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Middle-Age Men Who Can Do 40+ Push-Ups Have Lower Heart Disease Risk, Study Finds (cbslocal.com)
A new study finds that active middle aged men who can do more than 40 push-ups at a time have a significantly lower risk of heart disease. From a report: Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health followed more than 1,100 middle-aged male firefighters over a decade. They looked at two specific measures: how many push-ups they could do and their exercise tolerance on a treadmill. They found that men who could do more than 40 push-ups had a 96-percent lower risk of heart disease than those who could do no more than 10 and their ability to do push-ups was a better predictor of cardiovascular disease than their stamina on a treadmill test.
Soooo...people who are healthier have less diseases. Well done!
ohh, noonish. Maybe mid-afternoon bagel if I don't exert myself.
a year. Does that count?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Asking for a friend ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Pushups And Heart Attacks: The Usual Harvard Nonsense
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
"People who are somewhat physically fit are healthier than fatty ding dongs"
This is sure to trigger the Healthy At Any SIze crowd.
Wouldn't this just be a proxy for obesity? It's generally much easier for small guys to do more pushups.
I'm pretty sure the fact that a man in the 1300s could do push ups has little to do with my health?
'Correlation is not causation' is a two-way street. I can't even do 10 pushups, but I can ride a bike 100 miles in under 6 hours, no problem, but you're going to tell me I'm at higher risk of heart disease? Nonsense. I have low bodyfat percentage, high HDLs, low LDLs, high endurance, high leg strength, and lots of muscular endurance where I need it most (below the waist). Doing pushups is meaningless, overall health and fitness is everything.
It's odd, the number of former Special Forces operatives that can bench 300 pounds and run 100 miles non-stop that are working as programmers and sysadmins...
There are two factors here:
I have a feeling most men reading this will focus on the first part, but I have a feeling the second part is the more important. If you are overweight, it becomes much harder to do a push up, regardless of how strong your arms and chest are. The correlation between obesity and heart disease is well documented. So this isn't really anything new.
...men who could do more than 40 push-ups had a 96-percent lower risk of heart disease than those who could do no more than 10...
Duh? Anyone that can't do 10 pushups is pretty fscking out of shape, so that's like saying, "people that can do 40 pushups have 96% less risk than people that are already about to have a heart attack."
Healthy people able to lots of things better than sick or weakened people.
Bike riding is leg pushups so you are fine.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... the Harvard T.H. Chad School of Public Health
FTFY.
Have gnu, will travel.
I can do 40 pushups if I'm absolutely required to (I just tried after seeing this article), but I wasn't at all happy about doing them. In fact, I had to quickly drink a pint and a shot to recover. Does anyone know if you have to be able to do 40 pushups cheerfully to be healthy?
However, I can do the plank for 2 minutes without complaining. Especially after a pint and a shot. I actually think the plank is overall a healthier exercise than pushups, unless you're looking to grow big bodybuilder tits.
In case you don't know how to do a plank, here is a YouTube video of a fitness bro demonstrating a plank. If you're interested in learning how to drink a pint and a shot, you can meet me at the pub and I will teach you as long as you're buying.
https://youtu.be/pSHjTRCQxIw
You are welcome on my lawn.
40 unbroken, consecutive, full-range (chest touches the floor) pushups is really a fairly high bar athletically, probably on the order of top ~1% of the total population
The study indicates this corresponds to the top ~10% of firefighters, a group who on a whole are already known to be in vastly better shape than most of the population. This corresponds with my own anecdotal observations -- at my local crossfit gym, we test for max pushups once a year or so, mostly for fun. 40+ unbroken pushups easily corresponds to the top ~5% of that self-selected high fitness crowd as well.
People who are in better health tend to have lower health risks. Who would have thought.
^^^^^
Somebody mod this up.
Yes, the firefighters who could do the fewest push-ups were older (average age 48.4, compared to 35.1 for the ones who could do 41+ pushups) and were more likely to be smokers.
At the end of the 10 year study period, the firefighters who could to 41 or more pushups were still younger than the ones who could do less than 10 had been at the start of the study.
Older people have more cardiovascular events.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Lots of people can do 40 pushups. I can do it, and I'm hardly in good shape. If you read the actual paper, it's 40 pushups timed to a metronome set at 80 beats per minute. Or 40 pushups in 30 seconds. That's a lot harder.
msmash could at least find on-topic space filler.
You'll still get paid by Dice if you don't shit generic news posts all over the place, but you won't change or do anything different.
How about some Kardashian posts?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Heck, I heard of one guy that can defeat Godzilla with a single punch.
Middle aged men who don't feel the need to check if they can do 40+ push ups have better mental health
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Since the study notes that a treadmill doesn't seem to be as good a predictor as pushups, do we have any idea what other exercise would be the equivalent of pushups?
I used to do pushups every day, but stopped after I started developing wrist pain.
I'm always entertained by how much people here take personal offence at any article on health.
You're not morally defective if you can't do 40 pushups and no one is saying you are.
They are not even saying you're guaranteed to die of a heart attack or anything that silly. And they're not saying that doing more pushups will improve your health.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
being able to do 40 push up at a time doesn't require much effort from your heart, does it?
Isn't that getting in to the anaerobic performance of your upper body muscles?
From an abstract point of view, with no qualifications to back it up, this seems to me like it happens to be that people who can do this, also do a lot more other stuff.
So is the correlation between heart disease and push ups really a correlation between heart disease and X, where there is also a correlation between X and push ups?
Where X is, as another poster pointed out, the top < 1% of people in the world, in terms of push-up performance.
Personally, I found it not too difficult to go from 10 push ups to 25.
Getting over 25 is hard, requiring either good genes or a lot of hard work training.
From the study:
> For push-ups, the firefighter was instructed to begin push-ups in time with a metronome set at 80 beats per minute. Clinic staff counted the number of push-ups completed until the participant reached 80, missed 3 or more beats of the metronome, or stopped owing to exhaustion or other symptoms (dizziness, lightheadedness, chest pain, or shortness of breath).
That's much too fast to do a proper non-ballistic pushup. There's also no discussion of range-of-motion.
Also, from the article:
The results do not support push-up capacity as an independent predictor of CVD risk
Once again, we're getting news items that lack any technology, nerdiness, or anything Slashdot users care about. Who green lighted this story? UGH.
At a rate of 80 push ups per minute. That's 3/4 of a second each, until you miss 3
when it hurts.
and love sit ups, crunches, push-up, standing squats, star jumps and skipping.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Wow this would be awesome news if all I wanted to do in life was pushups!!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
guess I'm already dead. I do work in the public sector so that's 2 strikes right?
In a strange coincidence it appears most of them were doing push-ups at the time of the attack.
And risk looking like a chronical masturbator?! No way! ;-)
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
I took no offense.
At least not because of my health (or lack of it).
If anything, took offesnse at the silly "research". Hope those guys get an igNoble prize next year.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Nah, happy being a sysadmin, and scubadiving every now and then.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
It is nice to see more confirmation in this direction. Almost all research in the past decades was focussed on the health benefits of endurance training, however strength seems to be a better indicator for health than endurance, e.g. as noted in this longterm study, even when equating for lifestyle choices like smoking (so it's not that stronger people just make better decisions).
Grip strength seems also to be a good (and easy to measure) indicator. Also the stand-sit test which has become common practice in geriatry is practically a measure of strength.
Why muscle and strength (of course one has to exclude enhanced athletes with supraphysiological amounts of muscle) is so healthy is still not totally clear, but there are already two factors standing out, which cannot be replicated by endurance type of training: The first benefit is better mobility and protection against injury, in particular in high age. Second, when you are hit with a wasting disease, or just stop eating like you used to and get into a protein deficit, your body can take those aminos from your muscle instead from your precious vital organs. In particular atrophy in the heart is very hard to reverse (a struggle many recovered anorexics have).
martial arts and yoga are far more long duration, like marathon running, and both have way more young women in them.
Martial arts: Judo classes during high-school. ...it's simpler to say that out of the whole group, we were only 2 boys registered there.
Young women in them:
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Actually, they say that they corrected for age and BMI, though they don't specify how.
Exactly. They don't say how. This is the single most important part of the analysis -- the results mean nothing whatsoever without this "correction"-- and they dismiss it in one sentence.
The graph they show-- survival versus years since start of the study-- is entirely useless. The dark grey curve needs to be shifted 13 years to the right to make these two curves consistent with each other. Since the graph only covers 10 years, this means that the curve needs to be shifted off the chart.
What worries me the most (from a scientific point of view) is that they say that they only found a statistically significant effect between the 0-10 and the 21-30 pushups groups.
This is correct. Once you look at the adjusted results (adjusted how?), you see that the confidence intervals no longer are distinct.
I assume that means they used pairwise tests.
That phrase you use-- "I assume"-- should never be used when interpreting a scientific paper.
Far too often, the phrase hides "we didn't take the trouble to do it right, so we're shuffling the details where nobody will notice.
Cardiovascular events are highly nonlinear with age. In fact, the expected number of cardiovascular events for the lower age groups is pretty close to zero. Any correction is going to amplify noise.
They report the 95% confidence intervals, which then means that they didn't correct for multiple comparisons. This is an instance of p-hacking, if I ever saw one.
Exactly.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
No, all it shows is that older people have more cardiovascular events than younger ones.
No, it shows that the ability to do push-ups was a better predictor of cardiovascular disease than their stamina on a treadmill test.
No. It shows that ability to do push-ups is a good predictor of... age.
That's what the article says, and the table you linked to does nothing to contradict it. Age is the easiest thing in the world to control for.
Age is very hard to correct for in cardiovascular studies, and when you "correct" two groups that are pretty much non overlapping (the difference in means is larger than the standard deviations), it is effectively impossible. Cardiovascular events are very highly nonlinear with age, and the age they happen to use here is one where the many-push-ups groups is of an age where cardiovascular events are very very rare. Most of the events you're going to find are going to be with the population that is a standard deviation older than the mean.
And in any case, since this "adjustment" of the data is critical to the results they give, they should have documented how they did that adjustment.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com