Why Is “Hard” Exercise So Effective?
What makes hard exercises so damn effective?
Now if you’re having trouble understanding why exercises that require you to be either out of breath or fairly exhausted, then you’re in luck. Hard exercises or in this instance called high-intensity interval training, are more than just exercises. You don’t do it at an extremely high intensity just to carry out a certain goal. Whether that be for fat loss, conditioning, or just for fun. High-intensity interval training strengthens the heart even more than moderate exercise does. Let me explain why.
In a comprehensive study published in the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology, researchers went to great lengths to investigate what happens inside tiny heart muscle cells of rats after regular exercise. In the study, they found a couple of key factors.
The first is that high-intensity interval training reduced the severity of heart failure.
When a lot of calcium builds up inside the cytosol, the heart muscle cells can initiate new contractions when they’re actually supposed to be at rest. An electrical gradient develops which causes the heart to send electrical signals when it shouldn’t. This can cause fibrillation in the heart chambers which can be fatal and a common cause of cardiac arrest.
In addition, they showed how exercise improved heart function by counteracting the processes that cause it to become stiff. This simple improvement made each heartbeat more powerful and reduced the severity of heart failure. And aso you reduce the risk of dangerous ventricular fibrillation. In other words, increasing the pumping power to the heart is absolutely crucial for the quality of life and health of people with heart failure.
Finally, high-intensity interval training helped the body improve its work capacity. “The interval training also significantly improved the rats’ conditioning. After the training period, their fitness level was actually better than that of the untrained rats that hadn’t had a heart attack,” says Stølen. The rapid heartbeats of blood circulating throughout the organ systems and cells in the body do in fact avoid potential diseases and sickness, but it also strengthens the heart, lungs and muscles so it can pump more blood out to the rest of the body, therefore, improving its ability to function properly.
The best thing you can do for your body is exercise. Not only exercise, but really push your heart to beat rapidly. When we get up to take a walk, jog or sprint our heart automatically starts beating a little faster and pumping a little harder. The higher the intensity of the activity, the harder the heart has to work. And the harder the heart works, the better you ultimately will feel.
