Peter,
Just a quick note, Dr Natale just cautions Afibbers not to do very heavy bench and overhead presses above body weight ... The vast majority of folks can still engage in highly strenuous and effective exercise programs, and stay in excellent shape, after an expert ablation process.
He means the caution mainly for extreme body-builder type weight lifters and is from his frequent observation of both the need for open heart valve replacement surgery AND a super high incident of ongoing AFIB in serious competition level body builders later in life.... i.e. Arnold Schwarzenegger who has had valve surgery and AFIB, also the father of modern body building Joe Weider who died at a ripe old age of heart failure arising from complications from prior multiple valve replacements. Also, a significant number of owners and trainers of serious heavy iron gyms up and down the west coast, and in other parts of the US, have found a similar later life fate years after retiring from active competition.
When you really strain so hard and so often that you really have to grunt doing weight work, especially overhead and bench presses, it is like putting a constricting band around one's thicker-walled muscular ventricles such that this tight restrictive contraction of the ventricle's forces the two thinner-walled atria to balloon out and stretch over time which can often then lead, long-term, to leaky poorly seated cardiac valves and which also makes one especially AFIB prone due to the often dilated atria.
The vast majority of folks, though, after a successful expert AFIB ablation process, can engage in a very vigorous exercise program without having a problem just by taking a few modest precautions and applying good common sense.
Shannon
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/20/2016 01:06PM by Shannon.