Benefits of raising heart rate?

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Raising your heart rate through exercise has several significant benefits, mainly due to the efficiency improvements in your heart and its impact on overall fitness. Regular training, whether it's interval or steady-state, tends to reduce your resting heart rate while maintaining cardiac output. This change occurs because your heart's stroke volume, the amount of blood pumped per beat, increases. This enhanced stroke volume allows your heart to pump efficiently, needing fewer beats to achieve the same output. Consequently, this not only improves cardiovascular fitness but also the overall energy efficiency of your body 1.

Additionally, exercise-induced elevated heart rate improves the brain's vascular structure, notably in areas related to memory and cognitive functions. Specifically, exercise can lead to a denser network of capillaries in the brain, which improves the supply of crucial nutrients like glucose and oxygen. This, in turn, enhances cognitive functioning and can make regular tasks feel less strenuous over time 2.

Heart Rate and Fitness

Andy and Andrew discuss how heart rate is not a good metric for fitness and how cardiac output is a better indicator. They explain how stroke volume increases with training, leading to a lower resting heart rate, and why maximum heart rate is not a good proxy for fitness. Despite this, they still recommend training that gets you up towards maximum heart rate.

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