Too much exercise can KILL YOU!
This is the best news I've heard all week!
Hey guys, Tara here for Dnews - with an interesting new study about: the SILENT killer.
Now we've been taught to believe that exercise is great for us - because most of the time,
it is!
But it turns out there's a small portion of the population who exercises too much - to
the point where it may actually kill them.
Now chances are you've heard stories about people who are super healthy, run 20 miles
every single day, and then all of a sudden - boom, they drop dead out of nowhere.
Most of the time, that's caused by cardiac hypertrophy - which is what happens when you
exercise so much that your heart muscles get enlarged to the point where they obstruct
your ventricles, until eventually you just die.
Now most of us don't have to worry about that.
It only kills about 100 people per year in the US, and almost all of them are insane
athletes.
HOWEVER, a new study out of Germany finds that high-intensity exercise puts us at risk
for more than just cardiac hypertrophy.
The results, which were published in the journal Heart, show that people with existing heart
disease who "overdose" on high-intensity exercise - may actually increase their risk of death
from heart attack or stroke.
Researchers looked at over 1000 people, who had been diagnosed with stable coronary artery
heart disease for 10 years or more - and found that those who completed daily, strenuous
exercise - were more than twice as likely to die from a heart attack or stroke, than
those who exercised moderately.
By contrast, people who didn't exercise at all, were 4 times more likely to die of a
heart attack or stroke.
Current guidelines say that heart disease patients should do up to an hour of moderate
activity at least 5 times a week.
Which is still in line with this study, although their results seem to take on a sort of reverse
J curve - where no exercise is really really bad, moderate exercise is ideal, and too much
exercise is bad - but still not as bad as no exercise at all.
It might seem counterintuitive to think that exercise could possibly harm someone with
heart disease, but other studies have found similar results.
Endurance training, in particular - has been shown to send the body into an acute inflammatory
state that, over time, can damage the heart.
Of course, none of this should serve a deterrent to exercise, unless you're running marathons
every week.
Not exercising at all, still has the worst possible outcome - but the intensity and duration
of the exercise we do, are things we should also be considering.
What do you guys think?
Is high-intensity exercise gonna kill us all?
I can't say for sure, but I'll tell you this much - it definitely won't kill me.
As always, if you have thoughts about this episode - leave em in the comments below,
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