Every so often, you’ll hear of a perfectly healthy adult suffering a heart attack while out jogging. That in itself wouldn’t make the news, so it is most likely the person in question died. In most long-distance races and marathons, at least one person typically suffers a heart attack. Some don’t survive. Big factors in this are heat, over-exhaustion, and dehydration. There are warning signs in these cases that people often ignore.
Yet, 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” sit in the same sentence in newspapers, but there are specific points to be made about this. 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 artery into a potentially serious problem.
Overall, nobody should fret over this. Studies have proven that anyone who jogs, including those with cardiac risk factors, have a lower risk of heart attack than those who elect not to jog. In short: active runner could live longer, because the exercise could prevent heart conditions and sudden death. A couple of studies to note:
- In Seattle, people with undetected heart disease who avoided exercise had their risk of sudden death increase, not decrease.
- In Rhode Island, a middle-aged adult who jogs for one year was found significantly less likely to die of a sudden heart attack than the same person who did not jog.
Every hour you exercise tacks roughly two hours onto your lifespan. Researchers have found this to be true. Even those who begin exercising later in life can still lower their overall risk of death by a considerable margin. This is aerobic exercise, such as jogging and swimming. Any way you slice it, jogging delivers health benefits to your body. Your heart is a muscle, after all, so it needs to be worked out.
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 goods on 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, just don’t ignore your body’s warning signs, such as pain, undue sweating, nausea, chest pressure, and dizziness. Ask your doctor if it’s okay to start jogging, and he/she will most likely say “Absolutely.”
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