Endurance Training Can Be Harmful

Monday, May 27th, 2013

Evidence is mounting that endurance training can be harmful — beyond 30 miles of running per week:

“Heart disease comes from inflammation and if you’re constantly, chronically inflaming yourself, never letting your body heal, why wouldn’t there be a relationship between over exercise and heart disease?” said John Mandrola, a cardiac electrophysiologist and columnist for TheHeart.org.

Yet sports-medicine specialists are sharply divided over whether any warning is warranted. For every American who exercises to extremes, after all, there are thousands who don’t exercise at all — and who might embrace any exercise-related warnings as cause for staying sedentary.

That second paragraph reminds me why one-size-fits-all public health recommendations are so… bad. We can’t tell the truth, because some people might misunderstand it. Perhaps we need a more Straussian approach to public health.

Comments

  1. KK says:

    You see some variations of that in many places. I’ve overheard an occasional fat co-worker declare that he’s unwilling to start eating grapes or other fruit in place of snacks & candy “because they’re bad for you and what’s the point of trying if even those are forbidden”.

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