Vigorous exercise can harm your heart, experts reveal… but tell us what to do instead

Exercising ten hours a week in the gym, walking long distances with a weighted backpack, cycling intensively for long distances… would you be willing to exercise that hard in the hope of living a long and healthy life?

A new trend among celebrities in extreme exercise is driven by the promise that spending hours in profuse sweat every day will take years off your life and prevent serious illness.

Yet medical experts warn that the craze for extreme workouts is causing an increase in physical damage that could be dangerously harmful.

What’s more, new research suggests that light exercise, as simple as brisk walking, may be your best bet for robust health in later years.

The most prominent of the longevity hunters is Dr. Peter Attia, a Canadian-American physician and bestselling author of Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity. His Drive podcast has been downloaded 100 million times.

Dr. Attia would charge clients hundreds of thousands of dollars to perform his customized regimens of strenuous exercise, diagnostic tests and vitamin supplements at his clinic in Austin, Texas, promising that they will live significantly longer and enjoy better strength and health .

Celebrities such as actors Chris Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman and Gwyneth Paltrow reportedly follow his regimes. In his book, Dr. Attia that exercise reigns supreme as “the most powerful ‘drug’ in our arsenal” when it comes to living longer and free from chronic diseases such as heart disease and dementia.

That’s hardly a new message. Except his type of exercise is not for the faint of heart. Muscle strength – through vigorous, strenuous exercise – is crucial. His regimen involves training for an hour every weekday and up to two hours on Saturdays and Sundays.

Dr. Attia, who is 51, practices what he preaches. He spends about ten hours in the gym every week and is an endurance swimmer and cyclist.

He is also an avid “rucker” – an emerging sport that involves taking long walks in rough terrain with a backpack weighing 50 pounds.

Dr. Attia’s high-profile and extreme efforts in anti-ageing exercise echo the efforts of Bryan Johnson, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur worth a reported £300 million, who proclaims himself a ‘rejuvenation athlete’.

Johnson is making headlines around the world for committing to a rigorous anti-aging program of exercise, diet and supplements he calls Project Blueprint.

It involves 60- to 90-minute workouts six days a week, including lifting weights as heavy as 240 pounds and doing 60 push-ups at a time, as well as performing long, intense sessions on cycling and rowing machines at his gym.

Johnson, 47, says his goal is to reduce his biological age to 18. Although this has led to widespread scientific skepticism, Johnson claims he now has the lung capacity and fitness of the fittest teenager.

Similar boasts about the benefits of hardcore exercise are made by another American wellness advocate, Greg Lindberg, a 54-year-old business magnate.

In his book Lifelong, he claims that high-intensity workouts “activate cellular pathways linked to youthfulness and vitality,” in part by stimulating the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and telomerase in our bodies. BDNF is a protein that stimulates the growth of new brain cells and their interconnections, and is involved in learning and memory.

In 2020, a study from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that levels of BDNF decline as we reach our mid-60s, but exercise such as moderately fast cycling can prevent this, according to the journal Nature.

Telomerase, meanwhile, helps maintain our telomeres – the ‘caps’ at the end of our chromosomes that act like an aglet on a shoelace, protecting our DNA from damage.

Studies suggest that exercise can protect telomere length. The theory is that longer telomeres ensure that a cell can divide more often and therefore live longer. However, this is not unambiguous.

A study last year by Johns Hopkins University in the US suggested instead that long telomeres allow cells with age-related mutations to live longer, increasing the risk of tumors and some chronic health problems.

(Meanwhile, Lindberg’s wellness career suffered a setback last month when he pleaded guilty in a US court to $2 billion fraud.) Still, the belief that extreme exercise can actually boost longevity is highly controversial. While supporters cite evidence — such as a recent report in the British Journal of Sports Medicine showing that elite athletes who can run a mile in under four minutes live nearly five years longer than the general population — other experts are skeptical of the whole concept. .

David Stensel, professor of exercise metabolism at Loughborough University, told Good Health: ‘There is not enough evidence to support the claim that vigorous exercise will significantly extend lifespan.’

Studies in people who exercise intensively will show improvements in health markers such as BDNF, says Professor Stensel, but this is not the same as showing that such things can extend lifespan or prevent dementia.

‘Studies into the exercise and health of more than 100,000 Britons, from the UK Biobank (a huge database collected of genetic, lifestyle and health information) show that people who are moderately active than average tend to live slightly longer than people who are less active,” says Professor Stensel.

‘However, that may have to do with the fact that they are healthier in the first place. Overall, current evidence shows that mild exercise, rather than excessive exercise, plays a role in living longer, healthier lives.”

Other research shows that extreme endurance exercise can even cause significant damage. In a two-year study published in May, researchers from the University of Leeds followed 100 male competitive cyclists and triathletes and found that almost half had built up scar tissue on their hearts, and almost 20 percent had experienced abnormal heart rhythms called ventricular arrhythmias .

These cause the lower chambers of the heart to vibrate instead of pumping properly, restricting blood flow and increasing the risk of a heart attack. Another potentially life-threatening risk comes from exertional rhabdomyolysis (or rhabdo). This is damage to muscle cells caused by extreme exercise.

Dr. Christopher Gaffney, a sports science lecturer at Lancaster University who has studied the condition, told Good Health: ‘Rhabdo is relatively rare, with around 40 cases per 100,000 people per year, but its prevalence has increased dramatically in recent years.’

Research shows that there was a twelvefold increase in the number of cases between 2005 and 2015. ‘The explosion in cases has been linked to the increased popularity of high-intensity exercise,’ says Dr Gaffney.

‘The dying cells release proteins into the blood that damage the kidneys, block urine production and cause life-threatening complications such as kidney failure. The greatest risk is male amateur athletes who push themselves too fast and too hard. The risk of rhabdo can arise from suddenly starting an activity such as rucking.’

The main signs are that the urine turns brown after an intense workout and there is extreme muscle pain all the time, not just when you exercise.

Another complication of extreme exercise is overtraining syndrome, where your body does not have time to recover, leaving your muscles in a constant state of inflammation.

Not only do performance levels stagnate and then decline, it can also affect your health, says Dr Daniel Brayson, 39, a lecturer in life sciences at the University of Westminster.

He personally suffered from this after competing in ultra-endurance cycling events. “My training consisted of cycling as much as I could during work – very early in the morning and late in the evening, and also on weekends,” he says.

‘About four years ago I started feeling palpitations, mild panic attacks, palpitations and dizziness, and these became more and more frequent. I felt heavy and my cycling performance dropped by 30 percent. I took a year off from cycling – time is the only thing known to allow recovery from overtraining syndrome.”

Dr. Brayson, who is now researching the condition, adds: ‘I cycle a lot less now.’

In contrast to the emerging harms of high-intensity exercise, a growing body of research suggests that regular moderate exercise can produce the most lasting, significant improvements to our health.

A study in the journal Circulation concluded that adding just five minutes of activity to a daily routine could lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by as much as 28 percent.

Lead researcher Dr Jo Blodgett, from University College London, said: ‘Whatever your physical abilities, it doesn’t take long for there to be a positive effect on blood pressure.’

She adds that this included all “exercise-type activities, from running in front of the bus to a short bike errand.”