Can you climb four flights of stairs at a fast pace in under a minute without stopping? If you can, you have good functional capacity. If not, it’s probably a sign you need more exercise.
This exercise data was crosschecked against heart attacks, strokes and deaths for 11 years or so after each study participant’s last clinic visit.
The findings were dramatic: The risk of experiencing these events was roughly 50 percent lower for those who lifted weights occasionally, compared with those who never did — even when they were not doing the recommended endurance exercise.
The people who lifted weights twice a week, for about an hour in total, had the greatest declines in risk.
“The good news,” says a co-author of the study, “is that we found substantial heart benefits associated with a very small amount of resistance exercise.” As an associational study, the results show only that people who occasionally lift weights happen to have healthier hearts — not that resistance training directly reduces heart-related health risks.
The data, though, does reveal associations between weight lifting and a lower body mass index, which might be connected to fewer heart problems.
The specifics of which exercises people were doing — lat pull-downs? dead lifts? squats? — or how many repetitions they did or at what level of resistance is unknown. But don’t wait. It’s probably a good idea to lift some weights while the researchers figure out what the exact exercises were.