Exercise should be kept to a healthy minimum
mdpi.com
mdpi.com
UPDATE: I have provided a more detailed account, with some citations, below.
Please provide a citation for that extraordinary claim.
A quick Google on marathon life expectancy:
http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20140401/too-much...
First, it seems reasonable that, as a stressor, there is going to be a hormetic level of exercise, and then above that, a level that isn't healthy. That's in line with the linked article's advice, and also this summary of early death research from NYT:
'In the largest such study to date, involving more than 50,000 adults and presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine, participants who ran between 1 and 20 miles per week had almost 20 percent less risk of dying prematurely than people who didn’t exercise. But those who ran more than 20 miles per week enjoyed no such benefit. They had about the same risk of premature death as those who were sedentary.' [1]
If the above establishes the basic principle that too much exercise is counterproductive, there is almost certainly a level that actually starts subtracting lifespan (that study did not single out the most extreme endurance exercises AFAIK). Ergo, why there are so many deaths during Marathons (running even one M. can cause measurable heart damage).
I haven't checked out this angle, but it's also possible that lower muscle mass associated with endurance athletes is linked to (less) longevity, since, I believe, it is in general [2].
But again, one cannot approach this too simplistically. IIRC there is some evidence among pro bodybuilders of early death. More generally, exercise could have many effects, going in both directions, all with different curves.
This is a concept that seems particularly hard for folks who have learned to push their bodies well past the evolved resistance to high levels of exertion, and who take that unconditionally as a virtue.
EDIT: see also [3] below. I didn't have time to find the actual paper.
0 https://primalcycle.com/2011/09/17/life-expectancy-o-enduran...
1 https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/ask-well-endurance...
2 https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/muscle-ma...
3 http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20140401/too-much...
Mechanical parts wear out from use, whether they are animal or machine. Animal parts will heal to an extent and may require a minimum level of use to stay healthy, but they still wear out.
As to the general feeling here. I invite everyone here who thinks ridiculous exercise is good to volunteer at an emergency room for a week. I guarantee this idea will get cured on the first day in any large city.
If I go lift heavy weights, my bones self repair and get stronger.
If I sit on my butt all day on a computer, my bones get thinner and weaker.
No matter how much you drive a car, it is never going to get "stronger", only slowly wear out.
Since you are a human and not a car, I would suggest you maintain your body like it is alive and not made of metal.
Or, as some would have it, "with certainty".
[1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170601-the-secret-to-a-lon...
For a moment I thought that you were going to be either programming or reading.
Is there a proven cause-and-effect relationship to actual mortality?
Was this ever peer-reviewed?
(2007 study)
Can...this be changed?
Absolutely! I can only go full effort lifting for maybe 45 minutes. After that I'm just going through the motions.
Another thing to remember is that gains do not come while you're in the gym. The gains happen during the rest periods between workouts, so resting is just as important as the workout.
By definition, there is a point in between which maximises longevity on average. This may not be the same as the point which maximises quality of life.
How exactly does exercise "damage all your parts"? You need proof to back up that bizarre claim. Humans are evolutionarily designed to be long distance athletes.
Both processes have both short term and long term cost and accelerate senescence. More cells need more replacing under normal circumstances and this is limited by your genes. The absolute number of cells that will ever get replaced in your muscles is strictly limited in what is probably a measure against cancer. So increasing strength in muscles brings the day you get cancer forward. Not by much.
To a point this can be a worthwhile trade off, as it improves other aspects of your body.
But if you need or use food additives, or, god help you, steroids, you're far past that point.
In the short term over exerting muscles releases toxins, and over taxes your liver, heart, sometimes lungs, pancreas, and more. Needless to say this can trigger problems, and cause cell death in those organs too.
And lastly physically stressing your body can and will of course damage it. Even when there aren't large scale injuries there is damage. Any exercise will cause blood vessel ruptures. Will cause cell deaths due to crushing. It will bend or reshape your bones. Minimally, but nonzero. Of course, having a bmi of 35 will do cause more of this stress.
How is a process of building muscle through exercise, which humans have been doing for hundreds of years, and which is extremely well understood by modern science more likely wrong than a bizarre metaphorical similarity to how physical objects degrade due to stress? Use it or lose it is our latest understanding of both the mind and the body.
However, the article just says minimum exercise should be maintained for minimum entropy... there's no analysis as to why minimum entropy is a good thing. Longevity and wellbeing are complicated, multifactorial goals, and are certainly not determined by something as reductive as "biological entropy".
I don't think anybody has a unit for entropy.
They are falling a fallacy.
Just because you entered the world, you have increased entropy. Every time you eat, you increase entropy.
I can't believe this got published.
"Entropy is an extensive property. It has the dimension of energy divided by temperature, which has a unit of joules per kelvin (J K−1) in the International System of Units"
S = k log w. [1] S has units of energy divided by temperature.
> Every time you eat, you increase entropy.
Globally, yes, but it is very common to take the entropy of a bounded system. One can talk about e.g. cardiac entropy - the number of microstates (e.g. differentiated cells or even their individual molecules) that can form the same state observable at the boundary of the heart. One can likewise talk about cellular entropy (the boundary being the cellular membrane), or about the entropy of an organism (the boundary being its outer surface, like the human skin and related exposed structures).
The entropy of all of these is much lower than that of a container of 70 kg of water at 310 kelvins; you can swap a molecule of the water in one part of a container with that in another part without wrecking observables of the water at the boundary, repeating the process until you have moved every molecule of water. You can't swap many brain cells with liver cells and expect the organism not to die; you can't swap molecules from the cellular membrane with molecules with the genetic molecules in a cell and expect the cell not to die; and so forth.
"Non-swapability" goes hand-in-hand with "low entropy".
> Just because you entered the world, you have increased entropy
Globally, with the boundary at the horizon of the observable universe, entropy always increases.
As a human embryo grows into an adult, the entropy at the boundary of that individual's outer surface (mostly) increases, because the overall matter increases, with the increase in the number of differentiated cells offsetting the decrease in entropy from the non-swapability of cells that have differentiated into e.g. smooth muscle or glial cells. However, growing humans are still very low entropy.
Once the mass of an adult human stabilizes, it makes sense to think of the entropy of fatty vs non-fatty tissues. Adipose is relatively high entropy (you can move bits of it from one cell to another without killing the cells or the adult human; this is a normal part of fat metabolism even, and moving adipose tissues around is routine in cosmetic surgery) compared with e.g. the kidneys. The skeletal musculature, grossly, is lower entropy than fatty tissues, because moving a large piece of a whole muscle from one joint to another (e.g in some orthopedic surgeries) affects the observables of the adult human (e.g. by changing his or her gait or the range of motion of the affected joint(s)). However, as one "bulks up", there is more skeletal muscle, so the entropy of each, and the overall entropy of the individual, increases.
> I can't believe this got published.
vs
> They are falling a fallacy.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Divine_fallacy
A correlation between Boltzmannian entropy of an individual and the individual's lifespan is interesting.
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[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Boltzmann%27s_entropy_formula