The last paragraph about marathons reminded me of a PBS Nova documentary about a dozen people who just picked up running to compete in the Boston Marathon starting off from basically couch potato status.
I won't spoil it for you but it does not end like you expect.
I personally found that doing away with car and biking two hours a day has done me well. By combining exercise and commuting times I save a great deal of time.
Biking to work is great. For me the hour spent commuting guarantees some sort of exercise 5 days/week and I can add to that with something else during the week or on the weekends. Its also a great way to wake up, and to get my mind in the right space before a day (or after). My only complaint - it can be hard to do in the -10c winter months up here in Canada.
I actually prefer cycling in the winter (I live in southern Ontario). When it gets colder you can always add layers; unlike summer heat waves when you're limited in how much you can strip off.
I worked with a guy that did that. We have no showers at my office (like most offices), he quite after a couple of weeks when people started to complain that they didn't like the sweaty B.O. mess coming in with them in the mornings.
Its unfortunate there wasn't a better solution for your colleague. The half hour ride in the morning isn't at a hard enough pace to make me a sweaty mess, though if it did, luckily, we have showers (along with a gym) at the office.
I think present research shows that 10 hours per week is the minimum required to achieve a body transformation in 3-4 months.
Some recommendations:
1. "Body For Life" if you want a simple way to lose weight and gain strength.
2. "Maximum Strength" if you'r already been lifting for a while and want to get stronger. This is system also has you challenging your own limits so that you feel certain sense of achievement instead of just "wow I look thinner" ...
3. "P90X" if you like intense workouts with results.
I've personally done all 3 in the above order to pretty good results. After achieving the results , you really need to maintain a minimum level to keep it.
I wholeheartedly vouch for P90X. After getting over the commercials, my wife and I bought the DVDs. We got results within four weeks. The challenge with that system is maintaining a high level of commitment to something that kicks your butt over the long term.
Yeah its true for all systems. Its hard to keep the results if your a sedentary worker like a soft-engineer :) ...
Thats why I've always wanted to be a kitesurfing/adventure sports trainer or something of that sort.
I am reminded of a piece of alleged research I read a few years back: Scientists have determined that regular jogging extends your life span. The amount by which it extends your life span is precisely equal to the amount of time you spend jogging.
Unfortunately there's no explanation which means there's no science here. (The world seems to be full of studies which measure things that are easy to measure and say things that people want to hear.)
Here's an explanation as to why exercise might be good for you: exercise transfers attention away from repetitive thoughts and into one's body and one's surroundings. It thus confers benefits similar to those of meditation.
This theory may well be totally false. But, hey, at least it offers an explanation. There's something there to be false.
The next step would be to criticise the theory and then, if it stands up, to test it against current theories.
Any testing though, would be highly unlikely to resemble the observations referred to in the linked article. It would instead depend on the relevant details of the rival theories.
>"Unfortunately there's no explanation which means there's no science here."
Experimental science has a long and colorful history of answering the what before the how or why. Consider the question of black body radiation. Without the experimental research results and Plank's desperate attempts to fit them to a mathematical model, Einstein wouldn't have had a reason to think of light existing as discrete particles and theoretical quantum mechanics would not have possible.
Creating frameworks for why things work is satisfying, but gathering data is just as vital to science.
Yeah, sometimes novel phenomena are stumbled upon. Where they are deliberately stumbled upon I would call it exploration rather than science.
I don't think that exercise falls into that category. There is nothing surprising about exercise per se.
Popper once challenged an audience to go out and 'observe'; I think the point of his joke was that without knowing what you're trying to observe and why then the instruction is absurd.
In order to claim that 'more exercise is good' you need to start by guessing why some exercise might be good, whilst being open to the possibility that it may not be, and then start testing the best guesses. Otherwise you literally won't be able to interpret your 'more exercise' data, even if it is relevant.
I don't think a blanket exercise regimen of more is the way to go. I feel miserable when I exercise more than 5 times a week because it takes me at least one day to recover so piling on more exercise just keeps me in a constant state of recovery which is quite counterproductive. That being said I wonder what kind of diet those 100 mile a week runners are on to have such stamina.
If you require more than a day to recover you should either be doing less strenuous exercise or you should be lowering your number of workouts per week.
I used to sit next to a 100+ mile/wk runner and he ate nothing out of the ordinary, just more of it (100miles of running is a 10-14k net calorie increase, depending on who you believe).
"He started by buying the Runner's World subscription list, which yielded about 55,000 runners to study."
People are taking this garbage seriously? Some guy surveys a bunch of hardcore yuppie runners (the kind who subscribe to runner's world) and finds the ones who continue to run a lot more haven't had heart attacks. Ya don't say. Where are the folks who usually reflexively scream about correlation/causation?
The gold standard for research into this kind of thing is the controlled intervention. You can't simply survey runners. You have to pick people and make them run. I don't think especially encouraging results have come out of this.
Everything else I've ever read says exercise is dwarfed by diet when it comes to health, and the health benefits are pretty minimal to fitness beyond a pretty low threshold. Pro athletes are not long lived.
Almost every interesting and serious study regarding lifestyles is ethically and practically unable to be instantiated as a controlled experiment over the long term. Like many things, from studies of the economy, to social structures, to the climate. You can try to do a multivariate analysis, but ultimately you're not going to have much to go on. You have to take everything with a grain of salt, but it doesn't mean there isn't some valuable data in there. In addition, long term results are probably more interesting and important than short-term results; so much so that I would argue longitudinal studies are probably more useful than controlled studies, so long as one is careful and rigorous and vigorous with multivariate analysis after the fact.
There are many controlled intervention studies into diet and exercise. It is done. They provide the only results worth any consideration. More often than not regression analyses and "risk-adjustment" models are invalidated.
>"Everything else I've ever read says exercise is dwarfed by diet when it comes to health, and the health benefits are pretty minimal to fitness beyond a pretty low threshold"
<citation needed>
We've already been over this ground more than once:
According to one 32,000 person study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (1999), "fit persons with any combination of smoking, elevated blood pressure, or elevated cholesterol level had lower adjusted death rates than low-fit persons with none of these characteristics". The same study found that aerobic fitness had a far more important impact on longevity than obesity did.
This was cited in Fantastic Voyage, Kurzweil and Grossman, Chapter 22.
Another 100,000+ person study found that men who ran two or more marathons per year were 41 percent less likely to suffer from high blood pressure, 32 percent less likely to have high cholesterol, and 87 percent less likely to be diabetic than non-marathoners. Those who ran only one marathon every two to five years also had significantly lower risk for these conditions than non-marathoners.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/140104.php
The first study you link to does not appear to address the correlation/causation issue whatsoever. Specifically: "The study acknowledges that people who regularly run marathons, like many of the study's participants, may be genetically predisposed to running long distances."
The second link describing neurogenesis stimulation is more interesting due to the fact that they are tracking actual changes in the participants over the course of the study.
For the record, I do not doubt for a moment that exercise has numerous positive benefits, both physically and mentally.
"The more marathons run, the higher the likelihood of heart disease. The number of marathons run was an independent and significant predictor of the likelihood of myocardial damage.
The runners had about the same prevalence of non-zero coronary calcium compared to age matched controls randomly assigned from a survey population."
The "quotation" you've written appears nowhere in that article you've linked to. Trying to pass that off as an excerpt from the the article is not the most ethical way to make your case.
What the article did say in the heading titled Conclusions was this:
"Regular marathon running has a beneficial effect on the cardiovascular risk factor profile but the extent of calcified coronary plaque is underestimated from that risk factor profile"
That list is pretty terrible. 4 runners of the Boston marathon got brain cancer over ten years? Over 20,000 people finished the Boston marathon last year (http://www.bostonmarathon.org/2009/cf/public/statistics.htm). Even if we assume it's the same 20,000 people running every year for ten years (highly unlikely), an incidence of brain cancer of 4/20,000 is the same as the incidence in the general population 15-20 / 100,000. (http://www.oncologychannel.com/braincancer/index.shtml). So, 4 people is about what you would expect. Given that it's not the same people, it's probably a good deal lower than the rest of the population.
It's pretty difficult to take anything on that list seriously if they're going to blatantly misrepresent statistics like that.
Marathon running appears to cause heart damage. 12% of asymptomatic marathon runners had evidence of myocardial damage. Only 4% of the sedentary controls had damage.
This Breuckmann study repeatedly found about a 2.5 to 1 increased incidence of heart attack from marathon running over sedentarism. The number of marathons run was an independent and significant predictor of the likelihood of myocardial damage.
Linking to a fringe paleo blog which is blind to mainstream research (unless it supports paleo!) isn't much better.
The 2.5 to 1 increased incidence of heart attack from marathon running over sedentarism bit is BS, and flatly contradicted by studies already linked to on this thread.
It doesn't seem crazy to think that there's such a thing as too much exercise, but there are a couple problems with this top ten list you cite.
First, maybe there are right and wrong ways to run a marathon and the people doing it the wrong way have skewed the results of these studies.
Second, if running a marathon is bad, then surely running half a marathon is still not good, right? What about a quarter-marathon? One mile? Etc. I think everyone agrees that there is some amount of running that does more good than harm. But it's not that helpful to simply say that marathons cause harm without looking at the good (if any) they do and then trying to find the distance that properly balances good and harm.
The main difference I can think of between a marathon and shorter distances is the glycogen 'wall' - something that won't happen on a run of less than 20 miles. There's also the whole fact that four hours of stress and strain on your joints and muscles and feet is somewhat worse for your body than ten minutes.
(Having said that, I don't see the point in twisting statistics to lambast marathons either. I plan to run my first one next year regardless!)
And by listing negative effects, you can also make bad things sound bad.
Lots of people kill themselves with marathons. Maybe there's a right way to do it, but obviously it's easy to do it the wrong way. Which makes marathons dangerous until someone figures out your right way.
"if running a marathon is bad, then surely running half a marathon is still not good, right?"
No. Does not follow. As you say, there are probably distances where the good far outweighs the bad. 26 miles is not that distance.
No, "lots of people" don't kill themselves with marathons. A few people who try to go from couch potato to marathon in 12 weeks or who chug ridiculous amounts of water over the course of a 5-hour walk-jog kill themselves with marathons. (It's possible to drink to the point of excessive dilution of the sodium in your bloodstream, which can kill you just like dehydration can, but this is basically impossible to induce below an Ironman triathlon distance if you're reasonable about water intake.) That's not "lots."
Distance running is what humans evolved to do, according to a good deal of evidence. Admittedly, running on asphalt and concrete with awful form created by a lifetime walking and running in awkwardly built shoes and sitting in chairs all day is not what humans evolved to do.
He ran 240 km (150 miles) in two days. He then ran the 40 km (25 miles) from the battlefield near the town of Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over Persia in the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) with the word "Νενικήκαμεν" (Nenikékamen, 'We have won') and collapsed and died on the spot because of exhaustion.
So, after running 75 miles a day for the first two days, don't run another 25 miles the next day.
PS: The story is improbable, as the Athenians would more likely have sent the messenger on horseback.
People reflexively downvote DeVany's observations to their own peril.
While some of that list is anecdotal, most is based on relevant studies, and on DeVany's long interest and observation of patterns of health (as an athlete and economist). His perspective is a necessary antidote to the popular conception that ever-longer distance-running delivers a monotonically-increasing level of healthiness.
DeVany suggests -- with evidence -- that instead, the optimal activity involves bursty, varied, intense exertion more than marathon-like exertion. The stresses and rhythmic pace of marathoning damage some systems more than they help.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/marathon/
I won't spoil it for you but it does not end like you expect.
I personally found that doing away with car and biking two hours a day has done me well. By combining exercise and commuting times I save a great deal of time.