As I understand it, on average, people who exercise have been show to have greater longevity than people who do not exercise. But by how much does exercise increase one’s expected lifespan? Is it enough to offset the hours of your life you’ve sacrificed by exercising??
Say a person who is in his 20’s was to take up an exercise program, whereby he devotes a specified amount of time to exercise each and every day in hopes of increasing his lifespan. What is his expected ratio of hours of life gained to hours wasted exercising?
I would think this ratio would need to be fairly high in order to make exercising worthwhile, as you would effectively be trading ‘young’ years for ‘old’ years.
If you exercise for one hour, that is one hour you will never live again.
You extend your life by -1 hours for every 1 you live.
Exercising just makes all the rest of them that much better. The “to make exercising worthwhile” statement boggles my mind. Dont exercise to live longer, exercise to live better.
There are any number of mistaken assumptions in your OP, the primary one being that time spent exercising is “wasted”. Admittedly, time spent on a treadmill in a gym may not be quality time, but you can always go swimming, hiking, bike riding, canoeing, or even just take a walk. For many people, going to the gym is their social time as well.
Being in shape makes your entire life more pleasant, not just your twilight years.
Keeping fit does not guarantee a longer life (c.f. Jim Fixx, the running guru), however if you do manage to make it into old age, you’ll probably be healthier and more productive.
However, let’s pretend that the OP has some validity. The only support I could find in a quick Google search that exercise actually extends the lifespan is that obesity can reduce your lifespan by 10 years. So let’s use that as our very shaky benchmark. Let’s assume that you spend an hour a day engaged in some serious aerobic exercise. In 24 years, you’ll have spent the equivalent of an entire year exercising. In 72 years, you’ll have spent three years. But by that time you’ve probably extended your lifespan by 7 years, assuming that the exercise you’ve been doing is enough to keep your weight in check. So it’s still better than a 2:1 ratio.
So basically, it doesn’t appear that you can use your ratio theory as an excuse to keep your ass on the couch.
Well, you might have a heart attack while exercising. That wouldn’t be good.
Of course, you could also pull a muscle in your leg which in turn would make you limp and walk slow for a while, and lets say that you were being chased by a pack of wolves, well, you have a bum leg and the wolves would eat you. So, don’t exercise, that’s my advice.
And not only that, but exercise raises your metabolism, which causes more free radical damage, and that may cause you to die sooner!
If all you care about is a long life, then maybe it’s not worthwhile. But years of sitting on the couch waiting for the reaper don’t sound fun at all to me.
Actually, this topic much debated among the CRON-ies. (people practicing calorie restriction with optimal nutrition) In the rat studies where they restricted the animals diet, the rats that lived the longest had the most restriction and didn’t exercise. The rats that had restricted diets and did exercise lived the next longest, followed by the non-calorie restricted rats that exercised. The shortest lived rats didn’t restrict calories or exercise.
Which is pretty much waht ultrafilter is saying. Hmmmm, I know I’ve seen the abstract on one of the CRON-ie discussion boards I frequent but I can’t find the link right now…
That said, I personally believe that although exercise may not add years to your life, the years you have will be much better.
The trick to exercise is to make it fun. Let’s say your exercise regimen is centered around jogging in place on a treadmill and then plunking a huge, absurd, expensive Bowflex machine in your living room.
Booooooooring. The time you spend on exercise like this is not only gone forever, but risks increased stress damage when you realize what a joyless turd of a life you’re leading.
Now, let’s say your exercise regimen is based around hiking around a local state park and trying to silently follow a family of deer, or having regular enthusiastic sex with your SO, or learning kung fu or ballroom dancing or something else that makes you cool. Now THAT’S a worthwhile use of time and calories.
In exercise as in the measurement of life as a whole, quality trumps quantity.
What about the pulse? When you do aerobic exercise, you increase your pulse rate dramatically. The payoff (or one of them) is that if you do this enough, your overall pulse will reduce. This saves strain on your heart. So how many extra-beats during exercise leads to a one heart beat per minute reduction?
According to respected cardiologist Henry Solomon, in his book “The Exercise Myth,” exercise doesn’t do jack beans to extend lifespan–unless you are the most absolute sedentary slug in your personal life.
Some md has a website where he has listed all the healthy habits and how much it adds to your life expectancy. according to scientific research. Of course if you do multiple healthy habits, it doesn’t simply add. Flossing added two years which really got me. Can’t remember the name of the site right now but I might think of it.