"The groundwork of all happiness is health." - Leigh Hunt

Ask the doctor: When should I start exercising?

Ask the doctor.

Oh without delay Maybe five years ago it will have been even higher. I'll admit that almost all studies linking regular exercise to health advantages have been done in adults over the age of fifty. But recently a study by Johns Hopkins doctors was published in a medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine Which is directly related to you. The study enrolled nearly 5,000 young adults ages 18 to 30 and followed them for nearly 27 years. The study participants got here from different geographic regions of the United States and included each men and girls and folks from different racial and ethnic groups.

The fitness of those young adults was assessed by what number of minutes they may go on a treadmill exercise test before becoming too drained to proceed. How usually an individual exercises has a robust impact on well-being. The test was conducted when an individual enrolled within the study. Most of the study participants were repeated seven years later, to see if their fitness improved or worsened.

Those who were fittest at the beginning of the study had a lower risk of heart disease and premature death. Every additional minute an individual can exercise on a treadmill reduces the danger of heart disease by 12 percent and the danger of death by 15 percent. Those who remained fit when retested seven years later, presumably because they exercised usually, had a lower risk of heart disease and death than those that didn't. The least fit young adults usually tend to develop a heart muscle that was straining to do its job.

Such studies, even once they include so many individuals followed for thus a few years, cannot conclusively prove that regular exercise and fitness protect against heart disease and premature death. But they're pretty strong evidence that it's.

If the study followed its participants for one more 15 to twenty years, we might need even stronger evidence. The study would then be able to match subjects who were fit as young adults and stayed fit with subjects who weren't fit as young adults but began regular exercise later in life. . If this comparison shows that folks who stay fit throughout their adult lives perform best, then that will probably be even stronger evidence of my advice to you: start an everyday exercise program now.