Men with Muscles Live Longer – It’s True!

A lifestyle that incorporates plenty of exercise is usually advocated by physicians for older patients. The choice of exercise used to be largely aerobic – walking or running – but more recently resistance training has been recognized as having an important role in preventing cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, and osteoporosis. And an increase in muscular strength helps in preventing falls, an important cause of disablement in the elderly.

Now researchers have reported in an article in the British Medical Journal that muscular strength is linked with decreased mortality in men. Data were obtained from 8,762 men aged between 20 and 80 who attended an aerobic center in Dallas , USA , and were followed for an average of 19 years. Cardiorespiratory fitness assessed by a maximal exercise test on a treadmill. Muscular strength was scored using maximal leg and bench presses; the subjects were classified into three groups, based on these scores – low, medium and high muscularity.

During this period there were 503 deaths (145 cardiovascular disease, 199 cancer). After adjustments were made for age, physical activity, smoking, alcohol use, body mass index, and so on, hazard ratios across the three groups of muscular strength were calculated:

For all cause mortality low muscularity the hazard ratio was set at 1.0 (reference), medium muscularity was found to be 0.72, and high muscularity was 0.77.

For cardiovascular death the hazard ratios were 1.0 (reference), 0.74, and 0.71 for the 3 groups, respectively.

And for cancer deaths they were 1.0 (reference), 0.72, and 0.68, respectively.

The pattern of the link between muscular strength and death from all causes and cancer persisted after further adjustment for cardiorespiratory fitness.

The findings show quite convincingly that medium and especially high muscularity reduce the likelihood of all-cause death and cancer death by 25% to 30%, even after adjustments are made for cardiorespiratory fitness (or lack of it) as well as other possible interfering factors. And just because these findings were made in men, there’s no reason women shouldn’t get the same benefits from resistance training. Now there are more than enough reasons to spend equal time with the weight machines as on the treadmill.