Considering Target Heart Rates in Sports Medicine
Michael DeFranco: In the office, I often have athletes ask me about target heart rate. Can you tell us more about what that means in individual target heart rate?
Michael LaCorte: Well, you know and at least in our adult world, we go to our physicians and we for example get a stress test. They target a certain rate and that depends upon age. So for example, the rule of thumb is you take a baseline of 220 beats per minute, you subtract your age. So, if someone let’s say were forty, 220 minus forty is 180 and then genuinely that’s the maximum that you’d want someone to reach but you multiply that by 80 percent and that would be the ideal heart rate that you would get. So, it would be 80 percent of let’s say a hundred and eighty which might be around 160 would be your target.
So, for example when athletes are training depending on their age, you stood for that target heart rate which is as I said really based upon age. I mean older people are not going to have this high target as younger people.
Michael DeFranco: Okay. When you’re talking about aerobic exercise, you said that people do that type of physical activity, their heart rates tends to drop and there are some terms that have been related to that happening, it’s called athlete’s heart or what some people call athletic heart syndrome or bradycardia.
Michael LaCorte: Right, well bradycardia means slow heart rate and it’s amazing how many times I’ll see a teenager in the office referred by a physician because they listen to the youngster and the heart rate is let’s say fifty. And then they walk in and they take off their shirt and the first thing I say to them is I think we should switch places. I need to be on the table, you need to be examining me because bradycardia is what you see as slower normal heart rate.
The term athlete’s heart is really when you look at somebody’s heart let’s say on electrocardiogram, on an echocardiogram and the heart thickness is a little bit more than you would expect for someone of that size or age. In other words, it’s someone hypertrophy. So, we tend to use the term athlete’s heart, for a heart gets a little thicker and also, for like a marathon runner with a heart may not only be a little thicker, it may be a little bit bigger and in addition, their hearts are slower.
So, the bradycardia refers strictly to the heart rate while the term athlete’s heart encompasses the slow heart rate, the thickness of the heart muscle and maybe the slight dilatation of the heart as well. It’s a good thing. In other words you say, some are scared in athlete’s heart, not a bad thing.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services