Dr. Andy Galpin

You're not eating that candy as well.

You've got another supply of candy in your back pocket and in your house and you're pulling out of that candy, if you will.

Okay, so the heart itself is meant to be incredibly robust against fatigue, right?

against damage, against soreness, and against changing any of its inherent contractile or ionotropic is what the cardiovascular folks would probably call it, properties.

That said, it does respond somewhat similar to skeletal muscle.

with exercise adaptation.

So just like in skeletal muscle, where you can add quality, contraction force and speed and power, and you can add quantity, muscle size, the same thing actually happens in the heart.

The heart can get physically stronger.

This would result in you pumping out more blood per pump

Again, the fibers themselves won't necessarily change their inert properties, but the hard can contract with more force.

We'll talk about that a little bit later.

That's going to be referred to as ejection fraction and stroke volume.

It can also get larger.

And in this particular case, typically what you'll see in response to exercise or healthy lifestyle behavioral changes, the enlargement in your heart you'll see will be primarily in the left ventricle.

Again, this is the one that's going to have to deal with the pressure of the aorta, getting that blood out the rest of your body.

And what will ideally happen is the amount or size of that chamber, so the inside, the amount, the space that can be filled by blood will either stay the same or even get slightly bigger.

But what you'll basically do is you'll pack on tissue to the outside of the ventricle.

So it gets bigger, allows it to produce more force, but it doesn't compromise the size of the chamber.

So again, think about the left ventricle as a balloon, right?

If that balloon gets smaller and you can fill less blood in it, that's going to be a problem.