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Summer sloths have been urged to get off their sun loungers and start stepping up exercise with the news that running may add years to your life.
Coach and athlete Andy Price, who penned an exclusive series of training session columns to inspire GulfWeekly readers to enter triathlons, believes recent research findings will help inspire more people to take up sport.
Price, who works in the British Embassy, said: “A fit, active life leads to a healthy longer life. Too many of us lead sedentary lives, we sit around in offices and we lean all day over computers.
“Get yourself out, go for a run. If you can’t run, go for a walk. Go out there and actually do some activity, 30 minutes a day and you’ll feel so much better.”
Running may be the single most effective exercise to increase life expectancy, according to the new review and analysis of past research about exercise and premature death.
The new study found that, compared to non-runners, runners tended to live about three additional years, even if they run slowly or sporadically and smoke, drink or are overweight. No other form of exercise that researchers looked at showed comparable impacts on life span.
The findings come as a follow-up to a study done three years ago, in which a group of distinguished exercise scientists scrutinised data from a large trove of medical and fitness tests conducted at the US Cooper Institute in Dallas. That analysis found that as little as five minutes of daily running was associated with prolonged life spans.
After that study was released, the researchers were inundated with queries from fellow scientists and the general public, says Duck-chul Lee, a professor of kinesiology at Iowa State University and a co-author of the study. Some people asked if other activities, such as walking, were likely to be as beneficial as running for reducing mortality risks.
High-mileage runners wondered if they could be doing too much, and if at some undefined number of miles or hours, running might become counterproductive and even contribute to premature mortality,
And a few people questioned whether running really added materially to people’s life spans. Could it be, they asked, that if in order to reduce your risk of dying by a year, you had to spend the equivalent of a year’s worth of time on the trails or track, producing no discernible net gain?
So for the new study, which was published in Progress in Cardiovascular Disease, Dr Lee and his colleagues set out to address those and related issues by reanalysing data from the Cooper Institute and also examining results from a number of other large-scale recent studies looking into the associations between exercise and mortality.
Overall, this new review reinforced the findings of the earlier research, the scientists determined. Cumulatively, the data indicated that running, whatever someone’s pace or mileage, dropped a person’s risk of premature death by almost 40 per cent, a benefit that held true even when the researchers controlled for smoking, drinking and a history of health problems such as hypertension or obesity.
Using those numbers, the scientists then determined that if every non-runner who had been part of the reviewed studies took up the sport, there would have been 16 per cent fewer deaths over all, and 25 per cent fewer fatal heart attacks.
Perhaps most interesting, the researchers calculated that, hour for hour, running statistically returns more time to people’s lives than it consumes. Figuring two hours per week of training, since that was the average reported by runners in the Cooper Institute study, the researchers estimated that a typical runner would spend less than six months actually running over the course of almost 40 years, but could expect an increase in life expectancy of 3.2 years, for a net gain of about 2.8 years.
In concrete terms, an hour of running statistically lengthens life expectancy by seven hours, the researchers report.
Of course, these additions “are not infinite,” Dr. Lee says. Running does not make people immortal. The gains in life expectancy are capped at around three extra years, he says, however much people run.
The good news is that prolonged running does not seem to become counterproductive for longevity, he continues, according to the data he and his colleagues reviewed. Improvements in life expectancy generally plateaued at about four hours of running per week, Dr Lee says. But they did not decline.
Meanwhile the researchers found that other kinds of exercise also reliably benefited life expectancy but not to the same degree as running. Walking, cycling and other activities, even if they required the same exertion as running, typically dropped the risk of premature death by about 12 percent. (To make my own biases clear, I run but I also love cycling and I walk my dogs every day.)
Why running should be so uniquely potent against early mortality remains uncertain, Dr Lee says. But it is likely, he says, that it combats many of the common risk factors for early death, including high blood pressure and extra body fat, especially around the middle.
It also raises aerobic fitness, he says, and high aerobic fitness is one of the best-known indicators of an individual’s long-term health.
Of course, the findings in this new review are associational, meaning that they prove that people who run tend also to be people who live longer, but not that running directly causes the increases in longevity. Runners typically also lead healthy lives, Dr. Lee says, and their lifestyles may be playing an outsize role in mortality.
But even taking that possibility into consideration, he says, the data suggest that running could add years to our lives.
And don’t let the Bahraini summer put you off, just be prepared, said Andy. “In this climate take at least a bottle of water with you and if you start to get thirsty just take sips.
“Don’t drink too much and don’t gulp it down and when you get back make sure you rehydrate yourself by taking more sips and finishing off a litre bottle of water. You lose 30 per cent of your capabilities when you’re dehydrated and you must avoid heat stroke.
“Going out early in the morning is best, run on the dirt rather than the roads and pace yourself.”
Jogging for just 60 seconds a day can strengthen bones, a study found. Just a small amount of ‘high-intensity’ exercise stimulates the growth of bone cells, the research suggests.
In the study, women aged between 40 to 69 who exercised for just a-minute-a-day appeared to have stronger bones than those who did not.
The research, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, examined data from more than 2,500 women wearing fitness trackers. It compared participants’ activity levels with bone health. As well as finding four per cent better bone health among women who did one to two minutes of exercise a day, they found it to be six per cent better among those who did even more.
Lead author Dr Victoria Stiles, pictured, from the University of Exeter, said: “There’s a clear link between this kind of high-intensity, weight-bearing exercise and better bone health in women.”
Dr Stiles said the study was ‘careful not to ignore short bursts of activity throughout the day’ because ‘short snippets of high-intensity activity are more beneficial to bone health than longer, continuous periods’.
Researchers also found that older women required less activity to generate bone mass. Post-menopausal women jogging at 5mph made the same gains as those who had not hit the menopause jogging at 6.2mph.
