OMG! Could I Be Exercising Too Much?

Scientists say the health benefits of strenuous exercise have an upper limit.

Photo Credit: g-stockstudio

My new favorite writer is a fellow named Markham Heid. Heid has earned my eternal gratitude for an article that gladdened my heart and brought a tear to my eye. It started with this headline: “Beyond a certain point, exercise may be little more than physical abuse.”

Yes! Finally! Take that, all you sadistic secondary school coaches who insisted that more pain was good! Take that, all you genetically modified trainers who believed that sweatiness was next to godliness!

Heid’s article reports on several scientific studies concluding that the health benefits of strenuous exercise have upper limits; when you exceed those limits, some of the benefits erode. The pattern resembles an inverted U-shaped curve. But what first caught my eye was documentation that the benefits of strenuous exercise peak at 4.5 hours per week. I read those words and instantly ran to my calculator, where I quickly computed that my 48 minutes per day on an exercise bicycle, times six days, came to 4.8 hours per week. Holy mackerel! For the first time in my life, someone suggested that I might be exercising too much.  I thought this day would never come.

Naturally, in the spirit of the age, I choose to believe in the absolute truth of these findings, which happen to confirm my prejudices. Any information to the contrary is pseudo-scientific nonsense.

Reality Check

However…Once the initial euphoria wore off, I took a harder look at the text of the article, and I realized that “strenuous” exercise might be open to different interpretations. As I understand it, strenuous exercise makes you sweat like a nervous bridegroom and hurtles your heart rate toward the stratosphere. By that measure, my bicycle-bound exercise doesn’t qualify; I soak a t-shirt with sweat, but my heart rate only rises a blip or two. I do not pant for breath. In which case my exercise bike routine would have to classify as “moderate” exercise.

Oh. Never mind.

Now the consensus on moderate exercise is still favorable. James H. O’Keefe, who led an intriguing research study, “The Goldilocks Zone for Exercise: Not Too Little, Not Too Much,” wrote that “a routine of regular exercise is associated with an increase in life expectancy by up to six years.” At the risk of oversimplifying his findings, strenuous exercise provides cardiac protection and good overall fitness up to a point, when it becomes just extra wear and tear. Moderate exercise doesn’t deliver the same level of cardiovascular benefits, but any exercise is better than none and therefore worthy of applause.

Consider this medical advice, which seems eminently sound to me (because it confirms my biases) in contrast to the trend du jour, Paleolithic Exercise. (Sadly, I am not making this up.) It’s the next extension of the popular Paleo Diet, whose participants party like it’s 19,999 B.C.E.

Strong Like Cave Man

Paleo’s origin story goes something like this: Humans have wandered the earth for 2.4 million years, give or take a week, with brains and bodies that evolved to make us fit for survival. Up until 10,000 years ago, when some wiseacre came up with the idea of growing our own food, that survival was by engaging as hunters and gatherers. Humans were physically active all day and walked five to ten miles daily in their quest for food. Our advances in recent centuries have been amazing, but we’re still operating with the DNA designed for hunters and gatherers. Because we’re not required to be as physically active as we were designed to be, we’re beset by obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.

Paleolithic Exercise promises to attack chronic health conditions by adopting a training regimen based on the physical activities of our distant ancestors. The features are long-distance walking with occasional outbursts of high-intensity sprinting, along with muscle-building physical labor modeled after paleo man’s likely tasks: bending, climbing, digging, and lifting.

If that’s your thing, more power to you. You want to run 26 miles, go for it. (And hats off to 88-year-old Alan Patricof, who completed this year’s New York City Marathon.) But the Paleo enthusiasts neglect to mention something that seems significant to me. The life expectancy of a human, from 2.4 million years ago to 200 years ago, was 30 years. Human life absolutely was nasty, brutish, and short! If you lived to be 40, you were an elder. Also, for the record, the caves were damp and drafty, and I can’t get excited about a diet of wild berries and the occasional squirrel or mammoth.

My fellow humans, we have traveled a long way from the active lifestyle of Homo Erectus to the sedentary life of Homo Gluteus. There is no question that we can extend our lives by eating well and exercising often. But that doesn’t mean we have to live like cave dwellers to be fully human. Given the choice, I will gladly settle for a few chronic ailments in exchange for a long life in the comfort of a cave with indoor plumbing.

As a wise Greek once put it, “All things in moderation.”

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If you’ve retired and had some difficulties making the adjustment to that stage of life (even if you’ve resolved them by now), I would love to talk to you about it for a research project. If you’re willing to be interviewed, please contact me at don@donakchin.com for details.