The ROI of Exercise
(herman.bearblog.dev)127 points by ingve 12 hours ago
127 points by ingve 12 hours ago
Also, if you have health issues, you will not be playing tennis twice a week. Plus tennis is on the expensive to stay active in when you need a club membership and courts to play.
Every town I've lived in has free courts in a park that anyone can use.
I have a friend who, when you bring up exercise in any capacity, how good it is for you, anything about it, even if its just how I did it, he has to find some way to twist it so it can't be good. This thread is so reminiscent of conversations with him.
"Tennis is great for you" "there's probably a correlation with being rich" "Also unhealthy people don't regularly play tennis so there's survivors bias". "But there's free courts" "Nope they turned those into pickleball courts" "Wake up at 4:30am and go for a run" "Bro if youre waking up at 4:30 when are you going to bed" etc
People will find any reason they can to be unhealthy. Its better to just not engage with them.
Not in North America. Not sure about Mexico, but in the US and Canada the majority of tennis courts are public and free (some of them are being converted to pickle ball, but that's a rant for another post). You can pick up a racquet at a thrift store for a few bucks. A can of balls (a few bucks more) can be used for a long time, especially if you're a beginner to intermediate. If you become more advanced, the biggest expense can be shoes and strings, but that depends on your form/play style.
I find tennis an incredibly cheap sport to do recreationally. Basketball can be cheap, too, but I think you'd go through shoes pretty fast, especially on a city hard court. Soccer maybe cheaper, but it's too much organization (hard to get 10+ people on the same page at the same time).
I am begging HNers to at least pull up the study in scihub and see if there was multivariate adjustment (there was) before they hip-fire the first thought they had when they saw someone summarize a study in a blog post.
I understand but incompetence is so common everywhere in society that mistakes like this genuinely are the first thought people should have.
I have the opposite opinion - if criticism like this is so obvious (and it is), then it's up to the article to refute it immediately - this saves time of everyone reading it and gives it more credibility.
So any mention of a study in an online comment or blog post has to couch it in a bunch of pre-responses to potential kneejerk dismissals from people who won't even look at the study?
You can tell who never looks studies up on scihub because they have no idea that multivariate modeling for confounders (especially income and education) is something pretty much every study does, so it makes no sense to assume you just blindly outsmarted the study when you thought of the first confounder that came to your mind.
Yet it everyone else's responsibility to defend casual mention of every study from a critique you came up in 5 seconds.
There are plenty of wealthy people who are unhealthy.
Wake up at 4:30am and go for a run. You’re already accomplishing more at that point in the day than most wealthy people who are comfortably laying in bed.
The hard thing is doing the thing. Just do, that’s it.
>Wake up at 4:30am
About that, what hours people that wake up at 4.30 am go to bed? If they're so conscious about their well being I'd assume at least 8 hours of sleep, so maybe they go to bed at... 8~9 pm? my question is what do they do to end their day at 9pm? If you work 9-5, you have just 4 hours left after work. Less if you commute, have dinner and a "go to be" routine of maybe 30 min. How about social life after work? Run errands? In my case, if I need to do anything out of my house it has to be after work hours (because almost everything is closed between 6am and 9am when I start work).
So, what's the secret?
I go to bed at 8-9pm and get up at 4:30.
My fiance and I don't have kids. I'm sure this is the biggest factor to allow me to live by this schedule.
Having a short commute helps a lot obviously, but I still was able to keep this schedule back when I had an hour commute. Back then, if we had even one errand to run after work, it was straight to bed when we got home, so we usually tried to keep errands to the weekend. Even if we had no errands, a lot of days we only had time to cook dinner and watch an episode of the Office.
Now we have a 10min commute, so after work we have time for an errand or two, then go to the gym, then we can even watch movie or something before bed.
I cook easy meals, things that don't take long and don't require more than a pot or a skillet. I don't mean microwave garbage or instant ramen either. I mean things like soups and beer-steamed sausage.
However, this usually leads me to eating the same few meals over and over. If I ever want more variety, I meal-prep on the weekend.
My fiance and I don't usually clean on weekdays. We probably live like slobs by some people's standards, but we're never more than 20min from a clean house.
As for social life... All of our friends live too far away to see them on weekdays anyway.
The secret isn't the "4:30" part, it's the "do the thing" part. You can almost certainly squeeze something into 30 minutes of your day, somewhere convenient. So pick the convenient time and do that.
I don't live somewhere with sidewalks, so running is out for me. (Plus I don't like it much.) I do a basic circuit with pushups, lunges, and pull-ups, first thing in the morning, while the coffee is still brewing. It's my "I don't feel like fussing with a proper routine" bare minimum, but it's enough. Then I have breakfast, shower, and get on with the day. It takes no actual equipment (anything that supports your weight is fine for pullups) and costs nothing but time.
>So, what's the secret?
There isn't one. Its a trade-off. I get up between 4:15 and 4:45 (depending on the day) to exercise. I go to bed between 9 and 10 pm (usually 9:30.) I exercise with a group of people, and that ends up being most of my socializing time. 5 - 9 is family time.
I incorporate errands into my schedule. When I walk home from work from the train station I will stop by the local grocery store to pick up anything that is needed.
My employer is fine with me working from the train to and from work. I get there early and I leave early.
Weekends are arranged to buy other items in bulk.
My bed time routine is probably 15 minutes of reading a book before I fall asleep.
It’s not so much a secret as a set of tradeoffs. A few years back, I learned that I had made the wrong tradeoffs - I was unbelievably obese and got to spend a week in a cardiac ward because of a whole lot of bad choices.
My kid was only 16 months old at the time. So when I got out of the hospital, I got to deal with the guilt at almost leaving her fatherless through terrible decision making.
So now I make better decisions. Running early works best for me (and I collect an immense amount of data so I can prove that). I’ll usually go to bed at around 10:30, sleep until 4:30, do my exercise for the day, have breakfast and get to work. I snack on proteins, have a very small meal for lunch and then take a nap. I’ll usually walk in the afternoon or maybe play some pickup tennis in a nearby park, rinse and repeat. I have a very full life, enjoy every moment of it and can work with the schedule I have.
It’s just a tradeoff. Angiograms suck and I don’t recommend them. Having limited unstructured time isn’t great, but it beats the hell out of a poke in the heart. :)
The 4:30 part helps me with performance in a roundabout way. One of my weirdo obese habits was this messed up relationship with productivity, where I had all these great resources to learn how to get fit but wouldn’t do it because it took time away from work. Dropping pounds and adding in running boosted my productivity a lot - I could do much more in fewer hours. With morning runs, I get a nice little productivity hit that makes exercise even more habit forming because I get the reward mechanisms from the exercise, those boost productivity which gives me another set of reward mechanisms later on in the day when I’m starting to wind down. I’m really just an addict chasing different highs.
A different time might be better for you - the key is to do something, be consistent, turn it into a habit and slowly improve.
This is important. I can't speak for GP obviously, but for many people who get up unusually early there is no doubt that it is about having "extra time", but it only means they sleep less than they should or that they simply shifted their sleep (ie no extra time).
There is no free lunch and compromising sleep quality and amount is really a fool proof way into physical and mental issues.
Nope. I get 8-7.5hrs every night. I’m asleep within 15 minutes, zero screen time.
> There are plenty of wealthy people who are unhealthy.
No one said correlation is 1. It's just on average wealthy people live longer.
Very much this. While tennis has become more accessible and lower cost over time, it has always been an expensive sport.
Honest question: Why?
There's a free court near me, and both balls and racquets can be gotten for peanuts.
They're talking from a North American perspective (probably). In most of Europe, there are plenty of outdoor and other free exercise opportunity. Another downside of the incorrect build environment (poor city planning) is that Americans simply don't have built-in ways to move their bodies. When I spent time in Eastern Europe, there was literally a free tennis/basketball court across the street. And a variety of other courts, including outdoor gym. And when house sitting around, there was nearly always an outdoor park with greenspace for strolling, exercise. All free.
Tennis is very difficult though. One of the highest barrier to entry sports skill-wise.
Non-athletic adult people can't step onto a tennis court and consistently get the ball back to you, even if you hit it to them.
I thought Padel was easy, but when I organized a Padel after-work I saw that that was not reality, and Padel is much easier than tennis.
Tennis requires a certain proficiency to have fun with. Beginners tend to have trouble getting the ball reliably across the net onto the other player. This proficiency takes time to build. Thus, unless one makes a big up-front time investment, tennis is not particularly good exercise. Up-front time investments are expensive.
Also one cannot tennis alone. Anything one must practise with a partner is more expensive due to scheduling requirements.
Tradition, mostly. Tennis is seen as an upper class sport and prices will be set accordingly, it is not the case everywhere though.
Another reason is that a tennis court takes significant space for just 2 (or 4) people. So unless it is subsidized, when land is at a premium like in a large city, it is going to be expensive.
> has always been an expensive sport
Since I've been a child, living in multiple countries across Europe and Asia, there's always been either free or cheap tennis courts near me. I don't even play tennis much and I know this, I'm sure if I was searching I'd find way more low cost options.
It's more likely that the demographic who play tennis tends to be wealthy, rather than the sport itself being expensive.
I've never really bought this argument. The average American spends five hours a day watching TV.
Exactly. Some guy once told me that "research" shows that people who play golf live longer. I still didn't pick up the sport yet. Not sure I'll pick it up anytime soon, although I like the idea of living longer.
It's just like the headline that was going around a few years ago: "Studies show that women who own horses live 15 years longer than those who don’t".
It's not surprising there's a strong correlation between "rich people" hobbies (horses, golf, tennis, sailing, etc.) and health outcomes/longevity.
I bet it's even simpler than that: people who can play tennis a few times a week are a healthier cohort than people who are unable to physically do this
If you're disciplined enough to put something in your calendar and do it over a period of months, without someone breathing down your neck to do so, whether you feel like doing it or not, then you are likely able to apply that effort in other areas of life.
So then it's a bidirectional correlation. You're more likely to be fit if you are wealthy and more likely to be wealthy if you are fit.
Essentially, what you're looking at is that people who engage in self improvement end up better off than those who don't.
It's a priori obvious but some people are uncomfortable with it for some reason - trauma response / coping mechanism, something like that.
Advising people to exercise doesn't work and doesn't scale. Gyms are for people who have plenty of intrinsic motivation and money and time.
To improve physical activity at the population scale and over a lifetime, it literally has to be built into the design of the cities, so people get enough exercise while walking to work or grabbing groceries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUlgSRn6e0&ab_channel=NotJu...
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/activity-inequality...
I think that one huge factor is that people almost seem to be intent on turning sport onto a chore and moral duty. And tests of characters end up being around as appealing as cleaning the toilet.
Sport can be pleasant and fun. It can be social for people who want social. It can fulfill more then one goal.
But, instead the expectation is that people will pick the most boring thing (running, gym), that they will commit to amounts of times and periodicity that makes life's harder and that nothing fun enough actually counts.
> Advising people to exercise doesn't work and doesn't scale.
Agreed, in so much as telling people to exercise leads to a relatively small increase in the number of people exercising.
> Gyms are for people who have plenty of intrinsic motivation and money and time.
I'd say yes most people who regularly exercise at a gym have some kind of intrinsic motivation, but that's generally true of anyone with any activity.
Gyms with almost any kind of equipment, classes, and amenities are absurdly cheap: ~$30 / month. For the vast majority of Americans, that cost is well within a reasonable budget.
Time: TFA's time of 3 hours a week as an example is not insignificant but I wouldn't categorize it as extreme or "plenty of time." This investment could easily take from the amount of time Americans spend sitting and looking at a screen for entertainment. (Saying this as an American)
> To improve physical activity at the population scale and over a lifetime, it literally has to be built into the design of the cities, so people get enough exercise while walking to work or grabbing groceries.
I'm a bit more cynical as I believe a significant increase in the percentage of Americans who get a good amount of exercise is extremely unlikely. Any program or proposed change to policies necessary to affect such a change is DOA.
People don't go to a gym because the vast majority of folks are uninterested in exercise for exercise' sake: they want to look good. Unfortunately, improved physical appearance due to exercise takes longer than folks expect it to take.
What? Every city and small town I have ever lived in has had publicly accessible outdoor workout stations and running paths. A pair of running shoes is about 120 USD and good for ~500 miles.
I think everyone could benefit from running eventually, even though they may have to start by jogging or walking. But it's true that it's a sport that isn't for everyone because it's hard.
100%. There’s no point in nitpicking on this post. There’s an outsized return on exercise and it’s measurable. People don’t get — especially young people — that exercise is like eating, sleeping, and pooping. Your body needs it in regular intervals otherwise its carefully balanced system goes out of whack.
Further, people don't know enough about the deadly effects of obesity, high blood pressure, and the big killer:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atherosclerosis
Exercise is vital!
"Atherosclerosis generally starts when a person is young and worsens with age. Almost all people are affected to some degree by the age of 65. It is the number one cause of death and disability in developed countries. Though it was first described in 1575, there is evidence suggesting that this disease state is genetically inherent in the broader human population, with its origins tracing back to CMAH genetic mutations that may have occurred more than two million years ago during the evolution of hominin ancestors of modern human beings."
Anecdata:
I hated exercise. Still do. People talk about a glow or a good feeling after exercise. My SO does too. I never felt it.
Until I dieted down to being 'at weight' not overweight. Only then did it feel good to exercise, and only then after I exercised. The act itself is still a terrible experience.
I've put on weight again and, yep, I hate exercise now. But now I know there is a light at the end of the dieting and weightless tunnel. Without the experimental results, I would never have known.
So, its not that I don't trust the science here, I mean, how can I refute it? It's just that my lived experience says that I'm a freak and I'm sitting out on the end of some bell curve or whatever. I know that it got a high ROI, that's why I did these weight loss experiments in the first place. It's just that for some reason, my body and mind hate exercise until I get down to healthy levels.
Thanks for letting me share this.
Same. Still working on reducing body fat percentage (5'9", 230lbs, 32% body fat) but have been exercising twice a week with a personal trainer for over a year. Have put on quite a bit of muscle. Easily the strongest I've ever been and an in the best shape of my life.
Exercise still sucks. I hate it, it's an awful experience. The only thing I feel during and after exercise is tired and sore. There is no glow, no feeling of being refreshed, energized, satisfied, or accomplished. Just discomfort.
It doesn't matter the exercise, the intensity, cardio or strength, 15 minutes or an hour and a half. It also doesn't matter how long I consistently exercise. I'm at 13 months during this attempt and it's just as miserable an experience as it was day one. Despite assurance from multiple people it'll start feeling good after just a few months more than however long I'd been doing it.
In fact, I would say my actual day-to-day quality of life has gone down since I've started exercising regularly because now I'm sore from exercising most days of the week, whereas I was never sore like this before regular exercise. I deeply wish that exercise could be a positive experience.
I'm always worried I'll fumble and lose the habit because it would feel so, so much better to just stop exercising. (A personal trainer is quite expensive to boot, but there's no way I'd get to the gym and work out otherwise)
You at least have given me some hope that this might change if I get my weight down, so that's something I'll keep in mind.
At this point the only reason I put up with it is in 30 years I'll thank myself.
Keep the chin up!
It took me ~4 years before I finally got my act together. I had found an exercise routine I tolerated well enough (Deck of Pain), but it wasn't until I did a (frankly horrible) calorie focused diet that I started weight loss in earnest. 1k calories/day of dieting was awful for a year, but it did work.
It is very much worth it though. I have more energy for the family now and my friends too. I finally got the weight off and, like I said, that's when I finally felt the good feelings about exercise. I was pretty surprised by it too, felt that I was somehow genetically doomed to just hate exercise. Nope, the MDs are right here, being overweight is really bad for you. I just didn't think that it was a mental thing too, but in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.
You got this, keep it up
I’m feeling benefits from just doing 10K steps a day. And that involves putting in earbuds, listening to podcasts or an audiobook, and just wandering around the house. I try to walk after my meals to help digestion. It’s no burden if you’re engrossed in what you’re listening to.
I’ve tried many forms of exercise over the years, but it’s true that consistency beats everything else.
You may want to find some activities you enjoy while doing them.
I don't know what you tried, but sometimes a small variation is enough to make it fun and rewarding during the exercise. For example, I find slow road running pretty boring. The only value is doing exercise and relaxing my brain. I gave up many times. But replace the roads by challenging technical single tracks, and I'm very happy and havn't gave up in years.
Yeah, I get this every time I talk about weight loss/exercise.
For reference, I've swum miles at once, run a marathon, played team sports, combat sports, pick up basketball, roughhousing with kiddos, etc. I've not done literally everything, but I feel like I've tried enough things to make a reasonable call.
Look, I just hate exercise. I don't feel energized or happy or fulfilled or whatever. I just feel exhausted and tired and sweaty and gross. There really isn't a second, throughout my life, where I've ever wanted to exercise for it's own sake.
I know, that seems like crazy talk to you probably. But, form what i know of myself and my life, it's just the way it is.
Like I said, when I was 'at weight' for my height and in a good BMI, then afterwards I would feel good and nice and that exercise was worth it. But when I am overweight, then exercise looses that feeling for me. I just feel bad.
Still, thank you for the encouragement and ideas, I do appreciate it.
I hate exercise and I can't even imagine doing it in the morning because it just makes me tired and sleepy. After two hour bike ride or 3 hour walk, I just drop and fall asleep in the middle of the day messing up my sleep schedule. Somehow I feel that even for the author of this article exercise would feel different if he wasn't chasing it up with 45 minutes of binging coffee.
Well, why not try a 45min workout instead of 2-3 hour activities?
I can share a very simple incentive for exercise.
As you age, you will lose lean muscle and bone density. But you do have some control in maintaining a healthy level of strength for your elder years.
You can maintain strength and density by engaging in resistance training.
The total amount of training required is up for debate. I follow Dr. Peter Attia and he discusses needing about 1 hr a week of resistance training.
The other aspect of maintaining strength is protein intake. Dr. Attia describes it as a “chore”, that is to consume 1g of protein supplement for each pound of body mass. That’s a lot!
Think about your future, do you want to be strong and mobile into your later years? I see older unhealthy people walking the streets and don’t envisage myself letting that happen.
You must take good care of yourself and put in the time to exercise and eat properly.
I am embarrassed to admit I always thought people focused too much on protein and it was bro science but I also never managed to get stronger despite resistance training. Then in my forties I finally started eating 150-180 g of protein a day and doing resistance training to exhaustion a couple days a week and the difference has been huge. I wish I’d done this 20 years ago.
I'm 6'1 and 190-200lb, and I went from 130g to 80g a day of protein for the last year and have only gained more lean mass.
I do think proteinmaxing is mostly food/supp industry hype + advice for people who need to tricked into replacing donuts with something healthier. So YMMV.
But I think the training until exhaustion part of your comment is the important bit.
>I'm 6'1 and 190-200lb, and I went from 130g to 80g a day of protein for the last year and have only gained more lean mass.
And everything else was held constant? Moreover the claim isn't that you need absurdly high amounts of protein to build muscle, just that it's easier to build muscle if you have higher protein intake, all things being equal.
I just don't see it. The main connection I see is with calorie intake being slightly above vs below maintenance. How does "easier" quantify? What if it's a technically true statement but you're just talking about 2%?
It's like when you hear that steaming vegetables retains more nutrients than boiling them so everyone repeats this bit of trivia, but then you find out it's talking about a 7% difference so who cares.
> Less pain
Is there anything to back this up? The people I know who work out are always complaining about their muscles and joints.
There's a difference between soreness and pain. My muscles get sore all the time from exercise, but it's not painful. That soreness just tells me I'm probably going to be a little bit stronger because of the exercise I just did. (Of course it's a continuum: certain higher levels of soreness mean I probably overdid it.)
Joint pain is a whole other thing, though. Usually joint pain means that you're doing some sort of exercise incorrectly, or that you're using too much weight or intensity for your current level of physical fitness. Or you have a previous injury that can't fully heal and there are some exercises that you just shouldn't be doing, but you do them anyway.
But I think the author is talking about less pain in a different way. For example, I threw out my lower back 25 years ago in college, and it's never been the same since. But doing core exercises and strengthening the muscles around that area means much less chance of pain doing regular day-to-day activities.
Soreness isn't ideal. It won't make you stronger. Actually, it might make your recovery slower.
First time I've ever heard that soreness = something wrong. Isn't soreness basically guaranteed to some degree if you've done enough work to actually build strength?
> There's a difference between soreness and pain.
Sorry, but overexerted muscle feels exactly the same for me as the one hit with something hard and heavy or one that received a dozen injections that had a bit of tissue damage as a side effect.
> Usually joint pain means that you're doing some sort of exercise incorrectly
Joint and ligament pain means that you do too much of exactly what you are doing and you should do something at least a bit different. There's no such thing as correct or incorrect. You can do literally anything, just not too much. You only need to be careful because for some movements in some people 1 rep is too much already.
There's a big difference between recovery pain and chronic pain. Also, if someone has joint pain, they are doing the wrong exercises. For example, running trashes my knees, but biking does not. Also, picking up heavy shit (weights - squats and deadlifts) is the only thing that resolved lower back pain (from sitting all day).
Doing anything more than you should will trash something in your body. How much of something you should be doing? Pain is a good indicator. I you are below 40 you shouldn't feel it at all. If you are above, you should feel it a bit and observe it closely while reducing the load. If it gets weaker with time, you have appropriate load, if it doesn't or gets stronger, your load is still too high.
Everybody has bad everything. We are walking wrecks about to fall apart in few short decades. But there's genetic variety. There are dozens of variants of genes that code something as essential as collagen. Some resulting in very crappy kind. Some really do have it worse. That's why everybody needs to be listening to their bodies and apply themselves accordingly.
Some ways to exercise avoid injury & get results, and some.. don’t.
I’m a triathlete of 4 years now - love to be sore but have never been injured & unable to train.
There are three things you must do:
1. good technique: lift with the right muscles, run at the right cadence & target heart rate.
2. listen to your body when it needs less or more load.
3. treat recovery as equally important as exercise itself. Exercise’s mirror.
That said, instead of actual complaints, your friends might be social signaling! Bringing it up to bond over the joy of exercise. Humans do that subconsciously, and there is a ton of joy to bond over!
Why do people feel the need to waste time commenting about whether or not a comment is LLM-generated?
If you think the comment doesn't belong here, downvote or flag it. That goes for things you think are LLM-generated or human-generated. Commenting about LLM-generated speculation is just noise, and I regret spending this time replying to you on this topic when I could be doing absolutely anything else.
I've wondered about that too.
My personal thoughts and anecdote, assuming you're not talking about the kind of "bro I got in a killer workout yesterday, my biceps are still sore" Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness humblebragging:
I have a controlled autoimmune disorder like arthritis that causes me some joint pain. But it basically goes away if I do regular strength training. If you do strength training or any sport long enough you'll eventually hurt yourself. Usually that's just a pulled muscle because you woke up on the wrong side of the bed and it goes away after a few days. These micro-injuries actually seem to happen to me a lot, probably because of my condition I'm just prone to this stuff. But I prefer it to the pains of inactivity.
Even for people without arthritis, you have a question to answer: which would you rather suffer from? The pains from not working, out like having a weak core and bad posture and the discomfort of being unable to climb a few sets of stairs? Or the pains from working out, like pulling a back muscle because you didn't warm up or some shin or knee pain from too much running?
The answer is obvious to me. You're going to get hurt either way. I'll go with the path that makes me feel better, live longer, look hotter, and is a rewarding challenge.
From personal experience strength training has been key to recovering from injuries (caused by doing stupid things, not exercise itself). So maybe the correlation between exercise and pain is incorrect? The exercise is the cure to the pain...
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5753318/v1 (pre-print) seems to provide a strong argument for strength training being beneficial. My search was not thorough so likely more studies out there.
When you start working out, you will have soreness in your muscles from lactic acid because your body isn’t used to it.
Once you get in a routine of doing it at least twice a week you won’t get that soreness anymore. People who start working out, then miss a month, then start back experience it all the time. Consistency is key.
When you start drinking something like unsweetened tea, initially it's almost unbearably bitter. But as you drink it long enough, it feels less and less bitter. It didn't get any less bitter, you just impaired your ability to sense this kind of bitterness.
I wonder what happens with muscle soreness. Do they get actually get less sore after consistent exercise? Or do you just blunt your nervous system into not detecting chemical signatures of the damage? I'm guessing it's the second case because people here are commenting that after exercising long enough you can still have gains but no pain of muscle soreness.
Anecdotally, weight training eliminated my chronic shoulder and hip pains from sitting at a desk. I’ve read several similar stories but I’d be interested to see studies on this.
For me personally: My fitness routines are regular but sloppy.
I’m often complaining about soreness here, a lightly pulled there, a big joint that needs to be left alone for a few days. It’s annoying but also even kinda satisfying, and I know how to avoid serious injury.
I’m not complaining about lower back pain because my fitness activity has rid me of it. That pain would have stopped me from being able to move easily, work on my cabin, play with children, and would have eventually made me overweight and chronically ill.
The tradeoff is really a no-brainer in my case, and I don’t think my case is so unique.
Every life long runner I know has had a serious knee problem or other injury.
But I think running is higher impact on the body that a lot of of other exercise. You're putting your full body weight on a small area several times a second for many minutes every day.
I'm not talking about myself and I haven't evaluated the running form of the people I know.
But impact is just force and time and the high pressure is because contact is being made with your foot, which has a small surface area.
You can find hammers that absorb shocks better than others, but ultimately it's driving the nail because of impact and pressure. (Small hammer head striking quickly).
I don't doubt that proper form, correct training, and other interventions can reduce running injuries. But they're the most frequent exercise injuries I've seen personally and they also appear common statistically.
(Of course running is more accessible than, say, jai alai so base rates are higher anyway)
Physical activity triggers the production of endorphins, specifically beta-endorphins, which are natural painkillers.
If folks are regularly sore and their goals are not some lofty races or even higher and further down the progression path, they are doing it wrong.
You should feel the exercise and specific muscles afterwards, sometimes even a day after (like hamstrings and thighs from squats, those don't get much workout during normal life), but after initial beginner phase the continuous long term goal is to get enough workout that muscles are not sore, just notch below. Properly sore muscle needs few days rest, a well used one can be again fully loaded in 48h easily.
And overall definitely less pain or more like 0 pain, ie back from weak core is pretty typical. Another one are knees, but to train knees around some already-damaged tissues is more tricky, but definitely worth it.
After starting weightlifting (on top of some sports like ski touring, climbing, hiking etc) I can handle much more, heavier and longer. Need to move your/friend stuff to another apartment? All day carrying with them feels like mild stretch, compared to them complaining for back pain for another 3 days.
> that's about 8,500 hours of exercise, or about a year of solid physical activity
These comparisons are crap. You can‘t simply take one year, exercise 24/7, and get your 10 years of life. You have to fit it into life, which is much more time than it seems from claiming it‘s 1 year out of 80.
But it‘s still a good investment! :)
That's a perfectly valid comparison. A year's worth of hours is still a year's worth of hours, regardless of what time span I spread it over.
We use this sort of formulation everywhere. If I say I work 40 hours a week, no one is going to assume that I start work at 9am on Monday, work non-stop until 1am Wednesday, and then take the rest of the week off. If I say that people spend approximately a third of their lives sleeping, no one thinks I mean that they sleep continuously from birth until they're 30 years old, and then spend the next 60 years awake.
The point is that it's 8500 hours of free time used for exercise. It's time when you're not eating sleeping or working.
So it's not exactly the same. For people who have very little free time due to commute, work, children, etc. It's harder to spend half an hour of free time a day on exerciaing.
I mean I do agree with the premise that exercising is a good return (especially since the better sleep quality should be factored in) but I think the person you're replying to has a point when he says that saying it's one year of life is not really comparable
> You can’t simply take one year, exercise 24/7, and get your 10 years of life
That’s not what he said though. How would you demonstrate that it’s a good investment, do you have an alternative? For the purposes of calculating the ROI it’s a solid 24/7 year of accumulated exercise time. Of course you can’t do it all at once, but that wasn’t the claim. And sure you have to fit it into your life and sure there’s a little extra time go to and from your activities, but the ratio of exercise to time is roughly 1/80. If you exercise 45 minutes a day 3 times a week: 135 minutes out of 10080 minutes ~= 1/80. He said 4 times/week, so maybe he should have said 1.3/80, but that doesn’t actually change the point. Accounting for sleep and more exercise and lots and lots of travel+shower time, maybe it’s even as high as 1/20… still a great investment.
I used to hike every morning before starting work. Absolutely lovely.
Currently waiting for a new hip, because for some reason I've worn mine out too soon.
Now, I won't say that the fact I'm in pain 24/7 isn't making me sad, but the fact that I don't come outside as often anymore really is not helping.
Despite decades of being told about the benefits of exercise, I had absolutely no idea what the actual time investment looked like to go from unfit to fit. I couldn't put a number on it, and part of me assumed it must be enormous otherwise, why wouldn't anyone just say the number? Then I discovered Couch to 5K: 30 minutes, 3 times a week. A concrete, achievable number that delivered (to me) mind blowing results.
How could it be so low? How could i not know this? How is anyone walking around ignorant (as i was) of this?
Physical activity increases lifespan primarily by lowering the likelihood of falling and breaking your hip. If you break your hip, your life expectancy is dramatically reduced. If that's your goal, just train your legs!
That said, I think the most important part of exercising is the mental boost it provides. It's like a healthy drug. There are no negative side effects, and it's highly praised by society.
That's certainly not the only (and I'd also not put it as primary) reason for extending the lifespan.
Still, breaking one's hip in advanced age is often a death sentence as many people never get out of bed again.
When an old person breaks their hip around here, people say something along the lines of "we'd better hurry up for visiting them one last time".
There's also a lot of reverse causation here. Healthy people don't fall very often and when they do they generally don't break their hips. Falling frequently and suffering broken hips when falling are both general signs of poor systemic health and overall fragility which portend a short remaining lifespan regardless.
It's probably just me but I've had the opposite effect. When exercising I typically can focus less and I'm less productive.
My most productive days are when I just start working on my computer after tea/coffee in the morning and can keep building momentum over the day. Any distractions like exercise break my momentum.
You aren’t wrong. Train your legs and walk. Don’t sit in the recliner when you retire. 7000-10000 steps a day helps
True, however I know a lot of people over 60 who think that walking alone is sufficient. You need to strength train too. Train your abs and at least do body squat variations. Walking is great to lose weight and keep your heart healthy, but not sufficient in itself.
I agree with you. My comment wasn’t as detailed as yours but I meant the same. Great advice!
Interestingly for many people the break precedes the fall.
To me, exercise is compounding in action. Each workout may feel small in isolation, but like interest accruing, the benefits multiply invisibly over years. Extra vitality today, resilience tomorrow, and ultimately, more time across decades.
I was adamant on using one of those health/exercise tracking devices, mainly out of distaste of our modern habit to be constantly in the know of everything, but I gotta say, since I've started using one, it's just so satisfying seeing the accumulated numbers over N months or even years!
The mental toughness, discipline, and higher energy levels that come with exercise are more important to me than physical appearance or living longer, and at this point almost anything else in life.
Wake up at 4am, run hill repeats for miles and then go into work. I guarantee no incident or colleague will trigger a stress response. You will feel as cool as a cucumber and when an urgent issue does come up you will handle it with absolute mental clarity. That afternoon drowsiness will also not hit you at all, counterintuitive right?
By 9pm you will fall asleep no matter what happened that day.
This kind of work gives you an edge on everyone. You look at things and say, “shit this is easy compared to what I did this morning” and you will feel mentally fresh.
I usually lift rather than run, but I do the same thing, and it has changed my life. Up at 4 every day, and lift at 5. It makes everything else easier, I agree.
I do get in bed at 7:30p most nights and read, to ensure my body has the choice to get 8h of sleep.
By 9pm? A lot of people will need to go to bed at 8pm to survive this schedule.
I always wondered how routines like this work (not the activities themselves, but the timings)
If you swim till 9.45, how are you out, bathed, dried, changed, home, and at your table by 10?
If you’re struggling with exercise and with getting it into a routine, I can’t recommend standalone, wireless VR enough. It was fun and engaging enough to keep me coming back without feeling that I was doing a boring chore, and nearly every game has you moving, with the exception of the flying and driving sims.
Imagine fighting ninjas and dodging bullets as your workout. You can literally get that and more with VR.
It was my gateway back into fitness.
Stepmania [1] (open DDR clone) just requires a (decent) dance pad, no VR. That's as good a work you as you'll get from a game, I suspect.
I'm curious about this so I hope you'll indulge a few questions:
1) What kind of free space do you need? 2) What would you recommend in terms of headset if one plans to be swinging around a lot?
Can you recommend any specific games that meet these requirements? I don't have VR, but I remember playing "Super hot VR" and getting a surprisingly good workout from that game.
It sounds like they're talking about pistol whip.
If I can promote one myself, Synth Riders can be a hell of a workout. People like comparing it to beat saber. Unlike beat saber, there's no swords, so there's a lot less wrist movement and a lot more arm/full-body movement. It feels a lot like dancing while you're doing it. I'm no great fan of exercise, but if I'm not careful I can exercise myself deep past exhaustion in this one -- especially on the harder difficulty charts.
And beyond that there's a mode where you punch the notes instead of trying to catch them. I haven't tried it, but that sounds even more demanding.
But aside from anything else, it's just fun! Great option for training cardio, it really works out the arms.
What a sloppy article.
Correlation is not causation. All credibility is lost for this guy, in my view.
> We know from one study that people who played tennis a few times per week lived roughly 10 years longer than average. So we'll use that value going forward.
This is the study [0]. The study itself, in the conclusions, states that:
"Conclusion: Various sports are associated with markedly different improvements in life expectancy. Because this is an observational study, it remains uncertain whether this relationship is causal."
Has the author read the study at least?
Exercising and building muscles when you're young is the very best thing you can do. These muscles shall stay for a very, very, very long time.
As a kid I was doing BMX, tennis (still do some), swimming then as a teenager street skateboarding, rollerskating, MX (motor)bike, tennis.
Now I'm an old man (52 y/o) and I don't do much sport. Some MTBing (still can do a wheelie and trackstand, ah!) but really not much. I drive my old sportcar (yup, that is physical and you do sweat). Some tennis while on vacation. And shooting at the range (and, yup, that is a bit physical too).
But I really don't do much. I'm of this school: "Qui veut voyager loin ménage sa monture" (french) which translates to "He who wants to travel far takes care of his mount.".
The number of friends my age who destroyed their bodies by continuing to exercise as if they were 20 or 30 years old is beyond belief. I think I'm one of the only one who didn't get knee surgery yet.
Running is terribly bad as you get older. Hockey (ice or grass): body destroyer. BJJ? Don't get me even started.
My doctor says "sport is death". He knows.
Tennis is particular in that you can really play it at your own pace: just pick someone your age and hit the court gently. No crazy rallies, just fun: I'm not going to win Roland-Garros at 52 y/o and you ain't either.
And there's something else among all of my friends who regularly do sport: as soon as they stop for a few weeks, they get fat.
Which is a problem I don't have.
So exercising a lot in your teens, 20s and 30s: sure. That shall build you muscle you'll keep for decades (my legs are still very strong).
But slow down after that or you'll break your body and then get fat as soon as you have to stop exercising (for example because you have to get knee surgery because you destroyed your knees running).
Something something about Buddha / Siddhartha warning to not put too much tension in a lute's strings or in a bow's string. There's a lesson in there.
You have your age, deal with it and act accordingly.
"hackernews" the self help site always rings so hollow.
> We know from one study that people who played tennis a few times per week lived roughly 10 years longer than average. So we'll use that value going forward.
There has to be some incredible correlation between having the time and money to play tennis “a few times per week” and being significantly wealthier than the average person. And being wealthy is clearly the healthiest thing you can do.