i think running is actually bad for one's heart

what do you mean ? i'm talking about running here

The vaccine is poison to young athletic males' hearts.

Owner of a lonely heart -Yes

Only Love can break your heart- Neil Young

Your anecdotal evidence may be. Fixx is an easy one. Look up his previous health history and his family history of heart disease. I doubt he necessarily lengthened his life significantly through running, but it's easy to argue that he improved his quality of life through running and did nothing to shorten his life.

How about instead of that level of supposition and vague mention, you maybe provide a thumbnail sketch of the "many studies" with a clear sense of how and why you reject those other studies that have rejected the problem as significant? And "running is bad" is very broad. I'd have to look, but I believe in at least some studies, training hard >90 mpw over many, many years would be different from training moderately at lower mileage.

I think there's some solid research that suggests something like a handful of hours/week of cardio is optimal for heart health and longevity. That is equal to something like 20–30mpw. After that you experience diminishing returns, and at a point, you start to negatively impact longevity. Lots of people think performance and health go hand in hand, but there's very little healthy about professional/high level sports.

I discussed this at length with my cardiologist, who says that she would much rather have someone be an endurance athlete than someone who never exercises. She said yes it is possible that after many years of endurance training to develop a hardening of arteries, but it is not something that happens to everyone and this can happen to people who don't exercise later in life anyway. She felt strongly that the benefits outway potential risks and as long as we stay on top of our health assessments and listen to our body this isn't something to worry about. Also, she said there is much higher risk of long-term cardio damage from Covid itself over the vaccine.

Binging online porn and posting angry political screeds all day is bad for your heart (and your brain), The constant need for dopamine and oxytocin coupled with spikes in cortisol is both exhausting and damaging.

You should stop doing these things, talk to a mental health professional, and quit trying to discuss your problems on LRC. No one needs to advertise their involuntary celibate behaviors here. Thank the mods for looking out for your best interests!

i was talking about this kind of studies

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Potential adverse cardiovascular effects from excessive endurance exercise - PubMed

A routine of regular exercise is highly effective for prevention and treatment of many common chronic diseases and improves cardiovascular (CV) health and longevity. However, long-term excessive endurance exercise may induce...

Link:pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22677079/

i didn't find other studies who really "debunked" them and so i got scared given many elite runners died at a "young" age or had heart-related issues

Makes sense. I haven't skimmed those studies in a while. It's kinda the same with all forms of exercise.

Will I encounter some musculoskeletal problems in old age from lifting and running so much? Probably. But I've met a million older people who were never active and guess what? Their knees/backs/hips/whatever hurts them all the time. My dad's achilles is boned, and he's been saying it needs to rest for 20 years. It's only gotten worse.

A big advantage of doing a sport or activity is you hurt yourself, learn to rehab it, and get on with it. People who didn't have a sporting experience, at least from what I've observed, are more likely to respond to an injury with, "Well, what can I do about it? I just have to love with it." Meanwhile someone who's rehabbed tendonitis in the past or whatever can have a plan to deal with it.

Wrong. See expert opinions to follow here.

I'm aware of that kind of study. I was just wondering how wide-ranging your review of the studies was, and what criteria you were following to lend more credence to some studies rather than others.

A 2022 narrative review from Graziano et al: "The theory that repeated bouts of acute stress on the heart may lead to chronic myocardial damage remains to be demonstrated. However, male veteran athletes with a long sports career show an increased prevalence of cardiovascular abnormalities such as electrical conduction delay, atrial fibrillation, myocardial fibrosis, and coronary calcifications compared to non-athletes. It must be underlined that the cause-effect relationship between such abnormalities and the exercise and, most importantly, the prognostic relevance of such findings remains to be established."

Laugh, I nearly died - Rolling Stones

how many people run? how many people die whilst running? do the maths and the decimal point will have a lot of zeros before you get to an actual number

and out of those very few people, how many of them were going to die anyway and it just happened to be whilst running?

and how many people who die who don't exercise, would still be alive if they had exercised?

There are several other recent examples. See, for instance, Parry-Williams, Gati, and Sharma (2021): "There is emerging evidence that a proportion of athletes show high CAC scores, a higher plaque burden and myocardial fibrosis compared with age- and Framingham-matched controls. The mechanism and significance of these findings are unclear. Current limited data find no association between a high CAC score and all-cause mortality in master athletes"

My cursory review (and I'm looking at it as a layperson, not a specialist) of maybe 10 articles has been that around 2012 there was more concern because of the indications of "biomarkers" of cardiovascular damage in older endurance athletes. That concern was never fully answered or alleviated over the following decade, but I have not seen further studies offering significant confirmation of problems. Medical researchers on this topic continue to refer to limited data and inconclusive results, at least as far as I've seen.

And some of them refer to "extreme" and "strenuous" endurance exercise. One refers to "10- or 20-fold" training volume beyond recommended activity. And I lack the capacity to know much about the difference among these beyond what seems like common-sense reasoning. But if a medical researcher says that 150 minutes or 75 "vigorous" minutes per week is fine and researches problems for athletes at potentially at least 10x that, I don't necessarily thing "running" is a problem per se, and I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that running, say, 200-300 minutes per week incredibly likely to lead to early death.

Yeah, and that's noted in some of the articles (and even their abstracts).

But I get a bit annoyed and frustrated by this line of reasoning. I raised the issue with a couple of doctors during checkups. I asked one about whether training for two marathons per year might be excessive for someone my age. His reply was: "Well, I'm not going to tell anyone not to exercise." As though I was just asking him "Should I train for marathons or should I just sit on the couch?"

Highly anecdotal here, but I see 25 people a day in my practice and those folks lean heavily older than 60. I dont know for sure about heavy endurance sports, but relative inactivity +/- our western diet is utterly terrible for you not just from prevention of disease standpoint, but from a FUNCTIONAL standpoint. (inactivity infinitely worse than bad diet) Think strength, balance, prevention of falls (which does a lot of us in)...the number of years of decent quality of life! What if endurance sports took 5 years off the life expectancy, but the last 10 was way better than non athletes? The stuff Peter Attia talks about if you know that guy. I have a lot of 90+ y/o patients who walk miles per day their whole life. They are pretty good right up to the end. I hope to be like them. I think by and large you can outrun a bad diet, but you cant outdiet the effects of couch potato. (credit to someone I heard say that before). People die every day just not recovering from routine surgeries or hospitalizations because of their deconditioned lifestyle, obesity etc... they don't come out of anesthesia, or can't get off the vent, or get pneumonia post op... then they are gone. Just no reserve. This is the thing that gets a lot of our loved ones in the end.

BTW, hasnt anyone just looked at the life expectancy of endurance athletes across the board. I still wonder what their "quality of life expectancy" was! Except for high contact sports, I bet its longer.

This makes a lot of sense and I agree with a lot of it. I think a lot of people get mixed up between a "regular" amount of exercise and truly elite levels of exercise, whatever that may be. Seems like the researchers aren't entirely sure where to draw the line either. I kind of doubt that running 50–60mpw for decades poses a serious risk outside of some genetic predisposition to heart issues. But I wouldn't be too shocked if 120mpw for 15 years could do some damage.

The anecdotal evidence of runner obituaries, combined with the clear evidence of heart scarring after marathons, suggests to me that 800m, maybe even 1500m, on down is good for the body for the long-term and 5000m and up, the worse the higher, is hard on the heart and correlates with relatively shorter lives among otherwise healthy adults. This is not to say that the long distance runners live less than the general population but possibly less than the fit population.