How & Why to Strengthen Your Heart & Cardiovascular Fitness

1. Dr. Andy Galpin

   The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Andy Galpin, a professor of kinesiology in the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about the heart.

2. And I'd like to start with a very simple question. And that is, why do you breathe? Now, that may have caught you off guard. And so I'll let you think about it for a quick second. Why is it that you breathe?

3. The first couple of answers probably rushing to your head are something like, well, if I don't breathe, I'll die. And yes, that's true, but why? Why is it that if you don't breathe, you'll die? With that prompt, and you're now probably thinking about, well, I've got to get oxygen into my system, because oxygen is needed as a fuel for metabolism, to produce energy and to keep my cells in heart and brain alive.

4. Well, it's not exactly the right answer. Of course, oxygen is critically important, and you will die without it. But there are many other things going on that determine how you breathe, why you breathe, how often you breathe, and why that's vital to both your health and performance.

5. Given that the focus of this show is to discuss the science and physiology of maximizing performance, I think it's pretty prudent of us to then spend a little bit of time learning more about how and why your heart functions. In order to do that, we're going to cover what I call the three Is, the first being Investigate, another way of saying, how do I understand and analyze whether or not my heart is functioning at the highest level possible?

6. The second I is Interpretation. How do I value those numbers? Is that great, terrible, amazing, best in world history, et cetera? And then the third one is Intervene, which is a way to say, what do I do about it? How do I improve various markers? How do I reduce others so that I can maximize my overall functionality and performance of my cardiovascular tissue, or in other words, your heart?

7. In order to do that, we're going to have to expand our conversation past just the heart itself. This is going to include things like respiratory rate. In fact, I opened up the conversation here by asking you why you breathe.

8. And so we're going to take a look at not only the cardiac function itself, say, your resting heart rate, maximum heart rate, cardiac output, VO2 max, and things like that, but we'll also get into other important and relative metrics like your heart rate variability, your respiratory rate, CO2 tolerance, and other things that you need to understand to fully appreciate and then therefore improve function of your cardiovascular system.

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