Do different exercise interventions improve heart rate variability and cardiovascular health factors in healthy older adults?
Endurance, coordinative, and multimodal exercise training improve cardiac autonomic control in healthy older adults, whereas resistance training does not, though all modalities improve secondary cardiovascular health factors.
This systematic review revealed beneficial effects on cardiac autonomic control in healthy older adults through endurance, coordinative, and multimodal training but not through resistance training. Secondary health factors improved after all types of physical interventions. Future investigations should more thoroughly adhere to methodological standards of exercise interventions and ECG recording for the assessment of autonomic regulation.
Grässler et al. (Wed,) studied this question.