New Study Reveals Too Much Jogging is Bad for Your Health

A Danish study has concluded that too much jogging is bad for your health. It appears that high-mileage and high-intensity runners die at the exact same rate as people who don’t run at all.

The study was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and it is the latest study to deal with the issue of what it means to over exercise.

While nobody is contesting the fact that physically active people do have around 30% lower risk of death when compared to inactive people, the ideal amount of physical exercise is still unknown to scientists.

Dr. Peter Schnohr, lead study author from Frederiksberg Hospital in Copenhagen, said that long-term strenuous exercise was shown to be associated with coronary artery calcification, large artery wall stiffening and diastolic dysfunction.

He continued:

To our knowledge, there has been no study of the longevity of marathon, half-marathon or triathlon participants, but such studies would clearly be informative.

The researchers followed 3,950 nonjoggers and 1,098 healthy joggers for 12 years. After 12 years, 28 of the joggers and 128 of the nonjoggers had died. The authors of the study said that even though joggers as a unanimous group appear to live longer than sedentary people, light and moderate joggers were found to have much lower mortality rates than nonjoggers.

But the result that shocked the authors of the study was connected to the strenuous joggers. They are calling strenuous joggers people who run for more than four hours a week with a speed of 7 mph or who ran for more than two and a half hours a week with speed of more than 7 mph. It appears that too much jogging is bad for your health, as the strenuous joggers were found to have a mortality rate similar to the sedentary group.

The participants to the study were white women and men from Copenhagen between the ages of 20 and 93. The study did not take into account any other forms of physical activity besides running. The authors of this study wrote that further studies are needed to evaluate this already controversial find. They agreed that the purpose of the study was not to scare people who want to participate in more strenuous exercise, but to analyze the effects of high-mileage and high-intensity running of health.

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Christina Langfold

Remember that weird girl in school who never quite managed to fit in? Who was always silent and strange? That was me during my entire teenage life. A few years after finishing college (with a degree in arts) I decided that the best way to become more sociable, while also feeling safe, is to test my people skills online.