Cardiorespiratory fitness and heart rate recovery in obese premenopausal women

Post‐exercise heart rate recovery (HRR) has been proposed as a measure of cardiac autonomic dysfunction in apparently healthy adults. We aimed to determine the effects of a lifestyle intervention on HRR among clinically obese premenopausal women. A randomized controlled trial was conducted to investigate the effects of a 3‐month non‐dieting lifestyle intervention program on cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and HRR among healthy clinically obese premenopausal women. Thirty‐one were randomly assigned to 3‐month intensive lifestyle intervention and 31 served as controls. Sixty‐one participants performed a maximal treadmill walking test with metabolic gas exchange. Baseline anthropometric measures were closely related to HRR at 1 min, which may indicate reduced parasympathetic reactivation. Post‐exercise HRR at 60 s (HRR60) increased from 21.3 ± 6.2 to 27.8 ± 10.2 bpm in the intervention group compared with a smaller reduction (26.8 ± 12.3 to 24.5 ± 9.9 bpm) in controls (test for interaction P = 0.0001). HRR120 showed a significant effect of time (P = 0.0002) with no significant interaction with lifestyle intervention. A significant increase in was evident in the lifestyle group (21.6 to 23.6 mL/kg/min) compared with a modest reduction in the controls (22.6 to 21.6 mL/kg/min; test for interaction, P = 0.001). Clinically obese healthy premenopausal women achieved significant improvements in HRR60 and following a 3‐month intensive lifestyle intervention.