A study published in The New England Journal of Medicine suggests that “exercise capacity†(how intensely you can work out) may be a better measure of your overall fitness than your heart rate. Since fitness = longetivity we were quite excited by this article.
In this study, 5,720 healthy women were given stress tests; their exercise capacity was measured in METs (metabolic equivalents). Then during an 8-year follow-up, researchers found that those whose METs were less than 85% of the target for their age were 2.5 times as likely to die from a cardiac-related cause.
Exercise researchers have developed a simple to use calculation to find out your target MET level:
-For women, MET level = 14.7 – (0.13 x your age in years)
-For men, MET level = 14.7 – (0.11 x your age in years)