Optimising Sports Performance Through Heart Health Screening
Whether you are inspired by major global sporting tournaments, a marathon, or high-intensity events like Hyrox and CrossFit, participation in endurance and fitness challenges is soaring.
In fact, the 2026 London Marathon set the record for the highest number of marathon applicants, pulling in 1.1 million applications – an increase of nearly 300,000 from 2025.
Every year, athletes are pushing their bodies further and harder than ever before. Yet, many people embark on these intense physical journeys without fully understanding how their cardiovascular system responds to extreme exertion.
At One Heart Clinic, we want to change the narrative around cardiac care. Preventive heart screening isn’t about waiting for a problem to arise, or uncovering hidden conditions. For sportspeople and amateur athletes, it’s an empowering, performance-focused tool that allows you to train smarter and with peace of mind.
Why Understanding Your Heart Matters In Sport
Your cardiovascular system is your engine behind your athletic performance. However, there’s an important distinction to understand: good fitness does not always equal good cardiac health.
Health screening in sport can be highly valuable. You could have two individuals with identical running paces or VO2 max scores, yet their hearts may have completely different physiological structure and responses to exercise. Many athletes meticulously track their pace, power and splits, but have never had a detailed assessment of the very organ driving it all: the heart.
Dr Ginwala-Hasan, Consultant Interventional Cardiology and Preventive Cardiology at One Heart Clinic, notes that high-intensity exercise puts the cardiovascular system to the ultimate test:
“Elite and highly active athletes are pumping more litres of blood per minute through their heart than the average person, putting more stress on the heart. While this makes the heart healthier in many ways, because it is constantly being used, extreme exertion can cause the heart chambers to dilate, trigger arrhythmias, or cause calcium deposition in the arteries. We need to pay attention to how the heart adapts.”
The Value Of Establishing Your Physiological Baseline
Whether you are a professional competitor, an amateur athlete, or getting back into fitness after a break due to illness or injury, establishing a physiological baseline is invaluable.
Screening maps out your specific resting heart rate, blood pressure, cardiac structure, exercise response, recovery profile, and rhythm patterns. This detailed baseline helps you:
- Spot abnormal changes over time: Knowing your normal numbers makes it easier to track changes over your training lifecycle.
- Differentiate fatigue from warning signs: It helps you understand whether your symptoms are standard training fatigue or signs that require investigation.
- Avoid overtraining and burnout: It ensures you are not pushing your heart beyond its current capacity.
Critically, some athletes tend to normalise symptoms like mild dizziness, palpitations, sudden breathlessness, chest tightness, or excessive fatigue, chalking them up to “just a hard workout.” A professional cardiac screening provides the reassurance needed to distinguish safe exertion from potential risks.
Where Are You On Your Fitness Journey – And What Does Your Heart Need?
Dr Ginwala-Hasan highlights that cardiorespiratory needs change depending on where you are on your fitness journey:
Your journey into cardiac screening
| The beginner/returner |
|---|
| Goal: Safe entry/return into sport and fitness |
| Focus: Healthy lifestyle and good form form |
| Screening: Baseline tests |
| If you are just starting out or returning after an injury, consistency is key. Dr Ginwala-Hasan advises scheduling 30 to 40 minutes of cardiovascular exercise three to four times a week into your diary like an unmoveable meeting. |
| Moderately active |
|---|
| Goal: Refine training |
| Focus: Safe thresholds |
| Screening: Every 1-2 years |
| If you are running 5ks or 10ks, cycling several hours a week, or undertaking regular HIIT sessions, structural changes to the heart are less likely, but staying on top of your cardiovascular fitness remains key. Routine screenings every one to two years are highly beneficial for this group to ensure safe progression. |
| Highly active/elite athlete |
|---|
| Goal: Maximum performance |
| Focus: Structural monitoring |
| Screening: Every 6 months |
| For those regularly training for marathons, cycling races, or Ironmans, the heart is under sustained stress. Dr Ginwala-Hasan recommends regular cardiac screening – potentially every six months depending on weekly training volume – to monitor structural changes, chamber size, and arterial health. |
|
The beginner/returner
|
Moderately active
|
Highly active/elite athlete
|
|---|---|---|
| Goal: Safe entry/return into sport and fitness | Goal: Refine training | Goal: Maximum performance |
| Focus: Healthy lifestyle and good form | Focus: Safe thresholds | Focus: Structural monitoring |
| Screening: Baseline tests | Screening: Every 1-2 years | Screening: Every 6 months |
| If you are just starting out or returning after an injury, consistency is key. Dr Ginwala-Hasan advises scheduling 30 to 40 minutes of cardiovascular exercise three to four times a week into your diary like an unmoveable meeting. | If you are running 5ks or 10ks, cycling several hours a week, or undertaking regular HIIT sessions, structural changes to the heart are less likely, but staying on top of your cardiovascular fitness remains key. Routine screenings every one to two years are highly beneficial for this group to ensure safe progression. | For those regularly training for marathons, cycling races, or Ironmans, the heart is under sustained stress. Dr Ginwala-Hasan recommends regular cardiac screening – potentially every six months depending on weekly training volume – to monitor structural changes, chamber size, and arterial health. |
Dr Ginwala-Hasan’s Tip On Holistic Training
Cardiovascular exercise is fantastic for heart health, but it must be paired with consistent weight or bodyweight training 1-3 times a week. Resistance training protects your bone density, maintains muscle mass, boosts metabolism, and protects the skeletal system from the repetitive impact of sports like running.
Preventive Heart Health Tips: Fuel, Sleep And Polarising Your Training
Optimising your heart health goes beyond clinic diagnostics; it involves your daily lifestyle choices. Dr Ginwala-Hasan shares her core principles for supporting athletic performance with preventive heart health habits:
Whole Food Fuelling
If you are starting out, focus your diet using the plate mapping approach comprising of:
- One quarter of lean proteins
- One quarter of healthy carbohydrates
- One half of colourful vegetables
While high-quality supplements like creatine and reputable whey proteins are excellent tools, the vast majority of your intake should consist of real, unprocessed foods.
If you are embarking into endurance athletics, a focus on sufficient carbohydrate intake to improve glycogen stores will fuel your activity. This generally takes the form of a carbohydrate-loading diet starting at least 2 days prior to competition, and consuming 60-90g of carbohydrates every hour during competition.
Hydration throughout training and competition is extremely important with water and good quality electrolyte replacement.
Protecting Sleep Hygiene
Sleep is a non-negotiable recovery tool. Aim for a screen-free hour both at the start and end of the day to lower anxiety, regulate stress hormones, and dramatically improve sleep quality.
Polarising Your Training
Avoid the trap of running or training at the exact same high intensity every day. Embrace zone 2 training – slow, conversational-paced exercise where you can easily speak while moving. Keeping your long endurance sessions slow ensures your body clears lactic acid and preserves muscle freshness, meaning you can perform at your absolute best on designated high-intensity or speed days.
Cardiovascular Symptoms That Shouldn’t Be Ignored When Training
While serious cardiac events in athletes are rare, sudden cardiac issues can occasionally occur, even in younger, seemingly healthy individuals. Underlying conditions such as cardiomyopathies, inherited arrhythmia syndromes, or congenital health abnormalities often present no symptoms until the body is pushed to its limits.
Early identification allows these conditions to be managed effectively. Screening is not about causing fear, but about providing the ultimate reassurance and making informed decisions about your health.
If you experience any of the following during training, races or fitness events, you should seek a specialist review:
- Chest pain or tightness that comes on during exertion and eases with rest
- Pain radiating to your arm, neck, jaw or back
- Palpitations (a fluttering, skipping or racing heart) that feel out of proportion to the exercise you are doing
- Unexplained or sudden shortness of breath that slows you down compared to your usual performance
- Dizziness, light-headedness, or any instance of passing out (loss of consciousness)
While modern wearable fitness devices are reliable for tracking heart rate trends and acting as an excellent first-line flag, they cannot replace formal clinical diagnostics. If a wearable device flags an irregular rhythm blip, it should always be confirmed with professional testing.
Specialist Sports And Performance Packages At One Heart Clinic
To support your fitness goals safely, One Heart Clinic offers dedicated performance and sports medical packages:
Cardiopulmonary Performance
Best for: Those who want a high-level, data-driven understanding of their physiological capabilities.
What it includes: This package goes beyond standard fitness screening to provide an integrated picture of your performance, from central cardiac function to how efficiently your peripheral muscles utilise oxygen.
It features cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET), providing detailed measurements of lung function capacities and cardiac output to help refine your training thresholds and safely maximise efficiency.
Sports Medical
Best for: Competitive amateurs, elite athletes and endurance event participants who require formal, specialist confirmation that their heart is fit for competitive events.
What it includes: This package helps you meet the precise medical criteria mandated by race organisers or sports clubs, and even employers.
You will receive a Completion Of Clearance Form following your successful sports medical.
Do You Need Cardiovascular Risk Screening As A Young Person?
When you are in your 20s or 30s, feeling fit, and hitting personal bests in your training, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “I’m too young to worry about heart disease.”
The reality is that cardiovascular conditions can develop silently, even in younger adults. High-intensity lifestyles, modern stress, and silent risk factors often fly completely under the radar. Furthermore, underlying genetic traits or a family history of early heart issues can impact your cardiovascular health regardless of how many kilometers you run each week or how clean your diet is.
Early detection is everything. Catching subtle changes before any noticeable symptoms actually start empowers you to make proactive, highly informed adjustments to safeguard your future health and keep your training on track
Healthy Heart Screening For Under 40s
To give younger fitness enthusiasts and amateur athletes absolute clarity, One Heart Clinic offers a dedicated Healthy Heart Screening For Under 40s package. This specialised package bypasses the guesswork by providing a clear, comprehensive picture of your current cardiovascular health through five core investigations:
- Consultation with a Consultant Cardiologist
- Electrocardiogram (ECG)
- Echocardiogram
- Blood test panel (covering cholesterol profile, blood glucose, kidney and liver function, and thyroid markers, and novel biomarkers such as lipoprotein-(a).)
- In Office Blood Pressure Check
Find out more about our Healthy Heart Screening For Under 40s package.
Train With Confidence
“Investing in your heart health is the most performance-enhancing choice you can make.”
By understanding your baseline cardiovascular health, you can step up to your next starting line with confidence, knowing your body’s engine is ready for the journey ahead.
For more information on our sports and performance packages please view our packages. If you have any questions or wish to book a package or consultation, please call us on 020 3983 8001.
