by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Of course, exercise is healthy. But more doesn’t help; on the contrary: too much physical activity, such as intensive fitness training, is not good for anyone. Excessive consumption promotes heart disease and reduces life expectancy. You waste time and effort without benefiting. An American doctor backs up this surprising warning with new research results.
“I have always exercised whether I was nervous, happy, or sad,” explains Dr. James O’Keefe, a cardiologist with the Mid-America Heart Institute at St. Louis Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. “Sports were my coping mechanism.” In college, he played basketball and was a track and field athlete. He began his medical studies with the resolution “that I must exercise every day because it is very important to me.” Like most people, he thought, “A little is good, but more is better.” So I competed in triathlons and ran 5Ks, 10Ks, and the occasional marathon. I was very, very fit and pushed my body.”
But the doctor paid an unexpected price for this. “When I was in my mid-forties, I started having heart palpitations and sometimes pain after a very strenuous bike ride or something similar.”
O’Keefe paused. “Wait a minute, where did I get this idea that exercise is good and that extreme exercise is better in middle age? “That’s just not true,” as he found out firsthand.
So, he started researching. To do this, he used global contacts in the clinical research community, reviewed all high-quality studies on the topic that had been published between 2011 and 2022, and conducted his own. He has published his results with three colleagues in Missouri Medicine, the specialist journal of the Missouri State Medical Association.
On the one hand, this confirmed what was well known: being physically active is good for you. “70% of adults in the U.S. don’t get enough exercise and would be healthier if they did more, no matter what. Even a walk is much better than sitting on the couch, in front of the screen, or behind the windshield. We have a sedentary lifestyle, and if you don’t actively incorporate exercise into your everyday life, you will have problems, no question, just like with the standard Western diet.” After just an hour of sitting, blood sugar, triglyceride, and inflammation levels begin to rise. (1)
Why do we work like this? “For the last three million years of evolution, a physically active lifestyle was essential for our ancestors,” explains O’Keefe. “Adults typically took 14,000 to 16,000 steps per day, usually walking two to five kilometers, often carrying items such as wood, food, and water, as did their children. For hunter-gatherers, ensuring daily subsistence required plenty of moderate exercise with smaller doses of intense physical activity – we are genetically adapted to this pattern. This evolutionary template provides a logical guide to what an ideal activity pattern that promotes optimal health and longevity should look like.”
As O’Keefe’s systematic review confirms, the risk of premature death, diabetes, depression, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, sarcopenia – age-related muscle loss -falls, and much more decreases in a dose-dependent manner in couch potatoes once they start exercising. Aging processes slow down. Life expectancy is increasing. The “health span” increases: the period of life one spends well, without age-related restrictions. The mood brightens.
Too much intense training backfires
But “about 2% of people, maybe it’s 5%, overdo it. Very active, competitive people. I see patients like this all the time. They come with atrial fibrillation or accelerated arteriosclerosis with a lot of calcium in the coronary arteries or with ventricular problems. It can even shorten life expectancy if you take it to the extreme.”
Fitness freaks put excessive strain on their hearts in particular. “If you do full-distance triathlons at age 40 or 45,” O’Keefe noted, “the risk of atrial fibrillation increases by 500% to 800%,” one of the most common cardiac arrhythmias: where the heart beats persistently irregularly and often so quickly that it pumps less blood to the body. Although this is not immediately life-threatening, in the long term, it increases the risk of strokes.
„70 % der Erwachsenen treiben nicht genug Sport. Doch zwei bis fünf Prozent übertreiben es. Sehr aktive und wettbewerbsorientierte Menschen. Ich sehe ständig solche Patienten. Sie kommen mit Vorhofflimmern oder beschleunigter Arteriosklerose mit viel Kalzium in den Blutgefäßen oder mit ventrikulären Problemen. Im Extremfall kann es sogar die Lebenserwartung verkürzen. -DR. James H.O. Keefe
Is life expectancy pre-programmed?
O’Keefe recalls an incident while doing his cardiology training at the Mayo Clinic. (2) Before he went jogging during a lunch break, his mentor admonished him: “You know, James, you’re just wasting your heartbeats. Everything seems to have some sort of programmed life expectancy related to heart rate.” For most species: The sum of all heartbeats is constant. The heart of mammals beats about 2.5 to 3.5 billion times. A hummingbird, for example, has a heart rate of 500 beats per minute and lives for one or two years. Animals with a very slow heart rate, such as Whales, for example, can live for 200 years.” Some turtles can live up to 200 years with 5 to 15 beats per minute; conversely, a jerboa with over a thousand beats per minute only lives seven to 10 days.
And in humans? The highest life expectancy is achieved at a heart rate of around 60 beats per minute. If he constantly increases it in his fitness craze, he is not bringing himself closer to excellent health but rather to premature death. Above a value of 90 per minute, a cardiovascular event becomes more likely.
Where is the “sweet spot”?
How much is too much? Where is the so-called “sweet spot” – the level of exercise that brings the greatest health benefits?
“It’s a complex math problem,” says O’Keefe. “You should move enough to keep your heart rate low even when you’re not exercising. That’s how you optimize your heart rate. But you shouldn’t do it five or seven hours a day training intensively, let alone complete a triathlon over the total distance. Then, you are simply asking far too much of your heart. As with everything in nature, it is better if you don’t stay in the extremes but rather find the right balance between them. O’Keefe cites a recent large-scale study in which around a million people were followed for a decade. While intensive exercise of up to 75 minutes per week reduced the risk of mortality and chronic diseases in a dose-dependent manner, the benefit stagnated afterward.
In his research review, O’Keefe found, among other things, the “sweet spot” for strength training. “I’ve always been a fan of it. But here, too, the devil is in the details regarding the dosage. (…) When I do strength training, I go to the gym and train for between 20 and 40 minutes.” “I try to use weights. I can do ten reps with them (…) Afterward, you feel exhausted and need a few days to recover. If you do this two or three times a week at the most, that seems to be the sweet spot for longevity to be.”
Conversely, more than 60 minutes per week negates the benefits of strength training and leaves you worse off than if you skipped it altogether.
With the graphic above, O’Keefe illustrates the J-shaped dose-response relationship between active strength training and all-cause mortality. Accordingly, the benefits peak at 40 to 60 minutes per week. Beyond that, it sinks. Anyone who does 130 to 140 minutes of strength training per week – or perhaps even exerts themselves more excessively – will not benefit any more in terms of life expectancy than if they do nothing at all – a shocking finding. Anyone who lifts weights three to four hours a week will actually live a shorter life than someone who doesn’t do any strength training at all.
The doctor’s conclusion is: that 20 minutes twice a week on non-consecutive days or 40 minutes once a week is the way to go. In addition, the fitness program should not be limited to strength training but rather just an extra. Because you can achieve much more by simply walking or doing other moderate exercises.
Cheers to “moderate” exercise – ideally in company and outdoors
O’Keefe strongly advocates for “moderate exercise” – defined as exercise to the point where you are slightly exhausted but can still carry on a conversation. “We’re talking about gardening and housework, walking, leisurely cycling”; he also mentions yoga and not too strenuous swimming. Running, hiking, dancing, rowing, squash, golf, and doubles tennis are also included. “Moderate” When practiced, they have a more beneficial effect on our life expectancy than intensive training – about twice as good.
In practice, the doctor concludes:
- There is no reason to exert more than 75 minutes of intense physical activity per week – that is, to engage in particularly strenuous activities that “make the heartbeat, sweat, and cause shortness of breath.”
- From your mid-forties onwards, you should primarily enjoy physical activity and reduce stress but not engage in competitive sports. O’Keefe’s analysis shows it to be “extremely cardiotoxic” because it overloads the heart: “High levels of intense physical activity are necessary to achieve peak physical performance, but not necessarily to maximize life expectancy and the lifespan of the heart. Very strenuous exercise acutely increases the risk of cardiovascular disease – heart attack, sudden cardiac arrest – especially in people in midlife and beyond.”
One should not underestimate the benefits of just walking, as O’Keefe emphasizes. The average American walks about 3,800 steps per day, which is just over two miles. “There are more and more studies on this topic that are being carried out with the help of activity trackers,” says O’Keefe. “We receive large amounts of data, such as the British Biobank, which covers half a million people and has been doing so for ten years can be observed. More is clearly better. You can make great progress if you go from a sedentary lifestyle – 2,000 to 3,000 steps per day – to 7,000 or 8,000. But “at around 12,000 steps, there is a plateau” – longer distances do not help more health benefits.
In his analysis, O’Keefe also highlights the importance of “social sport” over individual training – for example, playing a tennis match with friends. A few years ago, he conducted a study with Danish colleagues in which they examined data on physical activity and longevity. It turned out that playing tennis gives you 9.5 years of additional life expectancy, playing badminton gives you seven years, whereas running, swimming, and cycling only give you 3.5 additional years. Gym activities like weight lifting and running on the elliptical machine or treadmill only last 1.5 years longer compared to the lifestyle of lazy, sedentary people.
At first, O’Keefe suspected that his analysis had somehow gone wrong. But then he realized the social aspects of certain sports brought the added benefit. “Doing sports and socializing at the same time is an absolute goldmine for longevity,” he says. “This means that even walking the dog or a friend or playing squash is very important… It’s about moving your body in a playful way and doing it in company.”
In addition, exercise in nature is more beneficial than in closed spaces. According to a British study, for the sake of your health, you should spend at least 1.5 to two hours a week outdoors – even if it’s just a city park or avenue. O’Keefe thinks very highly of shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing”: “Japanese people who live in Tokyo, one of the largest cities in the world, get on a bullet train and an hour or two later are in the mountains and forest. They go hiking or just sit in nature and smell the pine trees and the fresh air. Then they get on the high-speed train and go back home.” As they do, their blood pressure drops, their mood brightens, fears subside, and the quality of sleep improves the immune system is strengthened, cortisol and inflammation levels decrease. (3)
For the 10.3 million Germans who frequent over 9,000 fitness studios and ensure the industry an annual turnover of 4.9 billion euros, https://de.statista.com/themen/233/fitness/#topicOverview follows from O’Keefe’s analysis a clear message: A large part of what you are trying to achieve for your health there for a fee, you would get cheaper outside – with less effort.
(Harald Wiesendanger)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10121111
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Remarks
1 Dogra S, Wolf M, Jeffrey MP u.a.: “Disrupting prolonged sitting reduces IL-8 and lower leg swell in active young adults”, BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation 11, Article number: 23 (2019)
2 Im Interview with Joseph Mercola.
3 Siehe dazu „Auswege Infos“ Nr. 53 / Dezember 2017: “Rezeptfrei, unschädlich, wirkungsvoll: ‘Waldbaden’ gegen Krebs”.- “No prescription, harmless, effective: ‘Forest bathing’ against cancer”.