I thought I would start writing about different studies that I find when I search the medical databases. There are some really interesting things being done these days all over the globe.
Personally I don’t have the language for many of the studies because they use a lot of medical jargon, but many you can get the jist of.
The study: Can Exercise Help With Psychosocial Stress and Improve Mortality Rates?
Area of Brain With Stress Comes From
Psychosocial stress is essentially the stress that can lead to depression and especially chronic stress. So this is stuff that you and I feel probably every week… especially with our hectic world these days.
The study wanted to know if exercise training reduced the mortality rates in patients who had coronary artery disease. Symptoms such as depression, hostility, and overall stress levels were identified as risk factors and death in these patients.
It’s proven that exercise training can reduce these symptoms, but the people who conducted the study where unsure as to the health benefits that came along with the reduction of these symptoms.
It’s important to point out that it is proven that exercise training can heavily reduce stress, depression, and drastically improve your mood. Personally, I think that benefit is just as attractive as making my body look good.
The Test:
So they studied 53 patients with coronary artery disease with high levels of stress and 469 patients with low levels of stress. Kinda seems like a pretty big imbalance if you ask me. I wonder why they chose to only look at 53 patients who suffered with high levels of stress?
Exercise Training
They there was a control group of 27 patients who had high levels of stress but did not use any exercise training.
Besides the control group, the patients performed exercise training of some sort. It does not specify exactly what they did which would have been really helpful.
The Results:
First off mortality (the rate of death) was 4 time higher in patients who suffered from high levels of stress than it was in patients who did not suffer with stress. That means for every 2 deaths of the low stressed patients… there would be 8 deaths with the high stress patients.
Pretty big issue.
Exercise training decreased the prevalence of psychosocial stress from 10% to 4% and improved oxygen uptake in patients with high and low levels of stress. The Mortality rate in patients who improved exercise capacity was 60% lower that patients who had barely any improvement in exercise capacity.
So exercise did help the patients improve their mortality rate, but only if they had an improvement in their exercise capacity.
The Lesson to Take Home:
Push Yourself!
I think its a pretty safe bet that you aren’t suffering from coronary artery disease… but the one part of this study that I thought was worth highlighting was the drastic changes because of exercise improvement.
If you don’t constantly push yourself and get stronger, faster, or flat out more fit… then you are likely to not gain anything from your exercise.
Makes sense on a logical level doesn’t it?
So if you workout but you do the same thing over and over again which 80% of more of people do then you really are wasting your time working out. You’re getting nothing out of it.
Make sure that each time you enter the gym… or each time you workout at home… you push yourself just a little harder. Do something like:
- An extra rep in each set
- An extra set to failure
- Add some weight
- Change up the exercise routine
- And the possibilities are limitless to your imagination.
I hope you have a great Friday and weekend and I hope this was a fun post to read. Leave some comments answering this question…
Last time you were really pissed off… or the last time you were stressed out of your mind… did you workout? and if so… did it help you?
Other Helpful Articles:
Weight Training for Women… Getting Started
Resources:
