Scientists discover secret to living beyond your life expectancy - but it isn't ... trends now
When it comes to longevity - it's a sprint, not a marathon.
And yes, you read that correctly.
A new study discovered that people who ran a mile in less than four minutes lived five years longer than their peers.
This flies in the face of what many scientists currently think about extreme exercise, said Steve Foulkes, post doctoral research fellow at the University of Alberta, told DailyMail.com.
Sir Roger Bannister was the first person to run a sub-four minute mile in 1954. He died in 2018, at the age of 88.
Sir Bannister, pictured here at age 75, posing with the stopwatch that measured his record breaking mile.
Their theory is that the tremendous stress that extreme athletes put their bodies can cause heart problems and lead to an earlier death, Dr Foulkes told DailyMail.com.
Their results were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Only a few thousand people in the world have ever recorded a time that quick, but the researchers said this is evidence that whatever form of exercise you want to get may be beneficial for your body.
There's been a lot of emphasis on slow and steady exercise - as is evidenced by the 10,000 steps a day camp. But Foulke's research shows that extreme exercise may even be more beneficial to our bodies.
'The beauty of exercises is that it's a stress, but it's a stress that our body is really designed to deal with and adapt and grow stronger from,' he said.
We can see this by looking back in history. Sir Roger Bannister became the first known person to run a mile in under four minutes in May 1954.
Since then, 1,754 other men have broken that same boundary, according to the Sub-4 Chronicle, which was the database used in the study. The most runners come from the US, Great Britain and Kenya.
The researchers looked at 200 of the under four-minute-milers who hit their record from 1954 to 1974 so that they could see how these miraculous athletes fared as they aged. 30 percent of the men had died by the time the study began.
But overall, the researchers found that the runners lived on average four years and eight months years longer than people their age who did not complete a sub four mile.
This is probably because extreme athletes get some of the same benefits from exercise that normal people do, Dr Foulkes said.
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