Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
A team of researchers at Macao Polytechnic University announced this week that the human body, the specific one you are sitting in right now, requires between 560 and 610 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise every week to meaningfully protect itself from heart attacks and strokes. For those of us without a calculator and a death wish, that is ten hours. Ten. The scientists published the figure in the British Journal of Sports Medicine and then, assuming they followed their own exercise advice, went home and collapsed from exhaustion.
Like you were doing, just four times longer. (mihtiander/depositphotos)
The current guideline, which can be found printed encouragingly on the side of the treadmill nobody uses, is 150 minutes a week. The researchers concluded that 150 minutes results in a heart risk reduction of only eight to nine percent. Eight percent. After two and a half hours of killing yourself. The press release called 150 minutes a “robust universal minimum,” which in retrospect sounds a lot like a humblebrag.
To reach what the study calls “substantial protection,” defined as reducing cardiovascular risk by more than 30%, a person must log the full 560 to 610 minutes. Are you f****** kidding me?
The data showed that the people in the worst shape, the ones for whom a flight of stairs is more akin to a hostage negotiation, must exercise 30 to 50 minutes longer each week than actual fit people to earn identical health benefits. Which means the least able must do the most extra exercise. The researchers called this “the steeper challenge faced by deconditioned populations,” a phrase that belongs over the door of every gym as a warning to the living. Somewhere, a cardiologist read this and nodded.
Investigators strapped a monitoring device to the wrist of all 17,088 participants for seven consecutive days and ran them through a cycling test to estimate VO2 max, the laboratory measure of how efficiently a person turns oxygen into complete physical exhaustion. Over the following 7.8 years, they logged 1,233 cardiovascular events. They did not say how many events were caused by working out for 10 hours a week for 8 years, but we can be pretty sure it’s not zero.
The researchers proposed that future guidelines “may need to differentiate between the minimal moderate to vigorous exercise volume required for a basic safety margin and the substantially higher volumes necessary for optimal cardiovascular risk reduction,” which is a long way of admitting that most people probably can’t exercise ten hours per week, so why bother. All we are is dust in the wind, dude.
The lone act of mercy in the entire document is a single sentence near the bottom, where the authors concede this was an observational study and “no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect.” The nation’s sedentary population has located that sentence and is gripping it the way a man overboard grips a doorframe his girlfriend is riding on, even though there’s plenty of room for him on there too, and now I’ve forgotten where this metaphor was heading.
The authors also admitted their study group may have been “healthier and fitter than the general population,” which just makes me want to smack them even harder.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
