How Long Will You Live? The Treadmill Teat

The Treadmill Test

This is old now – 2015 – but still relevant.

The smart folks at Johns Hopkins got out their calculators and studied 58,000 people from all stages of life. After sharpening pencils, they figured out that the closer you can come to your maximum heart rate during exercise, the more likely you are to live another ten years. (Calculate your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 220. The result is in beats-per-minutes or BPM.) Like many of these reports, the science doesn’t reveal much as the headline teases.

Figuring out whether you have a disease is easy. Several years ago, doctors scanned my wife, and with one look at the scan, our doc declared kidney cancer. Cryosurgery cut out the offender, and scans showed just as clearly that she was cancer free.

But “health” is not that easy. Even something like body mass index (BMI) can be hard to figure. If you carry lots of muscle, you’ll likely find yourself on the obese side of the chart. As for fat, we understand now that it’s mostly visceral fat that is dangerous. This fat intertwines with your organs and causes a multitude of issues. Subcutaneous fat – fat under the skin – isn’t as much of a big deal.

Since health and wellness make gobs of money in the marketplace, researchers and scientists try to come up with measures to understand ‘total health’ as opposed to disease. Thus, Johns Hopkins and its treadmill test. This treadmill test attempts to give a number – a health score, if you will – relating to your relative health, hoping people with lower numbers will work seriously on their health to improve. No doubt we will soon see the Treadmill Test Diet on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. I can’t wait!

So how does this work? Say you’re twenty. If you’re in good health, you should be able to ramp up to a heart rate of 200 bpm (220-20=200). If you’re dying – figuratively – at 160 bpm, then you appear to have the cardiovascular system of a sixty-year-old. Get to it.

He’s an age calculator from Men’s Health Magazine. Do the six exercises, record results, total up and divide by six, and voila!, you’re a couch potato! These are different tests, though, and you should understand this. The treadmill test only asks if you will live another ten years based on current cardiovascular health. The Men’s Health test determines how you compare to other ages. I warn you that your fitness age will very likely be different from your chronological age, which brings up a caveat: I haven’t figured out where the baselines come from. Who says what a 40-year-old man should be able to do? Or a twenty year old woman? And who are these people? Dock workers? Teachers? Pro athletes?

Another odd age-related exercise is the dead hang. I read that a man should be able to hang from a bar for two minutes. I tried it and was depressed for a week. I understand now that the two-minute mark is for Superman. If you are a normal biped and can hang for a minute, you’re Superman in training. I do dismally less, but still compare nicely for a man of my advanced age. Check it out here.

Read the headline news version here from ABC.
Johns Hopkins Medical with a more measured write up here.

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