Push-up capacity predicts men’s heart disease risk

Findings could lead to an easy heart test

NEW YORK, Feb 16, (Agencies): The number of push-ups a man can do in the doctor’s office may be a good predictor of his risk of developing heart disease in the coming years, new research suggests.

In a study of more than 1,100 male fire-fighters followed for 10 years, researchers found that the risk of atherosclerosis and of cardiovascular events, such as stroke and heart attack, was 96 percent lower among men who could do 40 or more push-ups during timed tests compared to the men who could do fewer than 10.

The findings could lead to an easy test for heart disease risk, said the study’s lead author Dr Justin Yang, a researcher at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

“Using push-ups could be a no-cost and simple method to assess one’s functional capacity and predict future cardiovascular event risk,” Yang said. “For clinicians this is really important since a lot of tests vary in their results and are very expensive and time consuming. This can be done within a minute.”

To look at possible predictors of heart disease, Yang and his colleagues turned to data on 1,104 Indiana fire-fighters who had health exams between February 2, 2000 and November 12, 2007. Along with push-up capacity, a host of other measurements were recorded at the same time, including age, VO2 max (the maximum rate of oxygen consumed during intense exercise), height, weight, resting heart rate, blood pressure levels, cholesterol levels, blood sugar levels and smoking status.

At baseline, the fire-fighters’ average age was 39.6 years and their average body mass index (BMI, a ratio of weight to height) was 28.7, which is in the “overweight” range. “With fire-fighters pictured on calendars as muscular and very fit, we tend to think of them as different from everyone else, but this group is pretty much the same as the rest of the population,” Yang said. “Half of them were overweight or obese.”

During the study period, there were 37 cardiovascular disease-related outcomes among the men, according to the report in JAMA Network Open.

While other factors, such as age, BMI and VO2 were also predictive of the risk for cardiovascular disease events, pushups were the strongest indicator, Yang said.

One strength of the new study is that it relies on a measure of strength rather than on self-reports of physical activity, said Kerry Stewart, a professor of medicine and director of clinical and research exercise physiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Stewart suspects that the men’s pushup capacity is simply a marker for their level of fitness. “You have to be pretty fit to do that many push-ups,” said Stewart who was not involved in the new research. “You would probably have to do a good amount of exercise on a regular basis to get to the level of 40 or more.”

And fitness, Stewart said, is correlated with a number of factors, including blood pressure, cholesterol levels and abdominal fat. The findings underscore the importance of guidelines that emphasize both resistance training and aerobic exercise, Stewart noted.