Dr. Andy Galpin

So we will have this paper in the show notes.

The actual title of the paper is Physical Fitness and All-Cause Mortality, A Prospective Study of Healthy Men and Women.

And again, first author, Stephen Blair from 1989.

So if you cruise onto table two of that paper, you're going to see that they actually ran the analysis and split up the men and women into quintiles.

So this would mean the lowest 20% of fitness, the next 20, next 20, next 20, next 20.

So take everyone across the spectrum, lowest to highest, and split them up, top 20%, et cetera, et cetera, all the way down.

And what I will read off to you is the relative risk.

And again, this is risk of dying as we go from the most fit 20 percentile to the next most fit to the middle kind of 20 percent to the second to last 20 percent all the way to the bottom 20 percent.

That's a way to view this.

So if you start at the highest level of fitness, and we put that as just a number of 1.0, right?

So this is saying, okay, you're at a 1.0.

If I go from the top 20 percentile to the next 20 percentile, so think of this as like 60 to 80th percent, if you will.

My risk goes from one to 1.7.

This is a 17% increase in risk.

If I go to the next one down, it's gone from one to 1.7 to 1.46.

The next after that, 1.36.

And then here's where it explodes.

So again, think of this as if you are somewhere between the 20th to 40th percentile, 100 being the best, zero being the absolute worst.

So just being the second to last category

your risk is 1.37.