“New Study Shows Connection Between Leg Strength and Heart Health in Heart Attack Patients”

2023-05-24 11:19:00

By Martin Lewicki | May 24, 2023 at 11:19 am

For many, leg training is the tedious part of a gym workout. Some hobby strength athletes even neglect it completely. Strong legs apparently also ensure a healthy heart, as a new study from Japan shows.

Anyone who has dealt intensively with weight training certainly knows the saying: never skip a leg day! Don’t skip leg day! There are many good reasons not only to train your upper body, but also your legs. It’s not just about aesthetics and beautiful body symmetry. Because the legs and buttocks are home to the largest muscle parts of the body, so they stimulate the metabolism particularly strongly as soon as they are trained. They also ensure a higher testosterone release and thus promote the entire muscle build-up of the body. That’s why you should always train your legs to build muscle better. (FITBOOK reported). But from a health point of view, you should train your legs diligently, as a new Japanese study shows. Because apparently there is a connection between leg strength and the risk of heart failure (heart failure). FITBOOK took a closer look at the study. How do the researchers justify this?

Heart attack is the most common cause of heart failure

The exciting study was on the Heart Failure Congress Presented to the European Society of Cardiology in Prague in 2023. It shows that high leg strength can reduce the risk of heart failure.¹ This is an important finding because heart attacks have been shown to be the most common cause of heart failure². This means the heart cannot pump enough blood to supply the body’s organs with sufficient nutrients. Previous research has found that a strong quadriceps (thigh muscle) is associated with a reduced risk of death in patients with coronary artery disease.³ Now the theory has been reinforced that strong legs are good for heart health and particularly for recovery from a heart attack.

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Researchers examine leg strength in heart attack patients

The current study recruited 932 subjects who were hospitalized with a heart attack between 2007 and 2020. All of these patients had no prior heart failure and did not develop any complications during hospitalization. The mean age of the subjects was 66 years, 81 percent of the patients were male.

The researchers then measured the quadriceps strength of the patients. They were asked to tense their thighs as hard as they could for five seconds while sitting. The force was converted into kilograms using a dynamometer. In order to ensure comparability between the subjects, the force was set in relation to the body weight. Candidates whose scores were above the mean were placed in the strong group. Whoever was below that was in the weak group. The mean for women was 33 percent of their own body weight, for men it was 52 percent. About half of the subjects belonged to the strong group, the other half to the weak group.

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Risk of cardiac insufficiency twice as high with weak leg strength

Patients were followed for approximately 4.5 years after initial hospital admission and leg strength measurement. 67 patients (i.e. 7.2 percent of the study participants) developed cardiac insufficiency. The evaluation of the data showed that the test persons from the group with weak leg strength had a 41 percent higher risk of heart failure. The researchers also calculated that every increase in leg strength by five percent of your own body weight reduces the risk of heart failure by around 11 percent.

“Quadricep strength is easy and accurate to measure in practice. Our study shows that it could help identify patients who are at higher risk of developing heart failure after a heart attack and who could then be monitored more intensively,” explains study author Kensuke Ueno, a physiotherapist at Japan’s Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in a press release. The study results would suggest that patients after a heart attack should strengthen their leg muscles in particular through strength training. Because a high leg strength can apparently significantly reduce the risk of cardiac insufficiency. However, further studies are needed to verify this finding.

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