Hacker News Reader

Comment by DevX101 | Hacker News Reader

Strong legs are also associated with people who run a lot, which has been already shown to be associated with healthy brains.

It's possible this study is a proxy for the common health advice of 'just do more cardio'

View on HN

Or weightlifting, squatting and deadlifting heavy on a regular basis will give you substantially stronger legs than any runner.

I'm not entirely convinced 'strong legs' are the causative factor in healthier brains. It is possible the researchers measured an artifact of people that do running cardio.

Particularly damning is that the research participants were all female. Anyone who's set foot in a gym knows that women do cardio disproportionately, and that the cardio they do increases thigh musculature...

I have to disagree. Sure women do more cardio, but the cardio increasing thigh musculature? Not a chance. Squatting increases thigh musculature. Doing the elliptical for an hour a day does not. Running slowly or at a medium speed does not. Nor do either lead to any gain in strength anywhere.

Have you seen the thighs and calves of people who bike? Of course lifting will cause more hypertrophy, but arguing that cardio doesn't lead to some gains in musculature is just wrong.

Huh? Running certainly increases the strength of your leg muscles. The only possible exception to this would be if you were jogging very very slowly. But if you go from not running at all to running faster than, say, 6mph, your legs will certainly get stronger.

That depends completely on how you define "strong". I think legs that can carry a 50 pound pack to the top of a mountain are "stronger" than a guy who can lift twice as much as me, but can't even run a 5K.

That's endurance, which is objectively different from strength.

Objectively?

Because last I checked, the english language was flexible, with multiple definitions for most words. I looked a few up for "strength". I did not find any dictionary that solely defined it as the ability to move heavy objects.

Words have consensus meanings, and when you try to redefine them unilaterally you make it harder to communicate. Strength in this context is defined as the ability to exert physical force (as in Newton's Second Law, force = mass x acceleration).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_strength

The word isn't being redefined. Endurance is the ability to continue exerting physical force over a long duration.

Do you disagree that it's useful to distinguish between strength and endurance?

codingdave asserted, "I think legs that can carry a 50 pound pack to the top of a mountain are "stronger" than a guy who can lift twice as much as me, but can't even run a 5K."

The former is an example of great endurance (without necessarily having great strength), and the latter is an example of great strength without endurance. You can have one without the other, so they're different, and it's plainly incorrect to say that a person with high endurance/low strength is "stronger" than a person with high strength/low endurance.

Endurance is the ability to retain strength over an extended period of time, that's all I'm saying.

I took it to mean that the thing being described by the word endurance is objectively different than the thing being described by the word strength when not being used in the endurance sense. In a way saying that the measurement of a muscle's ability to repeated do the same amount of work before failure is a objectively different than the measurement of a muscle's ability to output a maximum amount of work for a single rep. Or another way, the stat that lets you lift a 1kg weight 200 times is objectively different from the stat that lets you lift a 200kg weight once. Related, but different.

As to if the word strength is objectively different from the word endurance, simply consider that one starts with a 's' and the other with an 'e'.

Any runner? Sprinting is as good as anything for developing explosive leg strength. Of course, the best sprinters work lifting into their training as well.

> Sprinting is as good as anything for developing explosive leg strength.

Considering that "leg strength" is conventionally measured via seated leg press for a maximal, single repetition, I would be extremely surprised if an Olympic sprinter could achieve the same sort of leg strength that an Olympic weightlifter (of similar weight) could attain.

If you define leg strength specifically as "seated leg press for a maximal, single repetition" then sure, the Olympic weight lifter will win.

Unfortunately, the abstract says nothing about how "leg power" is measured or what exercise regimens were used.

Lifting and sprinting will utilize different fibers (and fuels) than cardio.

I'd also want to see how they corrected for other effects, e.g. sleep. I sleep a lot faster and better a couple of hours after lifting, and that will have other benefits like hGH release.

No knowledgeable sources are advising to "just do more cardio" anymore. Science has long marched on past that advice.

Or just an overblown observation that smart people do more exercise. Similar to the massive bullshitstorm over the observation that people who are healthy sit less.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com