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Pain, but no gain: the dangers of one-off workouts
Are you the kind of person who compensates for a month’s absence from the gym by trying to fit ten workouts into one session and doing as much as you can, as hard as you can? If so, recent research suggests that a sporadic approach to exercise could be putting your health at risk.
American scientists from the William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, and Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit studied three million fitness club members across the US for over two years. They tracked how often they came to the gym to work out and found that out of 71 fatal heart attacks that occurred during or after a workout, almost half of these incidents affected people who exercised less than once a week on a regular basis. The authors concluded that people who only work out occasionally have a small but definite increased risk of having an exercise-related heart attack.
Now, before you cancel your own gym membership and vow never to sweat again, bear in mind that the risk is still very low at one death in 2.57 million workouts and that those who died were an average age of 52 and already had one or more risk factors or history of heart disease. ‘It’s likely that the people who died had been exercising at an excessive intensity and may have avoided a heart attack had they been exercising less vigorously,’ says Dr Barry A Franklin, co-author of the study and director of cardiac rehabilitation at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan.
Nevertheless, if a strenuous exercise session can put this kind of strain on your heart, should you give up workouts altogether unless you can make them a habit? Like everything else, moderation is the answer. ‘If you haven’t been exercising regularly, it’s best to start out slowly. You can’t expect to jump into a new kind of exercise head first and for your body to withstand it if you’re not fit,’ says exercise physiologist, David Bentley, from the University of Bath. Dr Bentley likens your body to a plant – if you give it too much water at once, it will die. But if you give it a steady stream, it will grow healthily.
Dr Len Almond, exercise physiologist from the British Heart Foundation National Centre for Physical Activity and Health at Loughborough University, agrees that you’re not going to see any improvements in fitness or get many health benefits if you only workout a couple of times a month. ‘If you’re sedentary, when you start exercising, your heart and circulation adapt and your muscles learn to use the extra oxygen, helping you walk faster or further,’ he says. However, if you work out once or twice in a row and then stop altogether, Dr Almond reckons within three days your body’s back to where it was before you started. In other words, you haven’t progressed at all.
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