Performance or health—do you have to choose?
People are living longer than ever—and, guess what—they want more! The US Census Bureau predicts life expectancy will reach the mid-80s by 2050, and that by 2100, there will be over 5 million centenarians. Longevity is big business—fueling scientific research on the known factors that affect aging like health care, diet, and exercise. In fact, there are scientists out there right now trying to make a mouse live forever!
When it comes to exercise, leading scientists in the field of longevity are studying what the healthiest “dose” of exercise might be, and there seems to be a dividing line between training for performance or training for health and longevity.
More is not always better
The more we exercise, the healthier we should get, right? Well, to a point, it seems. After a certain point, exercise seems to hurt us. At the end of this blog, we link to a study that shows in more detail when that happens, but here are the numbers:
500-3500 kcal/week = a declining death rate as exercise increases
Above 3500 kcal/week the death rate starts to climb
The type of exercise also figures significantly into the equation. The longer and more intense training sessions become, the more longevity is negatively affected.
Endurance sports
Veteran endurance athletes have been studied extensively, and show some disturbing trends in their cardiovascular health:
Increased coronary artery calcification (an accurate predictor of heart attack risk)
Increased incidence of atrial fibrillation (irregular heartbeats)
Increased incidence of myocardial fibrosis (stiffening of heart tissue)
Increased risk of sudden cardiac death (within one hour of exercise)
All of this sounds pretty grim—but we think it’s worth knowing that if you pursue a life of competitive endurance sports, there may be a price to pay—and if you’re doing endurance sports for your health, the notion may be misguided.
Away from the extremes: Choosing your spot on the Performance vs Health spectrum
When it comes to pure longevity-based exercise, the consensus seems to be that moderate exercise with a social element are the ones that ‘perform’ the best. Sports like tennis and golf seem to be better for you if the only metric you care about is longevity. But as you might have figured out by now, we like the performance aspect as well. We don’t want to train ourselves into the grave, but we don’t want to be really incapable humans for the last couple of decades, just because golf was the only activity we did outside the office.
So, is there a middle ground between performance and longevity? We think there is. What seems to be hurting our aging hearts is repeated exposure to high-intensity training over longer periods. This seems a little bit intuitive for those of us who aren’t 22 anymore. When you do exercise at high intensity for a longer duration—you definitely feel it. Our perspective on this is, therefore, to vary your training duration, intensity and training stimuli. Spend 80% of your training under 80% of your maximal heart rate and do some weekly harder but shorter workouts.
This approach should promote your fitness without hurting your heart or retirement plans—hence, you can have your cake and eat it too
Stay safe and until next time
Scott and Lennart
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7431070/#__ffn_sectitle