REAL LIFE NEWS: FAST RUNNING NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL
by Hazed
A few months ago I reported with some glee that strenuous running was bad for you. Now it turns out that may not be the case after all.
Many newspapers and websites picked up on the original story, reporting that training very hard is as bad as taking no exercise at all. The headlines were all based on a study conducted in Denmark, which looked at 1,000 healthy joggers and almost 4,000 healthy non-joggers. Those are large numbers so you would expect the conclusions to be solid.
However, the overall numbers may have been large, but only 36 of the subjects counted as strenuous joggers – and of that 36, only two had died. So those numbers are too small to be statistically significant.
Another problem is that the researchers have no idea why those two strenuous joggers died: maybe they suffered cardiovascular disease, which would have had some relevance to the study, or maybe they were knocked down by a bus, or abducted by aliens, which would have been completely irrelevant.
The study’s lead now admits his data did not prove that strenuous jogging is bad for you. Tut tut.
