I believe we can prevent heart attack. We can put in place strategies to reduce risk. We can literally plan to change your future. Welcome, my name is Dr. Oreck Bishop. I'm a cardiologist, I'm an author and a keynote speaker. Together with that, I'm CEO of the Healthy Heart Network and I'm all about trying to help people live as well as possible for as long as possible. You probably know, heart disease is huge in Australia. Every 20 minutes someone suffers a heart attack and we know that over 20 people per day die from heart disease. This is on a backdrop of over 9 million people globally being impacted by this condition. Truthfully, most of these could probably have been avoided if only we knew what to do. Well, this podcast is all about helping you understand Better, where blood pressure, weight, cholesterol, and all the other bits and pieces around there can help, together with general health literacy for general better health. I am on a mission to impact not just heart health, but general health on a global scale. If you enjoy this podcast, I would be honoured for a five-star review, and you can share it with your family and friends. Who knows? It may well save someone. you love. Hi, my name's Dr. Warrick Bishop and welcome to my podcast and videocast station. Look, I've got a bit of a no-brainer for you today. I think we all know this, but occasionally science goes out and proves the obvious. So I think this is one of those situations, but there's no harm in reiterating the importance of the message here, and I really, really want you to get this. I'm going to be talking about weightlifting and aerobic exercise as we age. And I've come across an article here that really supports older adults' outcome, particularly cardiovascular, but also cancer, when they undertake regular physical exercise, both weightlifting and aerobic exercise. The current recommendation in the US and pretty well in Australia as well for aerobic exercises, moderate intensity of about 75 to 150 minutes per week, which is about 30 minutes brisk walking a day. Now, the paper I've got was put together by a team. who looked at a cohort of patients who were enrolled in 1993 into the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial. These were adults who were between 55 and 74 years of age at 10 United States Cancer Centers. Some 13 years into the trial, so 2006, participants were invited to complete questionnaires about exercise and in particular included weightlifting. Now, among the participants, which was almost 100,000 individuals, there was good follower and... Of that 100,000, about 52% were women. About a quarter of those individuals reported any weightlifting activity within the previous 12 months, and about 15% reported regular weightlifting between about one and six times per week. When it came to physical activity and people who met the guidelines of that physical activity that I just spoke about, the 30 minutes daily, about 25%, about a quarter of the participants reported that they fulfilled that criteria. Having got some of that baseline data, they followed this cohort and over a nine-year period, 1,477 deaths occurred. Now, they were able to pull together the reported exercise regimes and match that up against risk of death. And this is what they found. They found that for those reporting weightlifting, they had about a 9% or 10% lower risk of combined all-cause mortality. So not a bad outcome for lifting weights. They then went on to look at individuals who didn't do any weightlifting but followed the aerobic activity recommendations. And these individuals had an overall lower risk of all-cause mortality of about 32%. Interesting. So if you were going to choose between weightlifting and aerobic exercise based just on these figures, you'd probably choose for the aerobic exercise. When they looked at people who did both, which was weightlifting one to two times per week, plus met the aerobic activity recommendations, these individuals had a 40%. lower risk of all-cause mortality. And that is staggering. If you think about it, the weightlifting group benefited about 10%. The aerobic group in isolation benefited about 30%. The combination just over 40%. So these benefits appear completely and utterly additive. Very interesting here is what we don't know from this study is it's all just self-reported and it doesn't give us good insight into exactly what sort of weightlifting these individuals undertook. Some of them might have been lifting a one kilogram weight as they walked, for example. Others might have been lifting seriously at the gym to build muscle and strength. That is not clear. from this research. What is clear, though, is that aging and healthy aging clearly benefits from both muscle strength work, weightlifting work, and aerobic exercise. Now, I don't think there's any surprise whatsoever with that, but this is a fantastic... vindication of the advice we give people regularly, which is to work on aerobic exercise in combination with strength. If you think about it, strength is what allows you to get out of a chair. Strength is what allows you to carry your shopping. Strength is what allows you to get up a flight of stairs and to a very large degree strength in combination with fitness. are the very things that maintain our independence and keep at bay frailty. So what was very obvious within this particular research is that the group who did no aerobic exercise, no weightlifting, had the highest rate of all-cause mortality. Is that... important of its own well i think you also have to realize that at times we will see there will be people who engage in exercise because they've got a better uh if you like motivation they may look after their weight more they may be more interested in their health and so there can be some confounders nonetheless i'm I'm all for regular aerobic exercise. I do it myself. I'm all for regular weight exercise. I do that myself. And I'm going to strongly suggest if you want to look after yourself until we know even more about it, you should be thinking about it on a regular basis. Well, I really hope you found that reminder of the benefits of aerobic and weightlifting exercise valuable. I'm going to leave it there for now. Till next time, of course, I'm going to wish you the very best and hope you live as well as possible for as long as possible. Take care and bye for now. Did you know that coronary artery disease kills one in four people? So most of us are likely to carry some risk or know someone who does. If you're interested in finding out more about how to evaluate that risk, check out. www.virtualheartcheck.com.au It'll give you information about risk and what else can be done to be even more precise.
