How many steps are you from dying?

After examining the results of 58,000 cardiovascular stress tests performed on treadmills in medical clinics, cardiologists at Johns Hopkins have concocted a formula that can be used to predict your chances of dying during the next 10 years. It is based on how long and hard you can keep running and walking before becoming too exhausted to continue.

They call their algorithm the “FIT Treadmill Score.”

What kind of ‘itness’ helps you live longest?

“The notion that being in good physical shape portends lower death risk is by no means new, but we wanted to quantify that risk precisely by age, gender and fitness level, and do so with an elegantly simple equation that requires no additional fancy testing beyond the standard stress test,” says researcher Haitham Ahmed.

The formula involves taking into account how fast your heart beats at its peak rate while you perform intense exercise and how well you can endure physical activity as the speed and incline of a treadmill increases.

“The FIT Treadmill Score is easy to calculate and costs nothing beyond the cost of the treadmill test itself,” adds researcher Michael Blaha, who is the director of clinical research at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease. “We hope the score will become a mainstay in cardiologists’ and primary clinicians’ offices as a meaningful way to illustrate risk among those who undergo cardiac stress testing and propel people with poor results to become more physically active.”

In the study, a 45-year-old woman whose fitness scored in the bottom 5th percentile had a 38 percent risk of dying over the next 10 years. In contrast, a 45-year-old woman with a top fitness result only had a 2 percent chance of dying during that time.

The interesting thing here is that the kind of “fitness” that predicts you’ll live a longer and healthier life isn’t exactly the same as what the so-called experts have been recommending.

They’ve been telling you for years that “cardiovascular” fitness is your goal. That you need endurance and stamina … so you should do aerobics, run, walk and “spin” for hours.

Yet in the results of the stress test the authors wrote that for those who lived a healthy life for longer, “peak metabolic equivalents of task and percentage of maximum predicted heart rate achieved were most highly predictive of survival.”

“Peak metabolic equivalents” and maximum heart rate achieved are terms that have to do with the strength and power of your lungs and heart. So It’s not how far you can run, or how much “cardiovascular endurance” you have. It’s how strong your heart and lungs are.

So if you want a long healthy life, go for exercises that don’t take that long, but that require your body to have power. Instead of jogging, do a few sprints.

Instead of walking for miles, find a hill and walk up and down a few times. Instead of swimming 40 laps, swim 10 as fast as you can.

Exercising for heart and lung strength will increase the maximum heart rate you can achieve … and lengthen your life.

- Carl Lowe