# Lance-Blood Pressure/Heart rate question.



## limba (Mar 10, 2004)

Lance Armstrong allegedly has a resting heart rate of 32 bpm. Now would that make him have high or low blood pressure? His heart is strong enough to pump x-amount of blood in fewer pumps so does that mean the blood pressure would be higher than normal?


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## medstugo (Feb 8, 2005)

limba said:


> Lance Armstrong allegedly has a resting heart rate of 32 bpm. Now would that make him have high or low blood pressure? His heart is strong enough to pump x-amount of blood in fewer pumps so does that mean the blood pressure would be higher than normal?


His blood pressure goes up when he is exercising, but he probably has really good blood pressure. i.e. low. at rest. Although his heart is really efficient and pumps with a lot of force, other factors like the resting tone of his blood vessels help to keep it low at rest.


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## ravenmore (Aug 12, 2004)

the thing I've always questioned is that they say his heart is actually larger than normal. I always though an enlarged heart is a bad bad thing.....


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## covenant (May 21, 2002)

It's bad when a heart is enlarged do to heart valve disease or high blood pressure. Normally it's a symptom of bad things going on.


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## bikeboy389 (May 4, 2004)

ravenmore said:


> the thing I've always questioned is that they say his heart is actually larger than normal. I always though an enlarged heart is a bad bad thing.....


I think when they say larger than normal, they mean larger than average. If his heart naturally and normally grew to a larger size than average, there shouldn't be anything wrong with that.

If his heart were an average size, and through abuse it became enlarged, well, that's a different story. As I understand it, an enlarged heart is bad because the only way for it to happen is for the chamber walls to get thinner--like blowing up a balloon. It's hard on the muscle and can lead to failure.

As to blood pressue, it's like someone else sort of said. Blood pressure isn't exactly a function of how much blood your heart pumps in one go, or how many beats per minute it goes. The limiting factor is how much blood your circulatory system can move smoothly. Exceed that flow rate, and pressure increases. There's more pressure required to push an equal volume of liquid through a skinny hose than through a fat one, to use a very primitive analogy.


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## Kerry Irons (Feb 25, 2002)

*Athlete's heart*



ravenmore said:


> the thing I've always questioned is that they say his heart is actually larger than normal. I always though an enlarged heart is a bad bad thing.....


An enlarged heart from disease is a problem. However, there is such a thing as an "athlete's heart" that comes from getting lots of exercise. The heart gets bigger and stronger from the work done, and that is a good thing.


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## CJA (Sep 24, 2003)

*Increased cardiac output and fitness*

Cardiac output = stroke volume (SV) x heart rate (HR).  

Assuming that at rest, cardiac output requirments are largely the same regardless of fitness, and an endurance athletes resting heart rate is relatively low, then SV must be increased for the same output. This is accomplished with greater chamber size, hence greater volume pumped with each beat.


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## alienator (Jun 11, 2004)

As everyone else has said, an enlarged heart from a disease process is bad. Most often the disease is conjestive heart failure, where the heart becomes weak, unbable to pump the volume that it used to. This leads to an increase of blood in veins--in the body, lungs, or eventually both--which cause an increase in pressure on that side. That increased pressure tends to overfill and eventually stretch out the weak heart. For a healthy person, the response is the opposite: put a little extra blood in the heart, and it contracts more forcefully (Starling effect, I think it's called.).


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