Long-term aerobic exercise is exactly what your doctor ordered if you asked for advice on how to build up your heart muscle for strength and endurance. An echocardiogram is a sonogram, an ultrasound picture of your heart in action, much like a sonogram you may have seen of a baby in its mother's womb. The echocardiogram shows your heart chambers and how they contract with each beat and it allows measurement of blood flow.
Increased Ejection Fraction
Every time your heart beats, it pumps blood out of its ventricles, the muscular chambers that pump blood to your lungs and to your body. An average, healthy heart pumps out about 55 to 60 percent of the blood in its ventricles with each beat. This is called the ejection fraction, as explained by Cleveland Clinic cardiologists. If each beat can eject only 35 percent of its volume, your heart may be weak and unhealthy. But, if you have engaged in long-term aerobic exercise and built up your heart muscle to athletic proportions, each beat may eject 70 or 75 percent of its blood volume. An echocardiogram shows a cross section of each chamber. A stop-action frame before and after each beat allows simple measurements to reveal your increased ejection fraction.
Increased Muscle Mass
If you pump enough iron you can build up your biceps to the point where you might even rip a shirt sleeve by just flexing your arm. You can achieve almost the same kind of muscle building in your heart with long-term aerobic exercise, according to the American Heart Association. An echocardiogram will show more muscle thickness and mass in your heart's muscular walls than in a healthy but nonathletic person's heart.
Increased Diastolic Filling
Athletes have slower heart rates than non-athletic people. An Olympic runner's heart might beat 30 times each minute while a healthy, non-athlete will have a rate of about 72 beats per minute. According to Mayo Clinic cardiologists, the time between heart beats is the time your heart has to refill its relaxed chambers before its next beat. That time is called diastole and the beat is called systole. If your diastolic filling time is long, you will have increased diastolic filling. That gives your heart more blood to pump with every beat. Long-term aerobic exercise increases the efficiency of your heart in this way. An echo cardiogram will show the increased diastolic volume -- the amount of blood ready to be pumped -- and the slower rate of beating.
Stress Echocardiogram
The ultimate test of an athletic heart is to watch it work during extreme exercise. When a highly conditioned athlete, after years of aerobic exercise, runs fast uphill on a treadmill in the cardiologist's stress lab, he will end the run with a quick lay-down on the echocardiographer's exam table while his heart is still working at high-intensity. The images will show an even greater ejection fraction and faster rate. Stop-action frames will demonstrate the greater degree of systolic thickening of your heart muscle with each stronger beat. The images will be analogous to watching and measuring your biceps as you lift and lower heavy weights. To see a video of this test being performed, follow the link in the Resources section.
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