Exercise, the Serial Killer

Remember when your, teacher, coach, doctor and parents told you that exercise was good for your body? They were wrong! Exercise can kill you. And no, I am not joking.

Image from: http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/circulatory/heart.htm

You may have heard about this on the news when a particular exercise-freak suddenly drops dead during exercise. This is usually caused by something known as cardiac hypertrophy, a condition where your heart's ventricular muscles grow too big due to excessive exercise, causing a blockage in your heart, resulting in death.

However, scientists in Germany have recently published a paper to show that excessive strenuous exercise can even kill people with stable coronary heart disease. What they discovered was that when such people participated in daily strenuous exercise, they were more than twice as likely to die from a cardiac arrest or stroke, as compared to those who only did moderate exercise. This study may also support current guidelines by the health authorities of moderate exercise, five times a week.

Obviously, this does not mean that having a sedentary lifestyle is absolutely better. In fact, the study also showed that when people with coronary heart disease did not exercise at all, they were four times more likely to dis from a heart attack or stroke than moderate exercisers. What this research suggests is that there is a reverse-J association, meaning no exercise has the least benefit, moderate exercise has the most, and strenuous exercise has at least some benefit. Thus, as long as you are not running marathons every weekend and not sitting at home all day, you should be fine.

What does this mean for us? Clearly, this is a sign for me to stay away from exercise so that it can never have the chance to kill me. What about you? Will you join me in my quest to never exercise again? Comment down below and if you liked this post, please share it!

Thanks for reading!

Reference:

Ute Mons, Harry Hahmann, Hermann Brenner (2014).  A reverse J-shaped association of leisure time physical activity with prognosis in patients with stable coronary heart disease: evidence from a large cohort with repeated measurements. BMJ Publishing Group Ltd & British Cardiovascular Society. doi: 10.1136/heartjnl-2014-305780