High intensity exercise has its upper limits

THERE is no benefit to doing more than five hours of high intensity exercise a week, a Harvard study has found, as it does not help to stave off an untimely death.

However, pushing your body as hard as you can does not have any damaging health effects, as some previous studies have claimed.

The 30-year Harvard study of 100,000 Americans looked at how exercise impacts a person’s risk of death and found that doing 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week, the recommended amount, slashes the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease by 31 per cent.

People who do twice this (two and a half hours of intense exercise a week) were shown to benefit slightly, further reducing the threat of death by between 2 to 4 per cent.

However, fitness fanatics who do more than four times the recom- mended amount of vigorous weekly exercise (300 minutes, or five hours) do not get any additional benefit, the data show.

“This finding may reduce the concerns around the potential harmful effect of engaging in high levels of physical activity observed in several previous studies,” the Harvard researchers noted in their study published in the journal Circulation.