Not sure why they call the findings surprising. Body builders have known that since before Schwarzenegger.
Body adapts and then you have to change the routine.
For long distance runners HIIT or just short, intense workout would be the obvious answer to up the metabolism again.
This paper (https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/6/eaaw0341) is about a 140 day event were runners, on average, run a marathon a day. It also states
”The mechanisms underlying this metabolic compensation are unclear but likely include reduction in nonexercise activity and reduction of physiological activity in other organ systems. Changes in running cost could also contribute, but evidence for training-induced improvement in running efficiency is mixed and the effect, when present, is generally modest, ~3% savings in energy per kilometer”
So, it doesn’t seem more efficient running explains the lower energy expenditure. Instead, it’s just that, as the days went on, they dropped dead in their bed earlier every day, and their bodies postponed doing long-term maintenance (my interpretation)
At some point, exercise has diminishing short and long term benefits and becomes actively harmful.
This isn’t true for everyone, but I stopped running years ago because I could see it would have long term detrimental effects on me. I still exercise, but I think I have a good understanding of where I want to be and just to maintain at that level.
https://www.active.com/health/articles/why-too-much-running-...
Not to mention shin splints, torn Achilles, etc.
Of course there are diminishing returns if you are running for the purpose of living a longer, healthier life.
As far what we “evolved for”. There is no evolutionary benefit of living past the age where you can pass on your genes and endure the next generation can do the same. There is no evolutionary pressure for a people to live pass that age.
Evolution would never favor a trait that would allow a population to live be 100 instead of 60.
It would. Grandparents care for grand children. In fact, they seem to have an uncanny ability to inculcate them with the desire for having more children, of their own. Hmmmm ;)
Naturally, knowledge transfer won’t be complete or perfect, so it seems plausible that there’s an evolutionary benefit to much younger generations to having some really, really old people around.
I mean, I’m not trying to argue for exactly what happens, mostly just contesting the idea that there’s no evolutionary reason for people to live way past child-rearing.
Kin selection is the term you need to read up on for our current explanation on why we live so far beyond reproductive age.
That’s not a valid argument. It could be survivor bias, with those still running (and not dead, bound to a wheelchair at 30, etc) looking great.
Even if, taking that into account, runners look better than non-runners, there, a priori, is no guarantee they wouldn’t have looked even better without it.
It can, however, be done: https://github.com/ctm/Bataan-Memorial-Death-March
What are your goals?
The article may be leaning too heavily on claims that the results are surprising, but that has little to do with the research.
Even if the effort you suggested were to be done, the noise would continue to distract in exactly the same way.
I've worked as a tech exec, and I've worked as a personal trainer, and I've competed... we have the knowledge. We know how people can be healthy, we know how people can live long lives, and we know how people can have bodies that are a benefit to their lifetimes, not a burden.
I remember a study, it graphed a demographic of people across a scale from "healthy" to "unhealthy". What they found was that people were heavily represented on either end of the scale, but to a significant degree, not at all in between.
So, the choice is... people's (barring economics, to some degree, I'll concede -- though, being poor in other countries isn't the health catastrophe that it can be in some first world countries).
People still seem pretty resistant to simple interventions like this though. I think a big part of it is that most people have an incredibly powerful status quo bias, and get extremely uneasy with diverging from the norm of behavior they see around them (even if those norms are of generally far worse health than they're targeting).
I've spent the last decade incrementally understanding more about nutrition and optimizing my diet, and I've reached the point where the divergence between mine and my friends' diets has become pretty insane. Not coincidentally, now that we're starting to enter the period where age catches up with our bodies, I'm by far the healthiest, by both appearance and symptoms. I've had friends ask me what I do, but it's far enough outside the norm that they assume it's impossible or that I have iron willpower (spoiler: I really don't. If you eat healthy, your tastes shift towards healthy food).
This is a general problem with people; in the narrow case, it could be solved by changing their environment (ie blanketing the country with PSAs with simple messages, like we did for smoking). It would do infinitely more good to somehow grant people the intellectual confidence (or indeed, capability) to avoid blunt heuristics like the so-called "wisdom" of crowds, but I have no earthly idea how one would do that.
It's a HN comment that repeats a trope and then people on HN complain that it's obvious.