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Have heart trouble? Get up and lift some weights

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published July 17, 2007

DALLAS - Pumping a little iron can help elderly nursing home residents and heart failure patients gain strength for everyday life, the American Heart Association says, expanding on earlier advice.

The new guidance was published Monday online in the journal Circulation.

Mark Williams, who led the group that wrote it, said resistance training - whether it's lifting weights or doing situps - should complement aerobic exercise.

"A lot of people after having a heart attack or heart failure think they need to 'take it easy,' " said Dr. Amit Khera, director of cardiac rehabilitation at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He said broader guidance should help reassure doctors and patients that it's okay for most people to start exercising after heart trouble.

Khera said cardiac patients using weights are often restricted to 1- to 5-pound weights for the first couple of weeks.

The heart association statement cited one study of a 10-week period of resistance training among nursing home residents with an average age of 87 that resulted in improvements in strength and stair-climbing power. In a study of older women who were heart failure patients, 10 weeks of resistance training resulted in a 43 percent increase in muscle strength and a 49 percent increase in the distance covered in a six-minute walk.

Resistance weight training includes doing things like abdominal crunches and resistance-cord exercises, with dumbbells, wrist weights or weight machines.

[Last modified July 17, 2007, 00:59:44]