Since the death of ultrarunner Micah True, there has been a good bit of news making the rounds debating on how much exercise is too much exercise. Some have said that more than 25 miles of running per week is too much. Others have said that more exercise is always better. Still others are still sitting on the couch and using these headlines as an excuse to not get up and exercise.
The full formula on what is too much is probably very complicated. It is probably different for every person, and probably different for a person at different stages of his or her life.
My two cents: Get up and exercise, chronic over exercise might be bad for the heart, however a sedentary lifestyle is bad for health.
If you are worried about the health effects of over exercising, don't run 5 marathons a year, but do run for fitness and fun. If you are running less than 20 miles per week, you have nothing to worry about. If you spend 8 hours per day sitting, you have a lot to worry about.
Meanwhile, I will leave the search for the facts on this issue to the exercise scientists and cardiologists while I train for my trail half marathon and olympic triathlon next year.
How about you? Do you plan to change your training based on these reports? Comment below.
Speaking of the exercise scientists:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.runnersworld.com/health/too-much-running-myth-rises-again
I would imagine that it is a lot like a few years ago when people actually started worrying that drinking too much water during exercise was bad. The amount of water it took was huge, something like enough to name you gain 5lbs by the end of the session.
ReplyDeleteWhen I would bike to kung tu. I would drink 2 24 ounce bottles or node on the way, drink a lot whole I was there, and still be 5lbs lighter when I got home, so I cant even imagine drinking that much. Especially with the sloshing.
Plus, it seems like we have heard all this before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Fixx
Heck, there was a guy in the 24 hour mtn bike championship a few years ago who almost died of rhabdomyolosis, but mort people aren't capable of pushing themselves that hard.
I think there is more risk of pushing yourself too hard one time and having something happen than actually training too hard as a routine, but that is just my gut talking.
And if you read Alex Hutchinson's article I linked to above, it looks like they didn't even correctly follow the information in the study they used as the basis for their article.
DeleteI think the biggest parts missing from those huge studies are the importance of diet, and maybe most important, the heart rate of people going 3+ hours at a time. Among my friends who do this kind of thing competitively we're rarely out of breath at the end of our events - just an overall feeling of being refreshed. Another possibly dangerous pattern might be how rapidly one goes from a sedentary life to an overly exhaustive one, building up over months is obviously the way to go, but that doesn't seem to get analyzed in the recent TED talk by O'Keefe. http://youtu.be/Y6U728AZnV0
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