Men who can do more than 40 pumps have 96% less risk of heart disease

How many pumps can you do next? This figure says a lot about your health – doctors urging people to aim for at least 40.

According to a new study, men who can do more than 40 consecutive pumps are 96% less likely to have heart disease than those who are less than 10.

The Harvard study, published in the JAMA Network Open on Friday, suggests dropping the doctor and showing your doctor how much you can do, which could be a better predictor of heart disease, heart attacks and accidents cerebral vascular tests than traditional treadmill tests.

"Surprisingly, the push-up ability was more strongly associated with the risk of cardiovascular disease than the sub-maximal treadmill test results," said Dr. Justin Yang, senior author, Resident in Occupational Medicine. School of Public Health Harvard TH Chan, in a press release.

"Our results demonstrate that lifting capacity can be a simple and free method for assessing the risk of cardiovascular disease in almost any setting."

The researchers analyzed the health data of 1104 active male firefighters aged 21 to 66 over a 10-year period. Their lifting capacity and their tolerance for treadmill exercises were measured at the beginning of the study in 2000, with each man then undergoing an annual physical examination and health questionnaires.

During the study period, 37 men developed a type of cardiovascular disease, "except one" occurring in men who performed at least 40 pumps on initial examination.

"Participants able to perform more than 40 pumps were associated with a significantly lower risk of cardiovascular incident risk compared to those performing less than 10 pumps," the study said.

Participants who were able to perform 11 or more pull-ups initially had significantly reduced the risk of subsequent cardiovascular events.to our knowledge, this is the first study to report the inverse relationship between ability initial traction and subsequent outcomes related to CVD in a cohort of professionally active men.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the world and despite mounting evidence of "an objective assessment of cardiorespiratory fitness as a vital sign in health care settings," the authors point out that physical activity and CRF evaluations "have been largely neglected by clinicians".

"The most commonly used physical activity assessments are personal history questionnaires and the state of health and lifestyle reported by the patient," the report says. "However, objectively measured CRF levels are often significantly lower than predicted based on self-reported physical activity."

Traditional cardiorespiratory fitness tests are "expensive, time consuming and often require professional facilities and qualified personnel to administer them".

"The use of these tools remains limited to particular professions and targeted patient populations," the report says. "To our knowledge, no study has examined the association between lifting capacity, a simple, cost-free, free measure of functional status, with future cardiovascular events."

The authors noted that, because the study population was made up of professionally active middle-aged men, the findings might not be generalized to women, men, or women. 39, other ages or less active.

"This study highlights the importance of fitness for health and explains why clinicians should assess fitness at clinical encounters," said Stefanos Kales, senior writer, professor in the Environmental Health Department at Harvard Chan School and Chief of Occupational Medicine at the Cambridge Health Alliance.