Moving Towards the Finish Line of Life Too Soon- Could Intense Exercisers be getting too much of a Good Thing?
If your experience as a diabetes educator is anything like mine you have to coax your patients with type 2 diabetes to be “physically active”, while a chunk of your patients with type 1 diabetes are already exercising quite vigorously.
Truth be told, I love to exercise as do many of patients with type 1 diabetes. Some of my patients with type 1 diabetes and some of my friends who don’t have type 1 diabetes like to do bizarre things like ride their bikes for over 100 miles at a time, run for over 26 miles without stopping, and swim for close to 2 ½ miles. Some of my really wacky patients and friends will actually do all of the above in one day! When all of that activity happens in one day it is referred to as an “Ironman” triathlon.
For a split second I have found myself feeling “guilty” for not ever attempting to complete a marathon or triathlon like my more ambitious patients and friends. Then my common sense kicks in to reinforce my strongly held belief that human beings were not designed to travel such distances and such rates of speed without assistance from some form of motorized vehicle.
It turns out that my common sense may be dead, pardon the pun, on. In a recent article published in the British journal Heart, James O’Keef and Carl Lavie present a compelling argument against participating in the training necessary to complete endurance activities like marathons. This not to say that we should all join our sedentary counterparts on the couch, as 30-45 minutes of daily vigorous exercise reduces the risk for a variety of ailments including early death, Alzheimer’s disease, CHD, diabetes, osteoporosis and depression.
The type of exercise that Dr. O’Keefe argues against is high intensity exercise (e.g. - running at a pace faster than 7.5 mph) lasting more than an hour a day. He backs up this assertion by citing a couple of abstracts recently presented at national meetings that show the following:
- In a prospective observational study that followed 52,660 people for up to three decades, the 14,000 runners had a 19% lower risk of death compared with 42,000 non-runners.
- When the running mileage was teased out in the running group, those who ran over 20 or 25 miles per week seemed to lose their survival advantage over the non-runners, while those who averaged between 5-20 miles of running per week had a 25% lower risk of death.
- Running speed seems to make a difference. Fast runners running faster than 8 MPH appeared to get no mortality benefit compared to non-runners. Those who faired the best ran at a 6-7 MPH pace which would probably be classified as a “jogging” vs a running pace.
- Finally, folks who ran 6-7 days per week appeared to also lose mortality benefits, while survival benefits accrued best for those who ran 2-5 times per week.
The moral of the story? Limit your vigorous exercise to 30-50 minutes a day and you “will add life to your years, and years to your life.” According to Dr. O’Keefe, “if one is training to be able to run at speeds above 7.5 MPH, this is being done for some reason other than further improvements in life expectancy.”
Reference:
O’Keefe, J. H and Javie, C. J. Run for your life… at a comfortable speed and not too far. Heart. Published online November 29, 2012, doi:10.1136/heartjnl-2012-302886.