If you want to live a longer life then you could be interested in a a new study that highlighted how those who followed in the footsteps of Sir Roger Bannister lived on average almost five years longer than the general population.
Sir Roger Gilbert Bannister was a British neurologist and middle-distance athlete who sadly passed away in 2018 at the age of 88. On 6 May 1954, and with minimal training, Sir Roger broke history as the first person to complete a mile run in under four minutes. His time clocked in at 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. If there’s one group of people you should take advice from, it’s probably elite athletes with their years of experience and incredible tips.
How to live a longer life, the Sir Roger Bannister way
Hoping to understand how to live a longer and more healthy life, investigators from Australia and Canada tracked down the 200 runners who had completed the 4-minute mile after Sir Roger Bannister almost 70 years ago. All of the participants were men, with most of them still alive.
“Breaking the four-minute mile was an extraordinary achievement 70 years ago and revealed just what the human body can achieve. It set off a wave of runners following in Sir Roger’s mighty footsteps,” said Professor Mark Haykowsky from the University of Alberta. “Remarkably we found that like Sir Roger, who lived to the ripe old age of 88, most of the first runners also lived well into their 70s, 80s and a majority are alive and healthy today.”
Through some serious sleuthing, Professor Haykowsky and his team were able to identify 4-minute mile runners from the UK, Australia, France, New Zealand, and the United States. All of them were born between 1928 and 1955.
Their findings were recently published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
What did the researchers find?
With the initial intention to analyze the effect of long-term exercise on elite athletes over time, researchers were pleased to learn the true effect of aerobic fitness.
Professor Andre La Gerche, a world-renowned sports cardiologist, said: “Our study set out to see how exercise affected elite athletes over the long term. We know that elite athletes have bigger hearts due to their sustained aerobic output and there was some belief that this could affect their health and longevity, but we found the opposite.
“Five years of extra life compared to average is very significant, especially when we found that many of these runners not only enjoyed long lives but were also healthy too.
“Not everyone needs to be able to run a sub-four-minute mile to enjoy good health long into old age, but they need to exercise regularly and push themselves aerobically.”
