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If you are an active adult over the age of 40 and participate in sports competitions or events, you’re considered a master’s athlete. While masters athletes are often healthier than their inactive peers, competing in sporting events doesn’t eliminate the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, especially as you get older. That’s why it’s important to seek the expertise of someone who can help manage your heart health, maximize your athletic performance, and lower your risk of having a sudden cardiac event.
Whether you’re preparing to learn a new recreational sport or training for a marathon, here are several ways a sports medicine cardiologist can help optimize your performance and maintain your ability to safely enjoy your sport for as long as possible.
Fine-tune your cardiac efficiency and training in partnership with a sports medicine cardiologist.
A sports medicine cardiologist is a doctor who is trained in sports medicine and has specialized expertise in cardiovascular care within the context of exercise. Sports cardiologists can help high-level athletes and highly active adults enhance their performance in competition, but they can also help individuals who have heart concerns live an active lifestyle.
If you consider that the body is like a machine, the heart is the central part of that machine and is essential to the machine performing to the best of its ability. The heart pumps blood to the muscles so the muscles can convert that oxygen to energy. When you make small adjustments to your heart’s ability to handle the demands placed on it during exercise, you can optimize your performance and also potentially minimize your risk of heart disease.
An individualized evaluation can assess your current fitness levels and potential heart risks.
Whether you enjoy sports as a hobby on the weekend or are an endurance or masters athlete training for a specific goal or sport, a sports cardiologist can help you tailor your training regimen and manage any heart disease risk factors as you remain active. An individualized assessment will include a discussion about your goals so we can determine a treatment or training protocol that will help you perform at your best without compromising your health. Some patients want to lower their cholesterol or lose weight, while others want to decrease their mile time or maximize their cardiac efficiency. A third category of patients is those who are active but at risk of or experiencing a heart-related condition or symptoms (such as shortness of breath or palpitations). These patients may be seeking expertise about how to safely return to activity again while managing their conditions. Ultimately, our goal is to learn what activity you want to participate or compete in and understand what your heart looks like so we can help you safely achieve your goals.
Unique cardiac tests can help you achieve peak performance.
If you are competing at an elite level, there are several cardiopulmonary exercise tests that help us to identify the capabilities of your lungs, heart, and muscles. This allows us to then develop a personalized training regimen that can help you to increase your fitness level and performance. In addition to stress testing and echocardiograms, specialized sports cardiac tests may include:
- Running gait analysis, which uses two high-speed cameras to identify imbalances in your gait
- Assessing your overall fitness levels and VO2 so you can recognize your anaerobic threshold (before lactic acid builds)
- Specialized imaging modalities, such as cardiac CT and MRI scans and ultrasounds, to look for any abnormalities
- Evaluating your heart rhythm
All of these tools can help us to better understand your heart’s performance and allow us to hone in on specific characteristics to improve your athletic capabilities.
A highly trained eye can recognize the difference between a heart abnormality and an athlete’s heart.
If you’re working out in the gym and lifting weights to grow your bicep, you know that you have to continue increasing the volume and/or frequency of your weight-lifting regimen to increase the bicep muscle. In the same way, an athlete’s heart adapts to increased loads or intensity of exercise over time. This “exercise remodeling” to the heart can look like a heart abnormality on imaging to the untrained eye. As a result, some athletes are referred to us after learning about a potential abnormality on an EKG or echocardiogram test somewhere else. It can look like something is wrong, but after further investigation, we can decipher when it’s an actual cause for concern or just changes to the heart related to exercise and physiology.
Being active doesn’t always negate the risk of heart disease, but it’s the best kind of medicine.
Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of people around the world, but research proves that people who are fitter tend to live longer. It doesn’t matter if you’re a weekend warrior or an elite marathon runner, we’re here to help you stay as active as you can for as long as you can. While being active as you age doesn’t make you immune to heart disease, we can help manage any inherited risk factors and optimize your heart health to minimize exercise-related heart risks as well.
Whether you’re experiencing heart-related symptoms or you just want to improve your athletic performance, our MedStar Health sports medicine specialists provide the same level of care and attention that they give our local high school, collegiate, and professional athletes. Like a daily dose of medicine, a little exercise every day can go a long way in keeping you healthy and allowing you to do what you love.
