The article wasn’t that precise about some of the numbers. That’s why I typed “about 31%.” It said that the percentage was similar to the 2.5 hrs/week exercisers.
I think it mentioned that the benefits plateaued going past 7.5 hrs, but I’ll have to check it again.
The study was more of a meta-study where they combined data from other long-term detailed studies/surveys. I don’t think they measured every exercise level between 7.5 hrs and 25 hrs. I got the sense that it was more general than that, looking at rough estimates. That’s just my guess though.
It could be a gap in what the article’s author wrote or a gap in the data from the studies or something else. I do recall that there weren’t as many people at the higher end of the scale (in terms of hrs/week of exercise), which is understandable. While 25 hrs/week might seem almost normal to some of us around here, the percentage of people who exercise that much consistently is fairly small. This low percentage would show up in the underlying studies, unless they specifically targeted ultrarunners and especially Ironman triathletes, and not even all of those people exercise/train that much. Most of the pros are probably at that level, but there really aren’t that many pro IM triathletes and ultrarunners out there. Under 1/10,000 of a percent of society at large. At that rate, they may have only had a handful of such people in the studies, which isn’t a good sample size.
For that small group, there could be other factors at play. Do those with natural talent for those sports also tend to have fewer genetic issues that could lead to premature death? Is their longevity more a result of the training/lifestyle or of the backgrounds of people who tend to be successful at those sports and are drawn to these sports? I don’t know if any of this was studied here. Those questions probably wouldn’t be a high priority for researchers focusing on general health questions. For sports scientist researchers, they may not have the resources to run decade-long studies. Would those researchers have access to genetic analyses of the athletes? That’s a lot of private information that isn’t available.
I’ll have to look at what the earlier studies had shown, the ones that got a fair amount of press last year or the year before. I think they showed something similar, that there was a peak in benefit at the moderate level of exercise and then it started to trend downward as you got into the high end of training hours. Something like that. I don’t recall all the details, but I remember all the fuss and controversy about how endurance training was shown to be unhealthy after a certain number of hours or training hours and intensity combined.
That’s a possible flaw in much of this research. Exercise hours by itself aren’t the entire story. Intensity also matters, a lot. Someone who rides at a moderate level for 7.5 hrs a week is not undergoing nearly as much stress as someone who does hard hill workouts, sprint workouts and long tempo rides for 7.5 hrs a week. I know most people wouldn’t train hard like that 100% of the time. But say someone trains hard for 3-4 hrs of the 7.5 hrs/week. That would still be a much different stress level compared to a person who rides easy on flat routes for 7.5 hrs/week.
Likewise, someone who does long races and truly races them hard will be subject to much more stress than someone who never does long races, or only participates casually and treats them more like moderate training workouts or social occasions. (Some amateur marathoners follow this approach.) It just means that there is still room out there for more studies. But this starts to get very nuanced, and the duration of the studies make this kind of work very difficult to do. Any researchers here interested in studying all this? I know there are some scientists among the forum visitors and plenty of scientists and researchers in the D.C. region overall. There’s probably not a lot of people looking to fund studies like this, however. Groups like USA Triathlon might be the best bet, but they don’t have enormous budgets for research, since that isn’t their primary focus.
EDIT: I should have mentioned stage road cyclists too, like those who participate in the Tour de France and other Grand Tours. They train more than 25 hrs/week, but maybe not quite at that level the entire year? Even so, there aren’t that many of them either. A few hundred at most, worldwide, and only a small number in the U.S.
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Even on more intense weeks, I find it hard to ride more than 15 hours while maintaining a full-time job and prioritizing family life. 12 hours is my sweet spot, and probably sufficient time for any of my training/racing goals.
