One of the projects I’ve taken on is coming up with Barbell Medicine Physical Activity Guidelines (BBMPAG?), as I feel there are a number of things lacking from the current guidelines. Specifically, the current guidelines are written to a professional audience, yet offer no guidance on behavior change, referral, screening, programming, or monitoring. I’m looking forward to publishing these guidelines, as I think they’ll be useful.
In the course of my literature review, I came across this paper and found it very interesting due to the HUGE, DIVERSE sample size (> 2 million, ages 20-90, multi-national, etc.). The study looked at the correlation between exercise volume and death over ~ 11.5 years.
It’s not surprising that they found a benefit of exercise across the lifespan, but one interesting piece was that the benefit appears to become greater as people get older. Compared to not meeting the physical activity guideline for conditioning, mortality risk decreased by 16% for those aged 20-29 and by 22% in those over 80 after correcting for things like smoking, education level, BMI, and so on. I suspect many might write off the unique benefits of exercise in older individuals, but I think that’s in error.
Another interesting finding, which is really what I was looking for upon reviewing this paper, is the relationship between exercise volume and mortality. Across all groups, the average reduction in mortality risk from achieving half the guidelines’ conditioning rec’s was 8%, which improved to 14% after achieving the guidelines’ minimums, and went up to 22% when doubling them This relationship continued all the way up to those achieving 5-times the guidelines’ recommendations. Unfortunately, the researchers did not ask subjects if they were lifting weights or not, so how much lifting is good for health is still sort of an unknown.
Anyway, my takeaways are as follows:
- Exercise appears to have a dose-dependent relationship with improvements in health outcomes. More exercise = more health improvement.
- The extreme exercise hypothesis continues to lack support.
- Older individuals benefit the most from training like maniacs, despite younger folks likely being more apt to do so.
Happy Holidays!