Why Are So Many Fit People Dying?

 The obvious culprit is “cardio exercise.” The heart doesn’t need to work any harder. It always is the hardest working and most reliable muscle of the human body. It is the other skeletal muscles that frequently languish — and they play the most significant role in optimizing health, functioning, and continued well-being. There is even the legend of “John Henry,” who was a hard-working man who thought he could outwork a steam engine — and of course, his heart exploded with that effort.

Similarly, a lot of the “World’s Strongest Man” competitors suffer from and even died of the great exertions required by their event. Additionally, it is a well-recognized fact that many of the top competitors in the Mr. Olympia and other bodybuilding contests experience heart as well as all other kinds of vital organ failures — thinking that it is enough just to push their bodies and organs to their limits for the body to adapt to those demands — rather than attaining critical failures — as with most things in real life.

Brute force is not going to make one invulnerable — especially from self-inflicted abuses — whether from exercise or from illicit drugs, and in many cases, both. So these untimely ends are not entirely unexpected and unprecedented, but are well-proven, and despite that, many go into denial about these obvious realities.

I’ve long pointed out that the heart has little effect on enhancing the circulation in the body — because it is the CONSTANT and not the VARIABLE — and in every experiment and experience, it is the variable that accounts for any significant difference and not the constant which is immutable. That is to say, that the heart is what it is, and nothing will change that, but the action of the rest of the muscles in the body, is what greatly impacts the effectiveness of circulation — particularly to those axes (joints) actually moved.

Otherwise, the heart has no idea where to prioritize that flow of blood and nutrients — but more importantly, it is those contractions of the skeletal muscles — that account for the propulsion of the blood and other fluids (inflammation, edema, lymphedema, lipedema, etc) back towards the heart — while creating space for the new to enter by virtue of the always working heart.

But for grossly misinformed people to think that all one is trying to accomplish in exercise is to work the heart infinitely harder, is the reason they are more likely to cause the heart to fail completely, rather than achieve the much more intelligent objective of using the entire musculature of the body to optimize the flow — and not just require the heart to work infinitely harder as the prescription for a longer and healthy life.

That is particularly the problem of the dementias — that the heart and lungs continue to function for many years after the circulation to the brain, hands and feet have ceased to remain vital functioning parts. It is a seriously flawed understanding that does not bode well for prolonged lives in continued good health and functioning — and therefore, all is lost.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1984/07/29/the-jim-fixx-neurosis-running-yourself-to-death/681bd977-8295-4d4a-802c-bbfd54684be5/