Heart patients urged to exercise their calf muscle

Heart patients urged to
exercise their calf
muscles
Written by Narelle Towie
SCIENTISTS have a strange tip for heart
disease sufferers: make sure you exercise your
ankles.
University of Western Australia sports
biomechanics scientist Fausto Panizzolo
studied the walking style of people suffering
from chronic heart failure and compared their
stride to healthy, age- and fitness-matched
volunteers.
His team found people with heart failure chose
to walk at the same speed and in the same way
as their healthy counterparts, except their ankle
muscles work much harder to keep up.
“Because we found some specific differences in
muscles with people with heart failure
compared with healthy people who just
exercise less, we believe some specificity of
this disease affects soleus muscles more than
other muscles,” Dr Panizzolo says.
The soleus is a powerful muscle found in the
back part of the calf, running down from the
knee to the heel. It is used for standing and
walking.
Previous studies have shown that people with
weak hearts easily become exhausted during
physical activity, such as walking, but that the
heart was not the only muscle affected by the
condition.
Dr Panizzolo says his team wanted to take a
different approach and isolate the specific
muscles, other than the cardiac, that were most
affected by the condition, so rehabilitation
programs could be tailored and improve a
patient's exercise ability.
Smaller calf muscles
Chronic heart failure, where the heart becomes
weak and fails to pump blood properly around
the body, affects 300,000 people a year and
kills more than 2500 in Australia alone.
Sufferers find exercising difficult and can’t walk
far, often causing other medical problems that
are sometimes terminal.
The researchers took biomechanical
measurements of six men and four women with
chronic heart failure as they walked on a
treadmill at different speeds and then compared
the results against 11 healthy people, including
eight men and three women, from the local
community.
“What we found is people with chronic heart
failure have a smaller calf muscle and then it is
also required to produce more work,” Dr
Panizzolo says.
“We speculate that …. the fact that their calf is
working very close to their maximum work
capacity is what limits their exercise ability.”
Dr Panizzolo says people with heart failure rely
more on their ankle than their hip when
walking, and that they should focus on
exercising their calf muscle, targeting the
soleus.