Wattsup

https://www.theguardian.com/science/...-disease-study.



WHO's recommended level of exercise too low to beat disease – study

Bigger reductions in risk of five common chronic diseases only achievable with five to seven times more activity, research finds

livedarklions

Studies that have come out in the seven years since this talk have suggested it is the combination of intensity and duration that could cause the harm. One of the researchers in this area said that it isn't training for the marathon that does the harm, it's running the race. I'm going to continue to ride long distances, but I had been doing a little hiit, which I am now going to avoid. My sense of the research is I either need to pick duration or intensity to maximize cardiac benefit. I get other benefits from distance riding that I don't think I'd get with shorter duration exercises, not all of which are physical. I really enjoy long rides for a lot of reasons.

ExPatTyke

There's an article in this week's Cycling Weekly about Sean Yates. Since 2003 he's apparently had ongoing heart problems; enlarged heart, one heart chamber dilated, and valves not working properly. He puts that down to 30 years of riding flat out.

Garfield Cat

The practice of Medicine and the science of Medicine is just one aspect.

There are reasons for people to engage in a sport that, when taken to extremes, it takes up that valuable resource, time. Or what little time you may have left.

I once met a boxing referee who stopped the fight, giving the bruised fighter a chance to live another day.

We plan for the future and retirement resources, etc. Planning for cycling may allow for an extended time to enjoy but not to over extend the invitation.

unterhausen

People love to publish these kinds of stories. Oooh, this bad thing can happen if you exercise! With the implication that you should sit on the couch or walk around the block 3 times a week. Whereas the reality is that I know a lot of long distance cyclists and don't remember one that had problems like this. I know they are out there, but it's much lower probability than people like to make it sound. And I know a lot of people that have heart problems from their sedentary lifestyle. Both of my parents suffered from heart disease and may have both died from it.

Lemond1985

Did he use PED's? Fignon died young at 50:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/s.../01fignon.html

Riding flat out while clean is tough enough on the body, doing it on PED's must absolutely shred various organs. I would assume that domestiques would would dope even more recklessly than the stars. Since the odds of them being tested would be lower, because they rarely place very high. Of course if Yates hasn't admitted it, he's presumed innocent.

Sy Reene

Can we talk about Bruce Lee? the Enter the Dragon guy..

aclinjury

Can you name one article that warns about extreme exercise and also concludes (or implies) that you should sit on the couch??
Some people are honestly trying to understand the issue which science is still trying to grasp. You muddling with silly nonsense isn't helping.

wolfchild

He died from brain swelling caused by prescription meds, and not from heart problems caused by doing too much endurance training.

Lemond1985

He was originally gonna play the David Carradine character on the Kung Fu TV series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_F...;s_involvement

ThermionicScott 

You're referring to a myth that people love to repeat, but isn't based in science. Thus, not worth caring about.

Rides4Beer

What do I care, I'll be dead, but at least I'll go with a smile on my face! (altho, it might be a bit traumatizing for the other person(s) at the time it happens)


Every time you turn around there's a new study about exercise, diet, etc. Is beer healthy? Probably not, but I enjoy it. Is running ultra marathons healthy? Maybe not, but I enjoy them. I'm not going to sacrifice my current quality of life for the potential for some extra time on the other end of my life, when I'm probably going to be miserable anyway. For all I know I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, gotta enjoy life while you can.

bakerjw

Interesting reads in the links and good discussions. I am in the "How did we evolve" camp.

Go back 50,000 years or so, the typical **** sapien was a nomadic hunter gatherer. Foods that were available and in season were consumed. Grains were likely a component of the diet at some point but they were very coarse when consumed. During winter months when fruits and vegetables were scarce, the diet likely consisted of lean meat and organs. If you are a hunter, have you ever cleaned an animal with marbling like we see in modern beef? If the diets was almost all strictly meat and protein then that would go a long way toward explaining why keto based diets work.

For the exercise part, did early **** sapiens run a lot or spend hours in zone 4 of cardio? I would assume during a hunt that they would chase after their quarry but considering that humans are slower runners than virtually all larger warm blooded animals it seems more likely that it was more trapping and cunning than running after a deer with a club or spear.

We see 2 extremes. The couch potato potentially suffering from heart issues due to sedentary lifestyles and poor diet as compared to the ultra athlete with a an extremely active lifestyle and good diet.

I fall in the middle as many of us likely do.

MoAlpha

Given that early H. sapiens tended to succumb to disease or accident after three or four decades, on average, (s)he didn't need a circulatory system that was built to last.

burnthesheep

That's an interesting idea. Thanks for that.

You'd be amazed at what you CAN do on only about 5 to 6 hours a week. I bet you could ride as a Cat 2 on 10 hours a week. Maybe not win anything, but be able to "hang".

It's also not totally accurate to bill it as "moderate" or "medium". It would help me to frame it in TSS or something like that. As last week I did only 6 hours and hit 500 TSS score. Usually, about 5 to 6 only nets maybe 350. I had more running and more steady-state on the bike instead of more on/off hiit stuff.

I think the stuff really bad for you is the pro biker "monuments" race style stuff. Where they breakaway and hold like 320w for like 5 hours straight. I feel that seems worse than Thomas or Froomie attacking in the 400's for half an hour over some mountain a couple times.

wphamilton

Generic "you" maybe, I couldn't ride with Cat 2 with any amount of training.

But you're right, what does "moderate" level of exercise really mean? The met-equivalents in some of the studies referenced by that study implied that a brisk walk was "moderate intensity aerobic exercise" and by that standard practically all of mine is more than moderate threshold. I still think it's within the general range though. My "10 hours" is split between 4 hrs running and about 6 hours commuting by bike. Not "serious" training but even so I believe there is still a large gap between there and the "extreme exercise" area, both in volume and intensity.

Generally speaking, there is pretty frequent reference to marathon training as the extreme or excessive volume of training. That's 2 or 3 times the amount that I run - and I'd be self-destructing at that point - so it's really not a threshold that can sneak up on you IMO.

MoAlpha

That's also a pretty squishy quantity. Elite runners train for marathons with a periodized combination of speed and distance work, which can amount to 100 mi/week or more at peak. I worked up to a 100 mi week once during a summer of training for college X-C and it broke me down so bad I sat out the entire season. Most casual runners training for a marathon will do a few 10-15 mi. runs in addition to whatever their base is and call it good. No need to describe the difference between what elite and not-so-elite cyclists do.

To me as a physician and a working scientist, it would seem very odd if physical activity were monotonically related to health.

livedarklions

I don't understand the reasoning that to figure out what we're suited to, we would look back 10s of thousands of years. It ignores the fact that we've since undergone many thousands of generations being selected for our ability to produce and live on an agriculturally produced diet. And the notion that paleolithic humans had anything resembling a single diet is completely belied by the fact that humans in that era were so wide-ranging that subgroups of them had entirely different food supplies, in some places, humans were almost exclusively vegetarian, in others, almost complete reliant on meat and/or fish. Despite what you're saying about lean meats btw, a lot of cultures were dependent on eating blubber or fatty meat and fish, for example.

A lot of us are descended from peasants--field work without machinery was grueling, I doubt anyone really knows what percentage of their day was spent in zone 4, but I'd bet it was a lot.

Anyway, evolution isn't about what will get you to live healthily into your eighties--evolution selects people for the ability to live long enough to reproduce. Longevity beyond that is something we socially desire and are now engineering consciously. It really has nothing to do with critters dwelling in the savannah and dying from an infected foot in their mid-20s, or people doing subsistence farming or hunting/gathering, and occasionally surviving into their 50s.
Not at all sure what you mean by "keto diets work", btw, nor why it would need explanation. It's still a crappy diet in today's world.

wphamilton

I suspect that you're putting it charitably there. The other way around has been posited, that physically healthy individuals are more active, but even that's a little fuzzy. IMO.

I don't doubt that there are levels, pushing the limits, that can cause cardio system damage. I just don't think there's any danger of accidentally getting there, just from being enthusiastic in the training. I'm pretty sure that you'd first have to be aware of over-training and taking deliberate steps to get beyond that, and potential structural injuries, and maybe a handful of other challenges that you'd encounter and deliberately move past before being in danger of the "extreme exercise" heart risk. You'd have to know that you were approaching the extreme end, and the stuff that most of us are doing isn't near that point.

MoAlpha

A gene promoting longevity beyond the reproductive years could be selected for because the reproductive success of a population might depend on the presence of elders with experience relevant to survival. At least this old man would like to think so.

burnthesheep

Then that changes whatever impressions I had. I had assumed "moderate" to be something else.

MoAlpha

I try always to be charitable and agree completely with the above.

livedarklions

Well, at least you're admitting you're fitting the hypothesis to get to your desired outcome.

BTW, I think that's exactly what the promoters of the paleo diet did--they wanted an explanation for why their diet was superior, so they invented an ideal construct of paleo genetic selection that had very little to do with reality.

MoAlpha

I didn't make this one up. Selection for traits which operate at the group level is modern evolutionary doctrine and at the heart of why animals have societies in the first place. The strength of the selection pressure is related to the genetic homogeneity of the group.

livedarklions

Yes, but that's a stretch to get to there's a longevity gene to provide elder leadership, which you implicitly acknowledged by saying "might". You can point to any given characteristic that varies in a population, and make up an evolutionary "story" about why that particular trait or variation came to be. It's fun, but it's usually reasoned backwards and explains nothing.

In any event, I don't see how looking at a caveman's life is going to tell us how riding 125 miles is going to affect your heart--like most of such arguments, it's a make-weight.