I don't think so. It's a valid concern. It is not either sedentary lifestyle or extreme endurance. There is a middle of the road. It seems that some here get angry when anyone tries to bring up a subject that might be something to pay attention to. It's not stuffing Big Macs and fries or Ironman.

Sigh. Just another article that the common folk will pick up, misunderstand, and cite to help them justify their sedentary lifestyles...


If people believe you have to do a marathon or Ironman to have a healthy heart or lose weight, it would discourage a lot of people. If people knew that you don't have to go to those extremes and would be better off just getting off the couch and going for a hike, or bike ride without having to be out there for 3 hours.


The focus should be on diet anyway, that has a far more important impact on heart health anyways.


Whatever we are doing isn't working given the dramatic increase in obesity and heart disease over the last 30 years. Without medical intervention, things would be a lot worse. Maybe it's not a bad idea to consider things have to change and maybe we have it wrong.

It is not either sedentary lifestyle or extreme endurance.
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You know that and I know that. However, many of the non-athletes I talk to say things like, "I don't run because running is bad for your knees," or "People who run are more likely to have a heart attack". The problem is that they read the headline, EX: "Article about too much cardio", skim the details, and come to the wrong conclusion.

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Take a short break from ST and read my blog:
http://tri-banter.blogspot.com/

Did you look at the other articles on t-nation??? They're all about body-building, and selling "Biotest" supplements, so it is no surprise they are anti-cardio. Not certain but i suspect the t in t-nation stands for testosterone and prob many of their devotees are taking it. Also, it is pretty clear from the discussion of several of the alleged problems, like excess lactic acid making your blood pH too low, make it obvious that the writer has never experienced what he writes of; the whole point of lactic acid build-up, from the body's self-preservation viewpoint, is that the pain of acidosis forces you to slow down or stop well before your blood pH reaches problematic levels.

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Health is crap.
Diets and exercise don't work.

People want to do things...
They want to climb mountains, climb huge rocks, Kayak raging rivers, compete and excel in sports.

When we want to do something awesome we will train, we will change our diets..... we get shit done!!!

When we are "trying to be healthy" we go to the gym and pretend to exercise.
We follow the latest diet fads half assededly. We scour the internet looking for articles that tell us that exercise is bad for us, that being "skinny fat" is unhealthy, that we are wonderful just the way we are.

No I havent, I think the T stands for "training " . I came across it looking for info on over training.
During my busy work season I train 6 days a week 1-1 1/2 hrs. But put in 50 hrs a week of some fairly hard work with a steady amount of intensity in the South Fl heat. Some of my clients think Im nuts and warned me about this so I figured id look into it and found this.

Hello Parkland and All,

Nice article .... thanks for posting

Looks like we need to up our game and ride in Tour de France to extend our lifespan .....

I cannot find the reference now but recall the Tour riders life extension was about 5 years compared to general population.

The study noted that the activity is not without some adverse effects to the body (and heart in particular) but on balance the Tour riders lived longer ...... also noted was that they were a select group.

https://breakingmuscle.com/...iving-everybody-else

Excerpts:

"This is the conclusion researchers came to and shared in a recent study published in the European Heart Journal. What makes this study even more extraordinary is that the study was not just an examination of elite cyclists, but Tour de France cyclists who participated in the event during the years of 1947 to 2012.

The riders who compete in the Grand Tours (Italy, France, Spain) are at the very top of the endurance world, and the Tour de France is generally regarded as the single hardest sporting event in the world, because it amounts to not just a single race, but an all-out race every day for three weeks."

https://academic.oup.com/...pants-in-the-Tour-de

"We observed a substantially and significantly lower mortality in participants in the Tour de France, compared with the general male population. However, our results do not allow us to assess in detail the balance between positive effects of high-level sports activity and selection of healthy elite athletes, vs. any potential deleterious effects of excessive physical exercise or alleged doping."

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I would suggest that humans probably select activities that they want to pursue ...... and afterward concentrate on the information that justifies the activity .... discarding information that argues against the chosen activity.



Dr. Michael Shermer ...... RAAM rider noted for Shermer's Neck Syndrome .... 'Believing Brain' ..... writes:

"We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow."

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Cheers, Neal

+1 mph Faster

Riiiiiight.

If the test tube on the homepage didn't tip you off, you just have to scroll down to the bottom.

I would suggest that humans probably select activities that they want to pursue ...... and afterward concentrate on the information that justifies the activity .... discarding information that argues against the chosen activity.



Dr. Michael Shermer ...... RAAM rider noted for Shermer's Neck Syndrome .... 'Believing Brain' ..... writes:

"We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow."[/quote]


THIS IS THE CORRECT ANSWER

You don't like endurance sports- fine!!

Take up bicycle touring, yoga, cross country skiing, competitive adult soccer....

Get out there. Do stuff. Have fun.
Do what you want.

Don't sit around looking for stupid psuedo scientific reasons why you shouldn't do stuff!!

https://www.runnersworld.com/...-of-running-too-much

This article does a good job showing why the media picks up on these sorts of things (Not sure if it references the same study though).

Basically randomness + media bias (and even bad science) means that we get articles published which say these sorts of things.

Put it this way, if you came out with a study that said "exercise is good for you" the media would just say "duh!". But if 95% is the standard you use for your statistical thresholdhokd, you still get a few studies thay run contrarty to established science.

The ones that the media publishes are things that grab your attention, which is why we get articles that day wine is or same as working out, or in this case cardio is bad for you. Even if you had 20 other studies that said that it was good for you, the one that says it's bad (and may have methodological problems) gets through the media screen because the others are boring.

Given your screen name and your 50 hr/wk of outside work, are you in the landscaping business???

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Anytime I hear of free radicals it’s part of a fad diet

Is it really true that a couple hours a week of cardio is bad for you?

I’m pretty sure without exercise / cardio my brain wouldn’t work as well (I’m cloudy without exercise), I’d drink more / eat less healthy and be less patient

Pretty sure cro-magnon man did a sh*t load of cardio chasing after those woolly mammoths... just sayin' is all.

Here's the name of some of the forums: Supplements and Nutrition, Bigger Stronger Leaner, Over 35 Lifter, Politics and World Issues, Rate My Physique Photos, T Replacement, Pharma.

If somebody calls it 'cardio', they clearly have no idea and are already biased.

An article also about too much lifting:

http://darwinian-medicine.com/...e-strength-training/

Random excerpt:

"The human body may be ill-equipped to deal with the stimuli that are produced by a high-volume, high-intensity bodybuilding-type workout. This type of exercise pattern differs markedly from the physical activity pattern(s) that conditioned the human genetic make-up.

Excessive strength training may cause a wide range of adverse health effects, including adrenal insufficiency, chronic injuries, gastrointestinal distress, and immune dysfunction. This is particularly true if it’s coupled with a compromised immune system and/or a high intake of supplements and unhealthy foods."

Roof cleaning business

Ah, so i would guess 50 hr/wk of carrying hoses of water and cleaning supplies, holding up the heavy hoses for hours on end, etc. While i've never done your exact type of work, i have spent a lot of time on USAF duty as a Civil Engineering officer. While i am an officer and hence technically "the boss" who could just stand around and "supervise", we were/are almost always short-handed (b/c most Americans have no interest in serving their country...) and my bosses always want the job to have been done yesterday, so i pitched in to help lay concrete, repair potholes, fill in sinkholes (pilots get really irritated when their plane almost falls in a sinkhole, which almost happened at around 0100 one morning in AFG a few years back...:)), build new billets, etc, so that we could get things done faster. Now I still had to go to a bunch of meetings so I never worked more than say 40 hr/wk outside, vs the enlisted guys who worked about 65 hr/wk, but i totally get what you're saying, and 10 hr/wk of SBR on top of 50 hr/wk of moderately strenuous manual labor would definitely wear you out. All i can say is you have to just go off of how you feel and do as much as you can w/o making yourself so tired that you can't get out of bed on Monday morning.

To get back to your original question about the article you posted, i think you can see now from all the other comments that it was written by a very pro-body-building, anti-endurance person, and comes from a body-building web site with forums as quoted by "the_thief" above. The "Rate My Physique Photos" kinda sums that web site up. :)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Except that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were generally dead well before what we'd call middle age these days. So if running after an antelope all day does have long-term negative consequences for cardiac health, it wouldn't have made any difference in terms of evolution because we'd have been dead of disease or being gored by a woolly mammoth long before those consequences kicked in.

False, because those who live the longest in better health are more likely to pass on their genes. Maybe in the short term you're right, but in the long term, evolution rewards the best adapted.

Hello imswimmer328 and All,

Unfortunately evolution does not help promote long life much ..... humans reproduce relatively early in life .... and after reproduction evolution is mostly interested in the survival of the offspring .... so another crop can survive.

Life extension therapy may help though ....

https://newatlas.com/...-human-trials/51867/


"Scientists have been making significant headway recently, studying a variety of anti-aging targets from discovering a protein that can restore hair and improve fitness in old mice to revealing how fecal transplants increase the lifespan of some fish. But the arena of stem cell transplantation has offered some of the most exciting anti-aging research outcomes.

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are a particular type of adult stem cell generating a great deal of interest in the world of science. MSCs are currently being trailed as treatment for no less than a dozen different types of pathological conditions from cancer to heart disease.

This new MSC treatment is targeted at reducing the effects of frailty on senior citizens. This is the first anti-aging stem cell treatment directed specifically at the problem of age-associated frailty to move close to a final FDA approval stage.

The treatment derives human mesenchymal stem cells from adult donor bone marrow and in these clinical trials involves a single infusion in patients with an average age of 76. Both Phase 1 and Phase 2 human trials have demonstrated the treatment to have no adverse health effects."

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It appears stem cell therapy would probably fall into WADA 'cell modification' prohibition and the general WADA prohibition of therapies 'with the potential to enhance sport performance' ..... like making you younger.

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Cheers, Neal

+1 mph Faster

I have a coworker who loves these articles. His favorite word is "cortisol"; he read an article about it like half a decade ago and is convinced that doing more than 20-30 minutes of elliptical once or twice a week (maybe) is bad for you. And of course I'm suffering a heart attack every race and won't be able to walk when I'm sixty.

He's also at least 80 pounds overweight and really intends to do something about it. Seriously, this time.

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The point is, ladies and gentleman, that speed, for lack of a better word, is good. Speed is right, Speed works. Speed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Living longest is irrelevant. Best adapted just means to reach child bearing age and reproduce and allow your offspring to do the same. If they can do this then living to 90 is irrelevant. If you start having heart disease because of running to much but it doesn’t occur until you’re 60 then it’ll be irrelevant for the most part on an evolutionary standpoint.

Did he also read an article about how eating healthy and in moderation is bad for you? My guess is his diet, like many Americans, is crap.

Oh boy...

He loves his Diet Coke (and it's healthy because it's diet!). And he "can't help" but have a pile of french fries with lunch instead of a salad, and then complains about carbo crash later in the day. Or Lean Cuisines. And he's convinced that anything the waiter says is "made in the restaurant" (I guess as opposed to bags like at Chili's?) is healthy.

I've long given up.

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The point is, ladies and gentleman, that speed, for lack of a better word, is good. Speed is right, Speed works. Speed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.