lifestyle and a happy heart.

For a lot of us, this will be a minimum, and in reality, will run much more than this. Experienced runners, marathoners, people training for events, sprinters, stair runners, trail runners, sky runners, and many other running athletes, will train much longer and harder, putting a lot more pressure on their hearts.

Trained and conditioned runners or athletes can usually train at these higher intensity levels safely and without any issue. However, there are a number of heart stress signs to watch out for –

• Your heart rate is too high for too long. This can lead to breathing difficulty, performance dips, and even dizziness. We’ll talk more about your heart rate in the next section.
• You cram your weekly running goal into one session on the weekend. Many runners use their weekend spare time for long runs, this makes sense for most people, but you should also schedule a couple of smaller runs during the week. With no conditioning of your body during the week, launching into a long, high intensity run on the weekend will put a lot of pressure on the heart.
• Too hot or cold. Long exposure to hot or cold weather when out running is also a red flag. Hypothermia can affect the function of the heart. Don’t attempt a really long run in severe weather. Listen to your body. In freezing weather, remember that you are breathing in extremely cold, dry air. And in very hot weather, you risk heat-stroke if not careful. In severe weather, limit your workouts to short runs or re-schedule, you must manage your temperature, hypothermia can cause complete heart failure.
• You begin to feel heart palpitations during a long or intense session. Your heart is telling you that there is a problem with this workout. You must take notice and stop what you are doing and seek medical advice, there may be an underlying heart issue that you are not aware of.
• Older runners. You’ve been a long-distance runner for many years, and you are constantly training for this event or another. In this scenario, where you have been running competitively for many years, your heart may display the following symptoms –
  • Hardening of the heart valves, myocardial fibrosis, may lead to heart disease in the future.
  • Coronary artery calcification, this may occur over time and in severe cases, may lead to cardiac arrest.

Chronic running, and massively overtraining, has the possibility of causing changes in the heart over time, which may lead to heart problems in the future.

Incessant high intensity running aside, however, should not put you off this great sport.

The benefits derived from running to your heart and overall health and fitness, for most people, will outweigh the risks, but it’s important to always listen to your body. There will often be signs when your heart is stressed beyond safe limits, don’t ignore them, and you should also get a heart check regularly.

QUOTE: “If you could take all the benefits of running and put them in a pill, it’d be a bestseller”. Cardiologist Raul Mitrani, M.D.

What About Heart Rate When Running.

As we have already discussed, when you run, your heart will work hard to pump enough oxygen and nutrient rich blood to your working muscles. The more intense your run, the harder your heart will work. The harder your heart works, the faster it will pump, which we can quantify as your Heart Beat.

These days, most people wear a smartwatch, such as the Apple Watch. Many of us who run, or play other sports, wear dedicated sports watches. Here’s why that’s important, and why you should consider using one if you don’t already.

Intrinsic to these devices is the measurement of your heart beat. These have gotten much more accurate over time, and for runners, this is a vital heart rate measurement tool. The watch will give you an idea of how hard your heart is working as you run, allowing you to keep your heart beat within your safe range, and alert you if it spikes too high.

But even when not working out, these watches can alert you to dangerous fluctuations in your heart beat, and have even warned people of a heart incident, knowledge of which has ultimately saved their lives.

So now that we can measure our heart rate, we just need to know what is the safe range we should train within when we are working out. There is a simple formula for calculating your maximum heart rate (MHR), let’s work this out –

How To Calculate Your Maximum Heart Rate.

As a general guide, simply subtract your age from 220, to arrive at your MHR.

For example, I am 64 years of age, therefore my MHR would be 220 minus 64 which equals 156 bpm.

This is a guide only, and in reality there are many factors that affect your heart beat when exercising. There will be times when your heart beat is above that indicative figure, short bursts of a higher heart rate when exercising intensely will often occur. These short bursts are usually ok, provided your heart rate isn’t consistently elevated beyond your MHR, and your heart checks have not indicated any heart disease or other problems.

Here is a handy calculator from Bupa to help you make that calculation.

As mentioned, this is a generalised formula. Very active people, and sportspeople, can use the following formula for a more accurate assessment of their MHR. 211 – (0.64 × age).

Using myself as an example again, 211 – (0.64 × 64 = 41) which works out to 170. For me, as a regular fit runner, and from experience, this seems more realistic.

Another point to keep in mind, which these formulas don’t account for, is that women generally record a slightly higher MHR of around 5 to 10 beats.

Your MHR is not a target to aim for, it is a figure that you should keep in mind and try not to exceed. When running, you should aim for a heart rate range according to the type of exercise you are doing. For this, there are five universally accepted heart rate zones to work within.

The following chart helps you understand your heart rate zone as a percentage of your MHR for each intensity of exercise you want to do.

5-Heart-Rate-Zones

This is very helpful because there are training benefits of each zone. As illustrated in the above chart, the different training intensities will use a combination of aerobic, aerobic/anaerobic, and anaerobic systems. Why is this important?

Each of these systems invoke different effects on the body and heart when training, and have particular benefits –

• Aerobic. Less intense training causes the body to use fat for energy, can be maintained for a longer session, and generally does not produce any lactic acid. This is a great range to train in for warmups/cooldowns, easy recovery runs, and long distance easy runs.
• Aerobic/Anaerobic. As the intensity of the workout increases, so does the body’s energy demands. To deliver this increased energy demand, the body will start to use carbohydrates as well as fat. This gives to you the power you need to fuel a more intense run. Your body will begin to produce some lactic acid, but because you aren’t going flat out, your body can typically clear it quickly enough so that it doesn’t build up. Training in these zones help you to increase your endurance, and is great for long runs, or marathon training runs.
• Anaerobic. Now you are working really hard. These sessions will be shorter and more intense, all the way up to flat-out sprints. The body needs energy quickly and will use carbohydrates as a fuel source. Lactic acid is a by-product of burning carbohydrates for energy. In these zones of intense training, the body will not be able to clear away the lactic acid quickly enough. You will need to back off the intensity to allow the lactic acid to clear, and for your spiked heart rate to slow down. In these zones, you will increase speed, power, and efficiency.

As you can see, training in each of these heart rate zone has its benefits, and it’s a great idea to incorporate these zones into your training regimen.

What Other Factors Affect Your Heart Rate.

Your heart rate may also be affected by some of the following variables –

• Medications
• Your medical condition
• Age
• Fitness level
• Stress
• Coffee, alcohol, drugs, nicotine
• Weather, especially heat

With experience, you can often predict the effect some of these conditions may have on your heart rate, and make adjustments to your running to compensate.

What To Do If Your Heart Rate Gets Too High When Running.

So, how high is too high?

We’ve shown you how to find out your maximum heart rate, how to measure it, and which heart rate zones you will mostly train in. As you can see, the intense training in zone five is going to spike your heart rate the most, possibly over your MHR for short periods. What we really want to know is, how far over is still safe in short bursts, and what to do if your heart rate is constantly elevated over your MHR?

Let’s be clear, going over your MHR is not healthy for you.

Short bursts of really intense effort such as sprinting, hills, stairs etc, may spike your heart rate over your MHR, but it’s only for a moment, doesn’t usually cause a problem, and you are backing off and recuperating immediately.

A heart rate of 200, even for a healthy 20-year-old athlete, is dangerous. The older you get, the lower your MHR. There is no magical number or percentage that is bad for you, just knowing, and observing your MHR is the safest way to train.

Here’s what to watch out for –

• Heart palpitations
• Chest pain
• Feeling light-headed
• Seeing stars, feeling dizzy or disorientated
• Shortness of breath
• Fainting
• You feel like you can’t even run at all

Here’s what to do –

• Watch that MHR as you are running
• If your heart rate spikes over your MHR, back off and allow it to decrease
• If it doesn’t quickly return to a safe range, get medical help immediately
• When experiencing any of the above symptoms, stop immediately and get medical help
• Listen to your body, don’t ignore danger signs, never put your heart health at risk

DID YOU KNOW: The most accurate way to measure your heartbeat as you are running, is with a dedicated strap-on heart rate sensor? These sensors, such as the Polar H10, will sync with your sports watch or smartphone and provide you with precise and detailed data that you can use to monitor your heart rate.

Wrapping It Up.

As one of the most beneficial cardio exercises you can do, running can be your ticket to achieving your self-improvement dreams, and your health and fitness goals. And that’s what we are here to help you accomplish.

You can use running, in all its forms, as a life-long health and fitness routine, and central to that health message is always being cognisant of staying safe and avoiding injury.

Your heart health will improve with regular exercise. And, by using the information in this post, you should be able to reap the benefits of that improvement to your heart health, whilst avoiding any extremely risky activity.

Go ahead and figure out your MHR using the methods we have shown you, then monitor your heart rate as you run, so you always keep within safe limits. Vary your workouts by training in the different heart rate zones, for full benefit.

I would love to hear from anyone who has had experience with running and heart health, and any tips or ideas you might have.

Happy Running,

Steve.

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This article is for information purposes only and is not a recommendation to act on any of its content. It is always recommended you consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any activity that may affect your health.

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