Snow..

“Age is just a number” mindset is fantastic. 

But one place it does not apply is when it comes to shoveling snow, which so many of us do every winter: The incidence of sudden heart attack spikes some 16% in men of a certain age when it snows, particularly if it’s a big storm, leading to a 34% rise in deaths, a large, two-decade Canadian study found.  

Let’s start with the fact that wet snow is heavy. In one study on men, the average shovelful of snow weighed 16 pounds. “That’s 16 pounds per shovel, 12 lifts a minute for 10 minutes,” says Barry Franklin, Ph.D., a spokesperson for the American Heart Association and director of Preventive Cardiology and Cardiac Rehabilitation, Beaumont Health in Royal Oak, MI. That adds up to almost 2000 pounds, the weight of a subcompact SUV.

 A different study conducted by Franklin and his team years ago found that a shoveler’s heart rate increases up to 97% of his max heart rate, more than when the same person does a treadmill test at maximum exertion.

Secondly, snowstorms happen when it’s, well, cold. When you huff and puff in that cold air, your blood vessels constrict, making it harder for blood to circulate around your body. This raises your blood pressure, making it even harder for your heart to get enough blood, he says.