My new book, Deep Fitness: The Mindful, Science-Based Strength-Training Method to Transform Your Well-Being in 30 Minutes a Week, coauthored with Philip Shepherd, came out on October 12, 2021. The following is an adapted excerpt from the book. If you want to learn more, order now!
To improve our cardiovascular health, the common assumption is that we have to do lots of aerobic exercise. But strength training turns out to be a powerful way to protect our hearts.
One long-term study of over 12,000 men and women found that, independent of any aerobic training, those who did strength training for less than an hour a week lowered their risk of heart attack and stroke by up to 70%. Not a bad return on the time investment.
Equally impressive is another study that found 30 minutes of strength training a week reduced people’s risk of a heart attack as much as 2.5 hours of brisk walking every week.
One massive study followed over 1,500 male firefighters for 10 years. The firefighters did a treadmill stress test—considered the gold standard for determining cardiovascular health—as well as a push-up test, to see how many push-ups they could do at a set speed. The researchers were surprised to discover that the simple push-up test was a better predictor of someone’s risk for future cardiovascular problems than the sophisticated treadmill stress test. In fact, firefighters who had completed more than 40 push-ups were 96% less likely to suffer a cardiovascular problem than those who completed fewer than 10 push-ups.
When you look at the range of ways in which strength training improves cardiovascular health, its effectiveness should come as no surprise:
It lowers abdominal fat, which decreases inflammation.
It lowers blood pressure.
It raises good cholesterol and lowers harmful cholesterol.
It reduces triglycerides in the blood, which are a type of fat that can lead to a hardening of the arteries or a thickening of the artery walls.
It improves the functioning of the circulatory system, helping grow new blood vessels and reducing arterial stiffness.
Despite those clear benefits, strength training is rarely prescribed to patients with heart disease because of concerns about safety. It has been suggested, for instance, that weight training can put dangerous loads on the heart. A review of studies on the issue conducted at McMaster University in Ontario, though, reported that “the misconception that [resistance exercise training] is less safe than [aerobic exercise training] in physically or metabolically vulnerable individuals lacks empirical evidence.” In fact, data from five studies on older adults with cardiovascular disease suggest that resistance training may actually be safer for the heart than aerobic exercise.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the world, and yet few people seem to realize how strength training can help prevent it, among many other benefits.