RDH - Thirty-Year Randomized Trial Finds Clear Benefits to Hard, Regular Exercise

Thirty-Year Randomized Trial Finds Clear Benefits to Hard, Regular Exercise

May 7, 2007

Young, extremely attractive thin people: the exception. Considered as a group, extremely attractive people under the age of twenty-five enjoyed a high level of fitness and good looks independent of physical activity.

According to the data from what is purportedly the largest randomized trial in medical history, hard, regular exercise is consistently superior to moderate or minimal activity. The study, conducted by the author, followed the bulk of the American population through three decades of daily life, collecting many thousands of impressions from nearly every corner of the population spectrum. In another medical first, there was no need for a control group, for two reasons: (1) all Americans, randomly considered, took part in the study (and the author was not interested in something so cliché as comparing Americans with, say, the French), and (2) none of the participants knew they were being tested. The author, who took pains to notice everything he saw, also insisted, as an additional precaution that is just now becoming a benchmark in the field of medical research, on protecting even himself from any knowledge of the study at the time it was being conducted. Moreover, many of the observations were of recorded or broadcast sources; the subjects of these photographic or audiovisual records, though they tended to know they were being watched, would have had no way of knowing to what end.

"But Mr. Harper, what's the point of all this?" There isn't any. But you must admit that there are some links on this page to some pretty pictures.

Let's get right to the data, which speak for themselves (or speaks for itself, depending on how much of the Latin sense of the term you insist on importing into English):

1. In the thirty-year-period from 1976 to 2006, every professional tennis player playing a full schedule on the tour and carrying a top-five world ranking was fit and reasonably attractive (adjusting for the taste and sexual orientation of their fans) while carrying that ranking. And as prize money and competitiveness have grown in lockstep, top players have continued to work brutally hard with no letup whatsoever. From Chris Evert to Steffi Graf to Maria Sharapova, there have been no clunkers. The wealthiest nations may be facing obesity epidemics, but one wouldn't know this from watching tennis.

"What about interval training?" Interval training is great. Short bursts of brutally hard exercise mixed in with long stretches of more moderate exercise have been shown to be superior to long stretches of moderate exercise with no short bursts of brutally hard exercise mixed in.

2. All top-flight marathon runners in the past thirty years have been thin. There is no need to dwell on this particular group, and the author admits that he didn't bother watching any marathons to make this observation.

3. People who shop at Wal-Mart and take advantage of the motorized courtesy carts tend to be significantly heavier and less attractive than those who have been seen doing cartwheels down the aisles of the same store. This observation, too, should require no additional analysis, and the author didn't bother visiting Wal-Mart to see if his hunch was correct.

4. Major League Baseball players who steal more than fifty bases in a single season are, by an overwhelming majority, fitter and more athletic than Major League pitchers with a reputation for staying out late and consuming vast quantities of beer.

Check with your doctor first. The results of this study are not intended to suggest a program of hard, regular exercise. Those wishing to pursue such a program should consult a licensed, practicing physician.

5. People who manage, for at least a five-year stretch, to do everything very slowly and spend a lot of time in bed or lying down on a couch tend to be heavier and less attractive than people who exhibit many bursts of furious activity and who are capable of, for example, swimming the crawl for two hours at a time without rest. This is yet another observation that comes entirely from the author's mind without any recourse to actual people.

There were many other observations recorded along the way, but in the interests of efficiency (and to give the overworked author time to fold laundry and to go outdoors and run up and down hills for an hour), this essay will now come to an end. Readers looking for more should feel free to draw analogies to the five examples presented herein.