More on Aortic Valve Leakage – BionicOldGuy

One of the things that keeps my grey cells active is learning all I can about medical conditions I have. So I’ve continued to research paravalvular leakage of the aortic valve with Google’s Deep Research. So far I’ve asked it for an overview of the condition, for more details on treatment options, and for exercise recommendations. The resulting reports are all gathered here. The report “Aortic Paravavlular Leak and Left Ventricular Hypertrophy Exercise Risk” was a bit of an eye opener. There is definitely danger of overdoing it with my condition, which can lead to pathological growth of the left ventricle (which is being chronically overworked). This brings a need for a change in mindset. For years now I’ve had an “aging athlete’s” mentality, that pushing it a bit in my training is a good thing because it slows down aging. Now that’s probably not true and I need to be trying more to maintain fitness and muscle mass as much as possible, but more importantly avoid straining the heart.

So I’ve cut my training back further, to an average of an hour a day. And I only do one harder day of leg training and one of upper body training per week. I’ve also cut the length of the harder training per session back some more. I also wear my heart rate monitor during training and avoid going over 100 beats per minute. I ‘ll discuss all of this him when I follow up with my cardiologist, but for now I feel comfortable that I’m being conservative enough.

I still am doing my group ride which is now my longest ride of the week by far, at about 2 1/2 hours. But I use ample electric assist as needed to keep the pace leisurely, and hang out near the back of the group. If my Doc frowns upon this long of a ride when I see him, I can always skip the group ride and just do a short ride to meet them for lunch so I’m still getting the social benefits.