Originally Posted by
bigjim1
I believe that there are a lot of people that take virtually no exercise and will live a relatively long life. As long as they stay on that couch and do not attempt to run for that bus. I would suggest that longivity is in the genes. Exercise will give you a much better quality of life for the amount of years that you have and stave off disease that would kill you earlier. Hard/extreme daily physical exercise IMHO is not always a good thing, you just need to keep moving. Look at nature, the slow steady movers [elephants/turtles] last the longest. Cheetahs? No chance. Pro athletes do not have a lifespan longer than the average.
Jim
I don't know about pro athletes and elephants, but I'll go with the science. You are incorrect about life span. In Physical Activity and Health, figure 9.5 shows that a top tier aerobically fit man has less than 1/5 the death rate of the couch potato type. This particular study was of 25,341 men at the Cooper institute.
I've been a student of physical activity vs health for about 40 years ever since I cured my own high blood pressure with jogging.
The more ft you are, the less cancer, diabetes, cardio and other diseases you suffer. You live not only better, but you live longer. The actual data is very convincing, but one has to be aware of it.
Back to elephants. One interesting fact is the long lived elephant and the shrew (lives a year?) have about the same number of life-time heart beats. Relating human life span to either seems silly to me. That said, what happens with aerobics is that you drive yourself to very high heart rates (or should) with the net result that your none exercising heart rate goes much lower than a couch potatoes. That's not the reason for the longer life span, but an aerobically fit individual does conserve heart beats like the elephant in a sense.
What does keep you alive longer is that aerobics (and weight training) causes sufficient cell damage to stimulate the body's repair mechanisms (human growth hormones and other chemicals). Those mechanisms repair the aerobics damage plus the decay damage due to aging. You don't do the damage, the age-related decay does not get repaired and you degenerate far faster and are more prone to disease than the fit individual.
Genetics for most people is a small factor. You can suppress most negative genetic tendencies through a lifestyle of strenuous activity, reducing meat/dairy and emphasizing fresh/frozen fruits/vegetables
Al