Let me preface this post by stating that I realize, support and live by the rules that exercise and diet are very important to your health and lifespan. I am certainly no iron man but I do like the treadmill, avoid too much red meat and fried foods and generally try to be healthy.
However my question is about the diametrical extremes of “being active”.
We all know that being a lazy fat ass who lives on fast food and a couch is going to die young and our society is filled with information on diet and healthy living to avoid that. But what about the other end of the spectrum? Those that push their bodies to extremes on a consistent basis.
Is there any empirical (probably not) or even anecdotal evidence along with opinion that you can in fact “wear out” your body, specifically your heart and other organs living on the extreme end of the exercise? By extreme I am talking lifelong extreme distance runners and the like.
Additionally, I wonder if any studies have been proposed to see if long term extreme exercise has led to a bodies vulnerability/increased exposure to diseases like cancer.
I have read many preliminary studies about calorie restriction leading to increased lifespan, leading me to think about the work load on your organs to digest and utilize the intake. Wouldn’t the same thing apply to very heavy wear and tear on your heart and other organs in long term extreme exercise?
While I know the body is nothing like a man made machine, it seems logical to at least consider you can wear out your body sooner by “red lining” it consistently in much the same way you would an engine.
I have definitely seen the issues with mobility, joints, overall comfort in football players like Earl Campbell. However I was more specifically asking things like heart failure.
If you are a lifelong marathon runner and generally get your heart rate in the 150+ range for extended periods, are you “wearing out” the muscle, the valves, et al?
Of course we need to point out here that (as the article points out) Jim Fixx was genetically predisposed to having heart issues, and his exercising, rather than being the cause of his death, probably kept him healthy longer than if he hadn’t been exercising.
I’ve heard of women essentially wrecking their bodies. What can happen is that they exercise so much that their body fat drops below what’s healthy for a woman, and they suffer what amounts to premature menopause (because fat produces estrogen). Their bones then can become brittle from osteoporosis, and if they try to tough it out they can cripple themselves.
Note that she has to really work at it to end up that bad off. It’s only logical that if you try to work anything too hard it’ll break.
According to this article (and others I just googled) endurance athletes like marathon runners, while they may have higher heart rates when they’re actively exercising, have unusually low heart rates the rest of the time. 40-50bpm, according to that article. So if you exercise strenuously for, say, four hours a day and relax the other twenty hours your heart probably beats fewer times each day than that of the average couch potato.
My wife, who goes to the gym regularly tells me that whenever she gets a checkup the first thing the nurse says when she measures her resting heart rate is “I can see that you’re keeping up with the exercise”.
(I go to the gym more than she does, and they don’t say that to me, though. Foo.)
wasn’t there a couple of olympic runners who this happened to? one was a woman who did drop dead of a massive heart attack and there was a guy nearly died and quit training. The woman was quite a while back (80 or 90’s) I want to say her name was kersee or something like that?
missed the edit frame, kind of short for those of us who don’t see or type well
anyway it wasn’t kersee who died it must have been a friend or relative also in the sport because I remember all the press about them being ultimate healthy and coroners report basicaoly broke down to a person needs at least minimal body fat for there organs to work and that was why the runners heart failed. I think I’ve also read that this occurs in anorexia too, might find something searching there.
did some google digging found several olympic athletes over the years dropping dead of heart failure very young, usually while playing.
sorry kind of dijointed long day and don’t feel well
You’re probably thinking of Florence Griffith Joyner, who was related (sister-in-law) to Jackie Joyner-Kersee. But she was a sprinter, not an endurance athlete, and died of epileptic seizure.
Perhaps some summary of those studies would be useful.
As per the full article of the second link,
That article then documented some findings consistent with myocardial fibrosis (“LGE”) in a group of 12 older male veteran lifelong and still competing endurance athletes average age 57, more in those who did the most marathons and ultramarathons.
This finding has been replicated in a larger study of veteran runners (and in rats, in whom it was documented that arrhythmias were more easily induced).
So possibly the extreme end of endurance training can increase the risk of fibrosis which in turn may increase the risk of arrhytmias.
A doctor once told me that “study [and it was in the singular] has shown” that people who run on average live longer than people who don’t - by about the same amount of time they spend running. I chose not to verify that statement, because I liked it. I still do. And I still don’t. Run that is.
