The Exercise Myth

One of the biggest myths I always here is that the human body is a "machine." It makes me cringe whenever I hear that. It's not even a particularly useful metaphor. The body is not a machine. It's an organism, which means, unlike a machine, it adapts. Thinking the human body is a machine gets us into a rut of linear thinking. We think that, like a machine, the human body needs a specific, preferred fuel sort and needs to be used in specific, pre-determined manners. This is where entities like Gatorade and GNC make their fortunes from nothing other than misleading people. The human body won't function better if it's getting an influx of Whey protein or NOS or whatever. Because it is an organism it will adapt to its environment and function accordingly. Some things seem to certainly help, such as getting enough sleep. But I don't think getting 7 hours of sleep instead of 8 is going to impede your fitness goals to any meaningful extant. Just the same, I don't think focusing too much on, say, how much protein or fat or carbohydrates one is getting is going to make or break one's goals. This has been the general gist of the past couple of posts. That the body adapts and that's why it is a bit foolhardy to believe that a highly specific diet of any kind is going to work better than basic "smart" eating, and also partially why it is so difficult to find a diet or workout that works 100-percent of the time for 100-percent of the people.

I bring all of this up because there is really only one aspect of the human body that does function in a machine-like way. And that's in overuse injuries. Just like how the more you drive a car, the more it's various parts begin to decay. The more you use a piece of equipment, the more care it requires or else it will cease to work. This is true of even simple machines like a can opener, which becomes dull or rusted, given enough time.  We often times refer to this phenomena as "wear and tear."

The human joints are highly susceptible to "wear and tear" and therefore are one of the few aspects of the human body that is machine-like. The joints, unlike the body's bio-chemical functions, do not adapt to stressors. They simply tend to weaken over time. The same may--may--be true of the heart and cardiovascular system.

This is where the book, "The Exercise Myth" comes in. You can read it for free at this website here. The book was written by Dr. Henry Solomon, a cardiologist who became concerned when so-called cardiovascular exercise became popular in the late 70s and early 80s. His concern was that he believed the research on the subject conclusively proved that "cardiovascular" exercise was far more dangerous for the heart than it was beneficial and felt that the fitness industry pushed the opposite idea only to literally capitalize on it.


Allow me to provide a long quote from the book itself:

Sudden death was studied in a group of soldiers, eighteen to thirty-nine years old, who were shown to have coronary disease. ⁽³⁴⁾ Fifty-seven percent of the fatalities were associated with strenuous activity, and another 38 percent with moderate activity. Not even soldiers spend 95 percent of their time hustling about. In a similar study, 29 percent of fatal attacks were coincident with strenuous activity, although the subjects spent only 17 percent of their time exerting themselves to that degree. ⁽³⁵⁾ They spent a full half of their time either inactive or asleep, yet only about a third of the fatal attacks occurred then. And in a third study, 78 percent of fatal attacks were related to activity, while only 22 percent occurred with inactivity or sleep. ⁽³⁶⁾ In all, a disproportionate number of sudden deaths were associated with strenuous exertion.

Other data confirm the same association of sudden death with physical activity. In one community study, sudden cardiac death was associated with activity in 80 percent of patients, including strenuous activity in 20 percent. ⁽³⁷⁾ In another, Dr. Meyer Friedman, who helped formulate and popularize the concept of the Type A personality, reported that more than half of 28 deaths occurring within seconds of the onset of any symptoms occurred during or immediately after severe or moderate physical activity, most notably running and jogging. ⁽³⁸⁾ "The close temporal relationship observed between severe or moderate physical activity and more than one half of the instantaneous coronary death cases," said Dr. Friedman, "makes us question whether it is worth risking an instantaneous coronary death by indulging in an activity the possible benefit of which to the human coronary vasculature has yet to be proved." It was also disconcerting that many of those who died during or immediately following exertion had been well accustomed to the specific physical activity involved.

If exercise had no specific causative effect on cardiac events— if chance alone determined the coronary death rate during exercise—there should probably be at most only a few hundred such deaths per year. When you look at the numbers actually reported, there is a dramatic causal relationship between exercise and death, a relationship that cannot be dismissed.

There are data that give us a truer sense of the extent of the risks. A recent study from Rhode Island indicates that the annual coronary death rate—that would include both fatal arrhythmias and heart attacks—from jogging is about seven times the coronary death rate during more sedentary activities. ⁽³⁹⁾ The prevalence of jogging was determined by a telephone survey and the actual incidence of death during jogging was estimated at 1 per year for every 7,620 joggers, or approximately 1 death per 396,000 man-hours of jogging. If you consider that 30 million people jog regularly in the United States, the yearly cost is over 3,900 lives.

This extensive quote doesn't even cover another survey of 1600 runners that reported 1800 injuries, meaning that each runner was averaging slightly more than 1 injury per year of running. So even if death isn't in the cards for us that year, we are hampered by other injuries. Injuries, by there very nature, being the opposite of health.

Which is something we should attempt to clarify once more: the difference between health and fitness. Health is the absence of disease or injury or any kind of pathology in the body. Fitness is the body's ability to perform certain quantities of certain activities without failing--e.g. playing basketball for 60 minutes or running 5 miles without stopping and within a certain time-frame. A person can be quite fit and still be unhealthy. This is where the issue with concussions in football is relevant. For years playing football has been considered a fairly effective of way of getting fit and healthy. I certainly used to believe this. However, with the new focus on how playing football leads to concussions, we can see how one can be extremely physically fit, as all professional football players are, and yet still be unhealthy. For if a professional football player has a concussion (or a torn ACL, or a broken ankle, and so on) then they are not healthy. 

This is a clean, concrete and rather extreme example. For, surely, a non-professional athlete who runs 3-5 times per week is not suffering from concussions or torn ACLs, and therefore is both fit and healthy, right?

Well, as the above excerpt from Dr. Solomon's book shows, people who are fit are often not healthy, to a point where it becomes deadly. And, again, overuse injuries are prevalent in most forms of "cardio" training. So, say, if I can't go to my Crossfit workouts for several weeks because of a muscle sprain or strain of some kind, how can I say I'm truly "healthy"? How can I even say that the workouts made me stronger when they are very clearly making me injured and therefore weaker?

It is my belief that exercise should be done in a way that keeps us as healthy as possible, first and foremost (N.B. that is difficult to tell at this point how much, if at all, intelligent exercise prevents or reverses any pathology in human bodies, although I think there is ample evidence that suggests there are a number of positive effects on general health, if done safely). Fitness should come second, and we should not exercise in a manner that threatens our health in the name of fitness.

I want to clarify that I'm not against activities like running or cycling or tennis, etc. if they are done for recreation.If we enjoy partaking in these activities for their own sake, then by all means we should do them, as long as we do so knowing the risks and are not doing them with the primary goal  of improving our general health. I partake in activities such as yoga and martial arts and grappling. All of the above put my general health at risk, but I enjoy doing them and I get other benefits from doing them. However, I also partake in them knowing full well that I'm not necessarily making myself healthier by doing so.

This is where High Intensity Training is useful. By training with slow cadences we minimize the risk of exposing our joints to excessive G-forces (Dr. Solomon points out that the average jogger's stride places 2-3 times the joggers weight onto one leg. Over the course of miles a jogger will end up placing literal tons of forces on their knees, ankles, shins and feet). With strength training we are not using excessive repetitions, so, again, we are not exposing our joints to overuse injuries. By focusing on recovery time, we give the body ample time to replenish its energy stores and to heal from whatever stress was placed on the body during the workout. And by working out once a week (or slightly more or less, depending on each person's recovery abilities), we are not repeatedly placing undue stress on the cardiovascular system.

I think an important fact to understand is that the muscles do not work at the behest of the cardiovascular system. The cardiovascular system works at the behest of the muscles. The muscles aren't there to support the work of the heart and lungs, the heart and lungs are there to support the work of the muscles. Once this idea is grasped, it's easy to see how proper strength training actually provides for a much more efficient and probably effective cardiovascular workout. Anybody who's been through a proper HIT session can vouch for as much.

However, Dr. Solomon's book has lead me to reconsider even whether the amount of stress placed on the heart during a HIT session is excessive. Dr. Doug McGuff, in his own book, Body by Science, includes a number of studies showing how HIT-style workouts are actually beneficial to the heart by placing enough stress to stimulate various physiological phenomena, but not so much stress that the heart becomes weaker from its efforts. And, as far as I know, no one has ever died from performing a HIT-style workout, and I have read the work of Drew Baye, Ellington Darden, Doug McGuff, Arthur Jones, Casey Viator, Mike Mentzer and Daniel Riley all of whom have trained thousands of clients each and therefore provide for a sample size comparable to those quoted above re: the fatal dangers of running. 

However, these are ideas to consider as we continue to attempt to develop healthy, worthwhile, non-mechanical lives.I think it's also important to note that Dr. Solomon believes running and other forms of cardio can be made safer simply by listening to your body and giving yourself permission to stop when your body wants to stop. Ignore the macho bullshit that the fitness industry tries to instill in us and stop when it's time to stop. There's not shame in calling it quits when you're tired, especially when it could mean better overall health.