Apparently, it was the mythical Betis player Roger Sosa who coined the famous phrase “running is for cowards”. The phrase, which summed up a whole philosophy of the game in which it was the ball that should move and not the players, has ended up becoming a commonplace of all those humorous criticisms of sport.
And yet, we have bad news.
What is the use of sports? Initially, according to a new job from the Cleveland Clinic, to live more. Or, if we are precise, higher cardiorespiratory fitness is related to lower long-term mortality. And it is that, although they are not synonymous, ‘cardiorespiratory fitness’ and ‘playing sports’ are closely related. The canonical definition of this is “the body’s ability to maintain a given intensity of exercise for a given time.”
More than 100,000 people on a tape. To find this out, Mandsager, Harb, Cremer and their team started a project that entailed following more than 120,000 patients to relate the results of resistance tests (on treadmill) with their own mortality. And the results they were very striking: “cardiorespiratory fitness was inversely related to all-cause mortality with no upper limit of observed benefit.”
In fact, extreme cardiorespiratory fitness (which is sometimes associated with elite athletes and the consequences of their high-level activity) “was associated with lower all-cause mortality compared to all other performance groups” .
Tentative numbers, but to take into account. This is curious because the data point out that the differences between having a high cardiorespiratory fitness and not having it have a greater effect on mortality from all causes than tobacco, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease. There is no doubt that we speak of that we speak of relative risks and that the methodology of the study leaves many questions in the air. However, the figures are significant enough to take them into account.
What consequences does all this have? Without forgetting that it is a retrospective study, namely; that cannot prove causality, the work of the Cleveland Clinic has a great interest. Above all, because cardiorespiratory fitness is somewhat modifiable; It is something that all of us can work on and improve. In essence, if this team is correct, it would be a simple intervention for most of the population that would affect long-term mortality.
The great mess of sport and diet. Be that as it may, we need more research on this topic and on everything related to diet, physical activity and other issues related to lifestyles. It cannot be that at this point we continue being so exposed to fads and conflicts of interest. Fundamentally, because we know that in this field of health promotion, the great medical challenge of the next few years.
Imagen | Jos Zwaan