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Elite WWE wrestlers' hearts are holding up just fine under the intense demands of professional wrestling, a new study finds. Cardiac remodeling observed in these athletes was physiological — not pathological — though notable sex differences emerged. The findings highlight the need for sex-specific benchmarks in athlete heart screenings.
Professional wrestlers may put their bodies through extreme stress, but their hearts are adapting normally, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Researchers screened 68 elite WWE athletes using ECGs and echocardiography and found that, despite high training volumes (~11.6 hours/week), most showed physiological cardiac remodeling with preserved heart function — no pathological hypertrophy detected.
That said, the hearts of male and female wrestlers didn't look exactly the same. Men were more likely to show concentric cardiac remodeling, while women had proportionally larger indexed left ventricular (LV) cavity dimensions — a finding that underscores why one-size-fits-all reference values can be misleading in sports cardiology.
By the Numbers:
Why it matters: WWE athletes have been largely overlooked in sports cardiology research. These findings confirm that resistance-dominant training produces normal cardiac adaptations — but also signal that sex-specific screening standards are essential to avoid misclassifying healthy athletes and unnecessarily sidelining them from competition.
