You hear about it every so often: a perfectly healthy adult suffers a heart attack while jogging. Now, normally this kind of occurrence wouldn’t make the news — unless the person who died was wealthy or famous. In most long- distance races and marathons, at least one person (out of thousands) typically suffers from a heart attack. Some individuals don’t survive. Big factors in this are heat, over- exhaustion, and dehydration. There are warning signs in these cases that people often choose to ignore.
However, the most important note about jogging is the unequivocally positive health benefits it gives your body — especially your heart. It may not seem that way when “heart attack” and “running” appear in the same sentence in newspapers, but there are specific points to be made about this connection.
If you have heart disease, you are more likely to suffer sudden death when jogging rather than walking or sitting. This is true. Vigorous exercise can make an at-risk heart slip into an irregular beat, spike blood pressure levels, and turn any clogged arteries into a potentially serious problem.
Overall, nobody should fret over this. Studies have proven that people who jog, including those with cardiac risk factors, have a lower risk of heart attack than do those individuals who elect not to jog. In short: active runners live longer because the exercise prevents heart conditions and sudden death. Here are a couple of studies to note on this:
– In a Seattle, Washington study, people with undetected heart disease who avoided exercise had their risk of sudden death increase, not decrease.
– In a Rhode Island study, researchers found that a middle- aged adult who jogs for one year is significantly less likely to die of a sudden heart attack than a person with the same health characteristics who does not jog.
Every hour you exercise tacks roughly two hours onto your lifespan, according to Harvard researchers. They found this after following 17,000 men for over 20 years. Even if they started in later years, they still lowered their risk of death by an average of 23%. It was aerobic exercise such as jogging and swimming that added the greatest benefit. Any way you slice it, jogging delivers health benefits to your body. Your heart is a muscle, after all, so it needs exercise.
A conditioned heart that has been exercised needs only 50 beats to pump the same amount of blood for which a sedentary person’s heart would need 75 beats. When it’s resting, the heart of a jogger is slower, calmer, and more under control. The real benefits of jogging are that it counterbalances every serious risk factor for heart disease: high cholesterol, hypertension, obesity, stress, and diabetes.
No matter who you are, you can jog. To stay safe, don’t ignore your body’s warning signs, such as pain, undue sweating, nausea, chest pressure, and dizziness. Plus, don’t forget to stretch before you hit the pavement. Ask your doctor if it’s okay to start jogging, and he/she will most likely say “absolutely.”
Next Post: Your Personality Could Help You Weather the Cold
Previous Post: Fake Nose May Be Able to Sniff Out Disease
Tags: exercise, obesity
