It’s often made note of in the news when an athlete dies, and overall I’ve always had the impression that most of them lived no longer than the average person, in fact IIRC, I often had the impression a number of them were departing the moral coil slightly early.
Athletes live a good potion of their lives at the acme of human fitness. Why does this seemingly yield little if any health benefit as they age?
Several reasons, as a WAG:
Playing a sport may make you healthier in the long run but is dangerous in the here and now. Marathon runners get heart attacks, football players get insane injuries. Some of these injuries have lasting effects - see: boxing.
Being a professional athlete may come with side issues - you may be more likely to abuse alcohol or drugs, for example.
Performance altering drugs may take a toll on health.
Just because a person is well-adapted for a certain sport doesn’t necessarily make them “healthier” in all respects - triathletes don’t tend to have a lot of body fat cushion, some of those football guys are really too massive for their own good, etc.
Some things you die of, your health isn’t really related. Not only accidental death like a car wreck - plenty of people die of things like aneurysms that could have gone at any time.
There’s probably a huge amount of selection bias in this. If even a semi-famous athlete dies you hear about it. Not so for ordinary people. And most professional sports didn’t become big until after WWII. Most athletes who played enough to get known are still relatively young.
And what counts as an athlete for this purpose? Only men who played in the major professional sports? Do they have to play for a certain amount of time or does anybody who ever made a roster qualify? Do minor leaguers count? Track? Swimming? Professional wrestling? What about college athletes? And women haven’t competed at anything like an equal level of possible fame except for a few Olympic athletes.
Too vague, too undefined, too selective to have a real chance of finding an answer.
Per the “in the news” example I’m thinking of I’m thinking of mainly of notable professional athletes, Olympians included, and assuming (possibly incorrectly) they would be generally representative of their athletic peers in terms of lifespan.
I’m not really putting pro wrestlers in this mix as they take a horrendous beating physically and often live fairly extreme lifestyles which includes massive performance enhancing and recreational drug intakes.
Not sure which athletes you have in mind. You do have to understand that baseball players whom you have heard about for the last ten years were the kind of guys that played hard and partied very hard. They drank a lot, they smoked a lot, and they ate very well.
Football players who are in their 50s and 60s now were playing in an age where you weren’t training year round. In fact, you most likely had a job in the off season. So you spent five or six months getting out of shape, then went into training camp where you were pushed to cut down all that weight fast and get into shape. My guess is that it isn’t good for a body to stress it that way constantly. Many, after retirement, ended up getting pretty overwight when they no longer had coaches working them to death every summer. Some of the players started getting into drugs and steroids as well and that stuff can’t be good.
Other guys like Darryl Kile had a genetic pre-disposition to heart disease. I believe his father died rather young from the same thing. In his case, unless they went in and gave a 33-year old guy a heart bypass, no amount of working out likely would have saved him.
WAG: excluding drug use, my guess is that what athletes consider “exercise” would not be recommended by a doctor, and would be considered dangerous for the average person. One metaphor would be driving a car at 5 mph, 50 mph, or 150 mph. All three have different effects on the car, some good, some bad, some really bad, and like the car, the athlete accumulates damage over time. What we would consider exercise is 50 mph, while what an athlete does is 150 mph.
Imho, that’s what separates professional athletes from recreational ones. The pros are genetically better than the average, and are able to take more punishment for a longer period of time.
One example that comes to mind is a Sports Illustrated article about a reporter sent to try Julio Franco’s daily exercise regimen. Julio Franco is a 50 year old MLB player with a legendary work ethic and training regimen. The reporter gave up when he couldn’t finish Julio’s breakfast (~20 egg whites.)
Jim Fixx was a runner, author of several running books and who died of a heart attack. However, he had lived longer than his father and several male relatives despite being a smoker and overweight before becoming a runner.
In general, being an athlete does not offer the chance of a longer life unless the athlete continues an “athletic lifestyle” and engages in some form of endurance exercise. Genetics also play a part.
Example: Vladimir Kutts, Gold Medal 1956 Olympics-5000 & 10000 meter runs. A stocky runner, he went from 150 to almost 250 lbs after retiring and died of a heart attack at the age of 48.
Shhh, don’t let Jack LaLanne hear you. He’ll kick your ass!
To further extend on the line of speculation that fitness for athletes does not mean overall lifetime fitness, while moderate aerobic exercise (walking or gentle swimming) is definitely good for you, vigorous aerobic exercise and weight training may not be. Aside from the stress this puts upon joints, tendons, and muscles, there is also the stress on both the insulin cycle (from carb loading to support extended aerobic effort) and metabolic stress from increased calorie consumption; talking in extra calories to support vigorous exercise results in an increase in free radical production, accelerated cellular processes, and attendant replication error. Also, many athletes, especially in decades past, don’t have what would be considered a good diet for long term health; they consumed a lot of high glycemic index carbohydrates, saturated fats, only modest amount of highly cooked vegetables, and excessive amounts of proteins, especially red meat (which was once thought to be the most healthful of meats compared to poultry or pork).
So while some exercise is good, it doesn’t mean that more is better, especially at the point that it starts stressing the body’s ability to maintain and repair itself.
Stranger
The physical side of the equation has been handled here. Exercise is good, professional sports aren’t. I personally would be amazed if the extreme wear on a professional athlete’s body didn’t come with a high price. But then there’s the psychological side. Aren’t most succesful athletes by neccessity go-getters, risk-takers, highly driven, aggressive, perfectionist, even obsessed? Haven’t these personality traits been correlated with increased mortality? (it’s been years since I read up on stress and the human body, so I may talk out of my ass).
Life expectancy for a former NFL player is worse than for non-athletes:
However, for some sports, like long-distance running, the life expectancy is actually greater than for non-athletes:
This is definitely part of it. While exercise is good for you in the long run, pushing your body to its physical limits for years at a time is not. For instance, if you go jogging recreationally it reduces your chances of getting colds or flu. But studies have shown that professional marathon runners, on the other hand, contract more respiratory illnesses than the average person, because they’re working they’re respiratory system so hard, so consistenly, that it actually has a negative effect on their immune system.
I cannot give citations for what I am about to say. Nonetheless I think it is basically accurate. I have heard that the average age of death of an NFLer is around 55 (depending on position) and one of the posts above essentially confirms that. Some decades ago, someone was attempting to decide if there was a significant difference in life expectancy of right handers and left handers and decided to study major league baseball players whose chirality was well-documented. (I am not sure how he dealt with “throws right, bats left”, maybe he discarded them). It turned out that righties lived about 9 months longer, maybe significant, but not important. But the shocker in his stats was that the average age of death was just over 65 years.
Now in comparing these stats to those of the (male) population at large, you shouldn’t ask about the average life expectancy of all males, but of all extremely healthy males, say aged 20, which will probably be at least a couple years above average life expectancy.
As to causes, well football is an extreme contact sport and I expect that the internal organs are pretty well mashed by the time an NLF career is over. But that cannot come close to explaining the story for baseball players.
So I have my own WAG. Yes, they are in pretty good shape when playing. But they work hard and eat a lot and then stop working, but their eating habits are harder to change. And the 350 pound behemoths that inhabit the intererior lines in football will see all that muscle turn to fat right quick if they don’t take extreme measures to lose it. Then there is the lifestyle–constant travel, eating in restaurants and so on.
Gotta love an answer that actually gives some real data more than TV reports!
Professional baseball players also live longer than their peers, by 3-4 years on average.
And this.
So the sort of activity matters (and the body build that goes with it - many pro football players are obese as well as muscularly massive) and the dietary habits that persist after the sport, no doubt, and other poor lifestyle choices that travel with being that level of a celebrity. But it seems that many sports are associated with a longer lifespan. Despite a very likely over representation of drugs and alcohol abuse.
Define athlete. People who do basic exercise (70-150 minutes a week of moderate exercise) have lower disability rates, lower rates of chronic disease and life expectancies that are 1-3.5 years longer.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10039577/
However, if you are talking about people who engage in athletics that requires a sustained high degree of metabolic activity (which can result in cellular damage over time) and impact on the joints and body (running, football), I can see how over years those people might have worse health than non-athletes.
My theory:
Because intense specific exercise is not good for you, at all (as you can see even in children with the high rates of injury). Moderate, varied exercise such as any animal gets in it’s normal day to day life, is. We are not made to ‘perform’ or ‘push to our limit’. I think it’s detrimental for long-term health to try to do so.