Why do your legs play such an important part in your heart health?

Or more to the point, how is it that your legs might stop you dying when your ticker is dodgy?

Studies show that people with cardiovascular disease tend to have a lower rate of death if they have strong legs.

Now, a paper finds that people with strong legs are less likely to develop heart failure after a heart attack. The paper was presented at Heart Failure 2023, a scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology.

Bottom line: Strong legs won’t necessarily stop you having chronic heart disease, or a cardiac event. But they will help keep you alive.

How so?

The short version: The leg muscles act as a secondary heart, playing a vital role in returning blood from the lower extremities to the chest.

The heart is a mighty, hard-working organ. But it’s not strong enough on its own to beat gravity and convey the blood in your legs back to its chambers.

This relies on a complex system involving the heart, a series of valves that keeps the upward-moving blood from travelling backwards, and the muscles in your feet and legs.

The heart can’t retrieve blood from the legs on its own. The legs act as a second heart.

When these muscles squeeze – which they do when you walk, stand and otherwise move about – the veins also squeeze, pushing the blood upward.

If you’re largely a sedentary person, you’re sitting in the one spot for hours on end. Meanwhile, your leg muscles aren’t being squeezed and the blood begins to pool.

This can lead to potentially dangerous blood clots called deep vein thrombosis, or DVT.

This is one reason we bang on endlessly about the need to be more active. It’s not just about losing weight. It’s about supporting the basic functioning of your circulatory system.

How strong legs can offset heart trouble

Myocardial infarction, more commonly known as a ‘heart attack’, is caused by decreased or halted blood flow to the myocardium. (This is the muscular tissue of the heart.)

A heart attack may be ‘silent’, and go undetected, or it could be a catastrophic event leading to loss of stable blood pressure and sudden death.

Myocardial infarction is the most common cause of heart failure, with about 6 to 9 per cent of heart attack patients going on to develop the condition.

About half of people who develop heart failure die within five years of diagnosis.

Heart failure occurs when the heart muscle doesn’t pump blood as well as it should. Blood often backs up and causes fluid to build up in the lungs and in the legs.

But, if you have strong legs – which infers you have good circulation in the legs – you’re supporting your heart that has been weakened by myocardial infarction.

How? By staving off heart failure.

For the research that supports this thinking, see here and here.