The people who exercise the most, have a lower average resting heart beat per minute, so it averages out about the same, except they have a higher quality of life, quality of sleep, etc.
I suspect Trump heard about this phenomenon, but his idiot brain couldn’t understand it, so he just assumed that less exercise = longer life.
I agree with you, it felt like one of those things where someone doesn't want to do X and then hear something vaguely related and go "perfect that means I don't have to..." while clearly not understanding, or caring, what the real context is.
But that would be skipping the nuance of fight-or-flight events and the drop during sleep which is where you should spend an average of a third of your time alive.
I've also heard it as a number bigger than a billion, more like 5 billion, and its for mammals minus naked mole rats and not other animals and I think that's because the others never achieve such high mileage on that muscle.
quickedit: im not agreeing with trump with this assertation, I'm simply remembering what probably spawned that chinese whisper game of a interpretation. I think you'll on average have that many heartbeats at the average lifespan we reach, i guess 70, regardless of if you're a marathon runner or an olympic swimmer swimming the open ocean, your circulatory system will become more efficient as you become more athletic. So by not exercising you are actually doing more damage than exercising especially relative to long durations of time because you need more effort and therefore heartbeats to compensate if you're out of shape where when you're more athletic it only needs a fraction of the effort.
I wasn't doing actual (or serious) maths, but u/BannedSoHereIAm replied to me with a link to the article that apparently triggered that reaction/excuse to not exercise if you're interested.
The thing is, even if that's the case then doing a bit of exercise is going to lower your resting heart rate and "save" you a lot more beats than you "spend".
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u/theantdog 16d ago
Holy shit that guy was an idiot.