Heart Health Cardiac Rehabilitation

It took me a while to find, but this is journal that it is in.

http://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Abstract/publishahead/Firefighters__Physical_Activity__Relation_to.98986.aspx

They will have some articles as free, but not this one.

Hopefully in a month or someone will do a report on this and dig out some more of the details to give some idea of what the sensitivity is to length and amount of effort.

But there are a few things that can be picked out.

"Increasing BMI category was associated with significant decrements in CRF and unfavorable dose-response trends in CVD risk factors (p<0.001), even for those reporting very frequent, sustained and intense PA."

If you are "fat", while exercise helps, you will still have problems.

"Results: Measures of increasing frequency, duration, intensity of PA and total weekly exercise (minutes) were significantly associated with higher CRF (p<0.001) after adjustment for age, BMI, and smoking status. After multivariate adjustment, increasing PA frequency was significantly associated with reduced total cholesterol-HDL ratio (TC/HDL), triglycerides and glucose, as well as HDL increments."

Here is where some analysis showing HOW MUCH frequencey, vs duration, vs intensity would be helpful.

Many different places you will see the common recommendations of 30 minutes/5 times a weak of moderate exercise.

But if you start looking deeper you will find that it is YES, BUT twice that amount is better.

And also if you can do high intensive then you only need to do it 1/2 as long.

Also I have found several reports that indicate that high intensity interval training is needed some of the times for maximum CRF.

Of course that is assuming that one can do the high intensity work safely.

I found a European report http://cpr.sagepub.com/content/16/6/677.abstract done with policeman.

"
RESULTS: The prevalence of the MS was 18.6% (22.5% in men, 10.6% in women). After adjustment for age and sex, average PA intensity, PA duration, PA volume and PF were each associated with reduced odds of MS. Regression analyses further showed an inverse relation between total CVD risk score and average PA intensity, the hours of PA performed at high intensity (>6 metabolic equivalent values) and PF, but no relation with total hours or the hours of PA performed at low or moderate intensity. When we adjusted our analyses for PF, the relations with the components of PA became nonsignificant. Using pathway analysis, we found that peak oxygen uptake mediated 78% of the effect of average PA intensity and 93% of the effect of the hours performed at high intensity on total CVD risk score.
CONCLUSION: PA and PF are inversely associated with the clustering of metabolic abnormalities. With regard to PA, it seems that intensity and more specifically higher intensity is the main characteristic of PA determining its effect on CVD RF. However, compared with PA, PF exerts greater effects on each of these individual CVD RF and its combination."


Which indicates it is more the length of high intensity exercise rather than the total length.


Apparently that journal has a new online distributor and for March all articles are free.



I got the full article, but have not had time to go through it.

An hour a day, varying intensity, do a warmup, do a cooldown. Do high intensity intervals occasionally. But don't be breathing hard, it indicates lack of oxygen to the heart, and therefore excess CO2 in the coronary arteries.