If you’re on the older side like me, you may find that the GP will be occasionally asking you to test your blood pressure.
Well, this happened to me not so long ago, the GP told me that my blood pressure was quite high and I needed to monitor it for a few days so that they could get an average. Sure enough, my BP did come back slightly elevated, on the higher side of normal.
As is common in these situations I immediately went looking for ways to reduce it and I was pretty annoyed to find that I was doing everything that the internet suggested. Eating bananas, reducing salty foods, eating oily fish & beetroot. It left me thoroughly disappointed with the prospect of potentially having to go onto medication for.
It got me thinking, my lifestyle is not the same as your average person nowadays. I mean how many people would you know that regularly run ultramarathons and have been doing for about 10 years? My guess would be either none or not many (unless you’re an ultrarunner yourself!).
You may have heard about a phenomenon called “Athlete’s Heart“, it is a physical adaption to the heart brought on by years of endurance training. The heart becomes stronger and larger to be able to pump more blood around the body. A bigger heart, is essentially a bigger pump which means that each beat of the heart sends a higher volume of blood around the body and, crucially, it means that there is a higher pressure spike when blood leaves the heart. Because the heart is bigger, it doesn’t need to pump as much whilst resting and this causes a low resting heart rate and mine is usually between 40 and 45, for elite runners in can be less than 40! I’m not quite there, yet!
So, this started my line of interrogation, would endurance athletes like me have a naturally higher BP than an average person?
As it turns out, yes, particularly when you’re older, like me. My time spent searching the internet came up with something called the “Endurance Athlete Paradox“. If you’ve never heard of this before its pattern that has been noticed (and studied) with long-term endurance athletes. The studies show that they can have higher levels of artery calcification (artery stiffening), despite excellent fitness and low risk factors. The athletes contain more calcification of plaques whilst actually being fitter.
This is obviously paradoxical to the general perception that arterial stiffness is bad. So, why might this be? The thought process of why this might happen is due to the rigours of intense training, that the repeated high blood flow causing stresses on the arterial wall forcing it to adapt. The plaques that endurance athletes develop are said to be more calcified plaques than soft plaques which is understood to be more stable and less likely to rupture. Which could explain a lower heart attack risk.
I decided to put some of my stats into chatGPT to see what it thought about it. It came to an assumption that my higher heart rate is about right for someone of my weight, endurance training history and low heart rate. It agreed that I have a slightly elevated BP but its in the right range for a “Masters” athlete (yes, that made me feel old!).
Obviously, I’m not going to take everything as gospel, it’s AI after all and prone to mistakes. But it made me feel a lot better and less stressed about my BP. I will use the information to go back with to the GP with and ask for them to look into it before I’m prescribed medication that I may not need.
I must stress, it’s not the GPs fault, they’re used to dealing with the average person, I expect that they don’t see many athletes come through their doors as we’re less likely to go. One of my runner friends told me a story about being sent to A&E because the GP thought their HR was dangerously low, when really it was just the years of training.
But, I think that it’s something we should all keep in mind when going to a GP, we’re not average. We have trained and adapted our bodies in a way that makes us physiologically different from the typical patient and, as such, we need assessing differently.
Something, I think, you should keep in mind when you visit a GP.
