Hope You're Sitting Down: Study Shows Running GOOD For You!

by Andrew Heffernan

Oct 30, 2008

It seems to have calmed down a bit in the last few months, but there's been a bit of a schism for a while now between endurance types and the weight training types.  In a word, runners and their ilk have become the Star-Bellied Sneeches of the fitness world.

The muscle-heads got good and frothy over the fact that running and other endurance activities apparently 'interfered' with sought-after their strength and muscle gains.  Studies seemed to bear this out, and weight-training types breathed a sigh of relief because that meant they could cut out the roadwork guilt-free.

Unflattering pictures of emaciated marathoners cropped up like weeds on fitness websites, with the stern warning beneath:  "Is THIS how you want to look??", and hypertrophied giants would awaken from nightmares, convinced that a mob of skinny endurance athletes was going to force them to walk a city block.

The interference effect might be real; it might not be.  The jury's still out.  

From there, things got ugly:  not only would running jeopardize hard-earned muscle mass, but it would in fact KILL YOU!  Anecdotes cropped up:  this guy had a heart attack from running too hard.  That guy decided to do an extra lap, now he has to be fed through a tube.  My cousin Willie ran headfirst into a threshing machine.

As a guy who lifts and runs, I started to feel like a smoker.  I looked ahead to the days of speakeasy-style running clubs and running shoes that were only available on the black market.

So I was relieved to see a study that actually reconfirms what runners have been pretty sure of for quite some time:  that running is--wait for it--good for you.  According to this piece by Dr. Sanjay Gupta,

Stanford University researchers began studying 538 middle-aged runners back in the 1980s...21 years of research...show that the runners did not have higher rates of osteoarthritis and total knee replacements. And the onset of disabilities appeared 12 to 16 years later in the runners' group vs. the nonrunners'.

That's huge; imagine living independently or delaying the use of a cane for an extra decade or more. There were also half as many deaths in the runners' group than in the nonrunners' during the study.

 Okay, that is interesting:  running enhanced longevity in the study.  Up to now I'd been under the impression that running enhanced quality of life but didn't actually tack years onto it.  Color me pleasantly surprised.

Running and other weight-bearing exercises...also help you reduce your risk of America's biggest killer, heart disease.

Again, a bit of a surprise, I'm almost ashamed to say, based on all the horror stories I've been hearing.

 .. "Studies show running itself isn't bad on the joints," says Dr. Amadeus Mason, an orthopedist at Emory University's Sports Medicine Center. "The issue is if you get an injury and keep running on it."

And--surprise #3.  It's not going to destroy your joints, either.

I suspect this won't be the last word on this, but I'm heartened to see some real numbers that repudiate some of the hard knocks endurance training has taken at the calloused hands of the iron-pumping crowd of late.  I mean, can't we all just get along?

Male Pattern Fitness