A study about push-ups and cardiovascular health has been making its way around the media. The gist of the findings is that men who can do 40+ push-ups have a significantly lower risk of cardiovascular events than men who can’t do 10 push-ups.
So just do more push-ups and you’ll be fine, right?
Not necessarily.
Despite what the news anchors are saying, this is probably a case of correlation, not causation. For those of you who (like me), slept through your high school statistics class, correlation means that two things tend to happen together, while causation means that one thing causes the other.
Let’s say that you notice that almost every thunderstorm happens on a day when you’re wearing shorts. You keep a tally for a year and you find out that 95% of thunderstorms happened on a day when you were wearing shorts. You think about it and you realize that it’s unlikely that your clothing choice controls the weather. However, 95% is a lot – you can’t shake the feeling that there’s a link.
While your clothing choices don’t control the weather, shorts and thunderstorms tend to go hand in hand. If you wanted to sound smart, you could say that there is a correlation between wearing shorts and thunderstorms occurring. The reason why they go hand in hand is not because your shorts control the weather, because they are caused by the same thing: hot weather.
Hot weather causes us to wear shorts because they’re better at allowing us to cool off. On hot days, more water evaporates, which creates ideal atmospheric conditions for thunderstorms, and leads to more thunderstorms. In this case, you could say that there is a causational relationship between hot weather and thunderstorms and between hot weather and shorts.
Now that we have a better understanding of correlation vs causation, let’s revisit the push-ups. Think about the people you know who can do 40+ push-ups without stopping. Most of them are probably in good shape. They’re probably lean, pretty muscular, pretty strong, and in pretty good cardiovascular shape. There’s a decent chance that their overall physical condition is the reason why they are at a lower risk for cardiovascular events, not just their push-up abilities. There are tons of studies out there that demonstrate that people who are in good shape tend to be at a lower risk of cardiovascular problems, so it would make sense if this is a correlational relationship, not a causational one. I can’t say for sure what the true answer is, but for now, I will continue to do exercises besides just push-ups.
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