Drop and give us 20.

On this week’s BJSM podcast, Dr Alex Hutchinson PhD (T:@sweatscience) joins BJSM’s Daniel Friedman (T: @ddfriedman) to make sense of all of the click-bait headlines and explore whether push-up prowess is the secret to long life.

Alex writes Outside’s Sweat Science column, about the science of endurance and adventure. He started out as a Cambridge-trained physicist and long-distance runner on the Canadian national team. As a journalist, he earned a National Magazine Award for his energy reporting with Popular Mechanics, covered adventure travel for The New York Times, and wrote a training column for Runner’s World. His latest book, out in February 2018, is ENDURE: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. He lives in Toronto, where he runs fast, climbs poorly, and gets outside as much as possible with his wife and daughters.

In this 17-minute conversation, Alex discusses:

· If push-ups can predict your likelihood of future cardiovascular events

· What we can learn from functional tests that aim to assess different health outcomes

· New data on the cardio vs weights debate

Further reading:

Yang J, Christophi CA, Farioli A, Baur DM, Moffatt S, Zollinger TW, Kales SN. Association Between Push-up Exercise Capacity and Future Cardiovascular Events Among Active Adult Men. JAMA network open. 2019 Feb 1;2(2):e188341-. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2724778

Stamatakis E, Williamson C, Kelly P, Strain T, Murtagh EM, Ding D, Murphy MH. Infographic. Self-rated walking pace and all-cause, cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality: individual participant pooled analysis of 50 225 walkers from 11 population British cohorts. Br J Sports Med. 2019 Mar 1:bjsports-2018. https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2019/03/01/bjsports-2018-100468.abstract