Fitness Level and Likelihood of Death
August 4th, 2005 by YzabelFrom WebMDHealth, in Fitness Level Predicts Likelihood if Death:
“Having a good fitness level for one’s age predicts better survival,” Gulati tells WebMD. “If you are below the fitness level for your age, you are more likely to die.”
Indeed, Gulati finds that women double their risk of death if they can’t exercise at 85% of the level normal for their age.
Gulati’s study appears in the Aug. 4 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. Accompanying the paper is an editorial co-authored by Duke University researcher Pamela S. Douglas, MD. Douglas is the president of the American College of Cardiology.
“We doctors usually look at electrocardiograms [EKGs] and other tests to see heart trouble — but it turns out how long you can exercise is almost as important,” Douglas tells WebMD. “If you are well, how long you can exercise is more important than any other variable in determining how long you live.”
I’ve never tried such a tool, I admit, and I wonder how it’d fare. Putting aside fitness advice applied to weight loss, it’s however true that not that many people have an “acceptable” level of fitness. I’ll never be able to forget the wafer-thin girl, four years ago, who said that I was “extremely courageaous” simply because I was biking for 15 minutes everyday to go to school—and if this is to be a high level of fitness, I fear to think about what most people practice.
Is this an exact study, and can a certain fitness level indeed allow us to live longer? I wouldn’t be able to tell for sure, but we already know that being sedentary and not exercising enough doesn’t bode well for anyone. When I look at how the human body is shaped, I realize that indeed, we’re not exactly designed to be sedentary creatures, and I can also easily see that people in my surroundings who don’t walk a lot and never go out of home tend to get, well, “older sooner than the others”. This isn’t the solution to every ailment on Earth, but I know it can’t be wrong to try to get to slightly higher levels of fitness.
