Leg!

September 3rd, 2022| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

Storks must be in good shape. They’ll live long.

Because of what researchers from Brazil, Finland, Australia, the UK, and the US reported recently in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

The ability to stand on one leg for at least 10 seconds is, apparently, strongly linked to the risk of death over the next seven years.

Stop right there. Especially if you are middle aged. And go try it out. Now!

(I did. Y’all are doomed to consume my blogs each Sunday for at least another seven years.)

If you are middle-aged and unable to adopt this ten-second, one-leg pose, you are four (FOUR!) times more likely to die of any cause—heart attacks, strokes, cancer, whatever—in the coming years than those who could, well, “stand the test of time!”

First author of “Successful 10-Second One-Legged Stance Performance Predicts Survival in Middle-Aged and Older Individuals,” Claudio Gil Araújo, MD, PhD, research director of the Exercise Medicine Clinic-CLINIMEX in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, called the results “awesome!”

As a physician who has worked with cardiac patients for over four decades, I was very impressed in finding out that, for those between 51 and 75 years of age, it is riskier for survival to not complete the 10-second one-leg standing test than to have been diagnosed as having coronary artery disease or in being hypertensive or having abnormal cholesterol.”

We’ve known for a while that balance and mortality are linked. One reason being falls: the WHO reports that, across the globe, 700,000 people die each year because of falls. And more than 37 million falls a year require medical attention. Fall danger is great, especially as one grows older.

In the current project, 1,700 Brazilians between 51 and 75 were enrolled in an ongoing exercise study. Not surprisingly, the ability to perform the test dropped with age. Although 20% of people in the study overall were unable to stand on one leg for 10 seconds, that figure rose to 50% for those at 70, about 70% for those aged 76–80 years, and nearly 90% for those aged 81–85. Of the two dozen 85-year-olds in the study, only two were able to complete the standing test.

Dr. Araúgo again:

We are accumulating evidence that these three components of nonaerobic physical fitness are potentially relevant for good health and even more relevant for survival in older subjects. Poor nonaerobic fitness is the background of most cases of frailty, and being frail is strongly associated with a poor quality of life, less physical activity and exercise, and so on. It’s a bad circle.”

But we, the children of God, can affirm with the psalmist:

My foot stands on a level place;
in the assemblies I will bless Yahweh.
Psalm 26:12

Because …

… You stand my feet in a broad place.
Psalm 31:8

Not because I stand, but because he, God, stands!

For He stands at the right hand of the needy.
Psalm 109:31

Only because of God!

Some in chariots and some in horses,
but we—in the name of Yahweh, our God we trust.
They—they bow down and they fall,
but we—we rise and we stand firm.
Psalm 20:7–8

So …

And I—in my integrity You uphold me,
and You stand me in Your presence forever.
Psalm 41:12

After all, …

… better is a day in Your courts than a thousand [elsewhere].
I would prefer to stand at the threshold of the house of my God.
Psalm 84:10

Stand, not on a leg or two, but … with God!

SOURCE:
MedScape; British Journal of Sports Medicine