Don’t run faster than your heart allows.

People who practice intense sports activity have a higher incidence of sudden death than non-athletes. This is stated by the Spanish Society of Cardiology (SEC) in a statement, in which it specifies that intense sport “significantly increases” the risk of suffering from this problem. The sudden death rate among those who practice it is 1.6 per 100,000 people, while among those who do not do sport that rate is not even half: 0.75 per 100,000 people.

According to Oracle Borates, head of the Cardiology Service of the Sports

Medicine Center of the Spanish Agency for Health Protection in Sports, “cardiomyopathies, including hypertrophic cardiomyopathies, are the leading non-traumatic cause of sudden death associated with sport” in young people. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is a disease that increases the size of the heart muscle. Most people with this problem have a normal life expectancy, but for them playing an intense sport is literally putting their life at risk.

On the other hand, a study carried out by Danish scientists in 2015 concluded that 메이저사이트 more than four hours per week can cause structural damage to the arteries, and that the life expectancy of those who run too much is similar to that of the sedentary people who do not perform any physical activity. According to this work —whose authors emphasize that new studies are needed to corroborate their results— it is recommended to run between 1 and 2.4 hours per week, distributed over no more than three days a week. An even more recent study, from 2017, found that running marathons is bad for your kidneys.

So how should those who like to go running do to prevent problems of this type?

The basic test is an electrocardiogram: 95% of people with hypertrophic cardiomyopathies have abnormalities in this test. But it’s not enough. Borates explain that, to detect this problem, “the diagnostic technique par excellence is the echocardiogram”. There are also other studies, such as the so-called electrocardiographic helter, which allows risk stratification, and the stress test, which is used to assess the response to exercise. In this way, you can be calmer when you go out to force —in addition to the muscles, joints and tendons— the heart. Although the advice is, again, to be very careful to avoid excesses.

Runnorexia, the obsession with running

Running, like all physical activity, has psychological benefits. Above all, it contributes to the reduction of stress and anxiety and, therefore, helps prevent depression. But on this same level, excessive activity can also have a detrimental effect: one can become addicted to running. This obsession with running has been given the name runnorexia, which can be defined, in the words of psychologist and personal trainer Jonathan Garcia-Allen, as “the loss of perspective of the role of physical exercise in a person’s life.”

Running addiction is possible because when someone runs, their brain releases chemicals that provide pleasure,  such as dopamine and endorphins. In this way, the same brain area is activated as in cases of drug, alcohol or sex addiction. How is it possible to tell if someone has become addicted to this activity? The runnorexic person feels a lot of pleasure when running.

But you need to increase the frequency and intensity of your training to achieve that same feeling. And when he’s not running  , he experiences symptoms  like exhaustion, fatigue, weakness, irritability, depression, and loneliness . If the existence of a possible addiction to running is suspected, the recommendation is to go to therapy in order to overcome it.

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