Thoughts On a Year of Exercise

I’m 30 and I’ve been exercising for just over a year, everything you said rings true for me too. Especially the aches/pains and energy levels.

I have to really force myself to go, but it’s always better afterwards.

Have you tried group fitness? That changed everything for me. I just show up. Don’t think just work hard for 50 min and then leave.

Having people around keeps you honest. I swear by boot camp / hiit classes.

What sort of exercise do you do? I hate the gym and find it mind numbingly boring.

I cycle most places - its the fastest way for me to get around my city. Cycling saves me time and money. And I love white water kayaking, skiing and mountain biking. Kayaking especially has made me travel to some amazing places and brought m wonderful experiences. I have kayaked for years and I can understand that they would be difficult for someone older to get into. I imagine that there must be some form of exercise that you could find interesting.

I like doing hard workouts and 1 hour a day seems like too much. Try 45 minutes instead. I try not to go past that when lifting weights. I rarely surpass 25 minutes when doing high intensity interval training.

Yeah, rowing rocks. I just finished the Concept 2 100K challenge. I feel seriously good pretty much all the time. My posterior chain is much stronger. My posture is much better. I can eat anything. The correct rowing stroke is difficult to master, more so if you want to row on the water. Time spent with Dark Horse or Training Tall YouTube videos will help quite a bit.

Jumping rope is also very underrated. I’m just starting the CrossRopes challenge.

Weight training is fairly rated. Spinning fairly rated. Ellipticals are overrated.

Finding an activity that you enjoy is the most important piece. Activities you enjoy you will keep doing. Habits are hard to form.

> The big thing that worked for me was data. I weighed myself every day no matter what and even if I knew I was going over the calorie count for the day I logged it anyway.

This is the only method that works for me. A scale with weight, body fat and muscle mass measurements each morning after waking up.

What gets measured gets done.

Doing something enjoyable is super important. You'll want to be able to treasure the time spent using the equipment / activity.

Kudos to OP/TFA for sticking with it, but I'm wondering if exploring other options would be beneficial for the long term. Real strength is not gotten from a treadmill alone, although it does have bone strengthening benefits that eg cycling does not.

Rowing seems like a great alternative to be added to the mix, as would weights.

I think rowing is a wonderful exercise, with a caveat.

A relative of mine was on a crew team for years. He got into very good shape, and developed extraordinary back muscles, but his chest became sort of small in comparison. It was similar to runners who end up with huge legs and undeveloped arms.

I wonder if rowing could be re-designed to target all the muscles somehow, not just pulling in one direction.

Are there complementary sports or exercises?

Do you have your rowing studio at home, or do you use it in a gym? And what's the name/brand? I have been running for a really long time and am hitting an age where it's getting hard on my body. Looking for what's next.

> I burn roughly a calorie per row stroke

Doing that consistently is impressive.

> I burn roughly a calorie per row stroke

How do you measure that?

Rowing is amazing. I cannot overstate how great an activity this is for cardio and building core strength. The amount of impact to your body, assuming somewhat decent form, is virtually negligible compared to alternatives such as running. The other thing about rowing that is so compelling to me is the continual variability of intensity that is possible. With running, you usually have a discrete jump in exertion when going from a fast walk to a proper run. With rowing, you have a much finer gradient of exertion to work with. If you feel like rowing precisely at 815 kcal/hr, you can hold that target the entire time without feeling like your body wasn't designed for that exact pace. Warming up into an intense session is also substantially easier because of this. Many times I will tell myself "let's just row lightly for a bit and watch this podcast", and inevitably I will end up in an intense rowing session after about 10 minutes of screwing around. This is how continuous it is... you almost trick yourself into exertion after a while without realizing it. One final upside is that because of the low impact, after a few weeks of conditioning, you can pretty much row every single day without worrying about wearing yourself out in any serious way.

The only downside to all of this is that rowing is an activity that is very direct in its payout model. You have to intentionally push yourself harder because of how the resistance mechanism operates. Just sitting on a machine or boat and going through the motions for X amount of time does not entitle anyone to weight loss or any other health benefits. If it doesn't suck at least a little bit while you are doing it, I can pretty much guarantee you won't experience any upside afterwards. You will have to become the architect of your own individual hell when using a rowing machine. The worse it is during, the better the results will be after (but don't discourage yourself!).

In my personal experience, I literally cannot gain weight when doing at least 5 sessions of 5km (<25 minutes each) per week. Now, this ~25 minutes is pretty brutal, but it's all it takes to keep me at a healthy weight without even trying. I could drink a 6 pack of light beer every single day (obviously not recommended) and still not put on any appreciable weight. Being able to consume anything you want whenever you want is very liberating. Contrary to the parent post, I never bother to log my calories or weight. I just enforce the rowing output on a regular basis and keep it simple. Having the performance monitor module on the rower helps a ton with maintaining consistent output.

I purchased a Concept2 Model D about 4 years ago now, and it has already seen over 7000 km with not so much as a hint of breakdown. Just a little bit of 3-in-1 oil on the chain once in a while and it runs like a dream every time. 9/10 times if I can't get myself motivated to get in the car to go to the gym, I can at least talk myself into a 20-30 minute rowing session since it's just in the other room. This was probably the best purchase I've ever made if we are considering personal health as a high priority.

I’m thinking about getting a rowing machine. Anybody have a recommendation?

Indeed. If you find something that involves both exertion and fun, you are golden. If not, it's a constant struggle. For me it's bikes. Those of us who find that enthusiasm are lucky.

After doing it for a while, you get a rough feeling for the calories involved - you can tell just by looking at your dish if it's 500 or 1,000 calories.

That means you don't get high precision data, and the nutrients may be off, but it's more than enough to keep yourself in a caloric deficit/surplus as you choose.

(Also, don't eat lunch at work if you can avoid it. It's greasy, over-salted, and not the best food for you. No matter what corporate propaganda tells you)

Honestly, as someone who values efficiency, I found MyFitnessPal way too slow and clunky. A food tracker should get out of the way. Otherwise you'll - in the heat of the moment - decide not to log things. It also lacked flexibility for those times you dine out, skip meals, or skip logging.

Which leads nicely to the shameless plug for https://www.joyapp.com . Built it for myself, then it spread through forums and has quite a few users.

Benefits:

- Once you learn the ropes, it's an order of magnitude faster to add entries. It was designed to be opened for as little as possible each day.

- If you make it hard to log your food, you won't do it. This makes it trivial.

- Also, there are no community-entered foods. This is a feature in most cases. All the food is either from a professionally curated database (Nutritionix) or custom foods you enter.

- No ads whatsoever. And we don't sell your data. Privacy is very important to us.

I used lose it. I will go back to it but I haven't used it for a few months. What worked for me was logging on the table, as soon as I got the food. Once I started deferring it, ok I will log it later at end of day, I started slipping. The reason for deferral was similar to yours: I want to go more fine grained and be accurate, but no: you are deferring it and eventually I will get into a state where I miss a day or 3 and now no way to go back and fix. So the next time I start (touch wood), enter as you grab the food.

I always found that calorie counting is much easier if you primarily eat packaged and/or prepared foods. Popular apps and websites already know the nutritional info for what you're eating, so it can be as easy as searching by brand name or UPC.

If you do a lot of cooking and baking yourself, counting calories is a painful process. You have to weigh everything going into the recipe, understand how cooking processes alter the nutritional makeup of your ingredients, calculate the probable calorie count of the finished product, and then weigh each portion while it's being served. If you like to use specialty ingredients (e.g., different kinds of grain flours in a single recipe or fermented vegetables in Sichuanese cuisine), even figuring out the calorie values of your inputs can be challenging.

What works for me is continuous tracking. As long as you continuously track weight, body weight, activity (fitness monitors or the pedometer on your phone), and calories you will be able to make corrections based on the output (basically body weight with some corrections based on what you see in the mirror if you lift weights or exercise regularly). Even if your calorie estimations are off eventually for the day, it will show up in your body weight so you just adjust your estimates based on that to develop your "feel". Buying a food scale and cooking your own food really gives you a good feel for the calories involved with various ingredients. After a few cycles of calibration you will get a better at it and it will be less of a burden.

My trick is to look carefully at the food I'm about to eat, and consider how good/filling/satisfying/etc it looks compared to a known benchmark (e.g., a McDonalds cheeseburger). Estimating that way, I'm usually within 20%, which is plenty close (esp given that unbiased errors cancel out).

Beyond that, weigh every day, track values in a decaying average app to cancel out noise, and greatly reduce or fast completely on days where I'm over my line.

Easier said than done, of course, but I'm halfway successful.

Totally agree.

I tried a few ways and eventually giving up. I just have to live with not having accurate counts.

1. I try to make my own food using common ingredients. It failed in a couple of weeks because I do prefer to not spend that much time on making food.

2. Eating at restaurants is especially difficult. Even if you bring a scale with you. Like if you are given some Chinese dish where all the things are mixed together. I give up and go with "Chinese buffet" option in myfitnesspal.

3. Ironically, fast food places do have calories listed, and that justifies some of my visits...

You MUST use a food scale and weigh ALL of your food.

Don't use measuring cups, and don't eyeball it. Also, don't trust any calorie counts from a restaurant.

After a while you get better at not needing a food scale for absolutely everything, but I've been controlling my weight (both gaining and losing) via CICO for nearly two decades and I still weigh most of my food.

> Has anyone had success with particular workouts or strategies to keep motivated?

Not to knock you, but this sentence is where I think the issue is - at some point motivation drops off and you need what I like to label as "discipline" to progress further.

The best piece of advice I heard was from someone getting awarded their 5th degree black belt in Aikido, something that takes decades to earn [I'm paraphrasing here]: Training is like a marriage. It is great in the beginning because you are learning all these new things and improving, like the honeymoon phase, everything seems to be great. But over time, that feeling will decrease a bit. Sometimes you wonder if its worth it at all. But, like a marriage, training takes effort and even years down the road you still have to work on it. Not just maintaining it, but actually working on it.

I also like a book by George Leonard called "Mastery" [1] that I think I've linked on HN before. In the book, he's taking the position of the instructor to explain types of "student behaviors" he's seen over the years - Dabblers, Obsessives, and Hackers (people who just "show up"). As learners, people will behave like one of these types on their way to becoming masters in an domain. Each student type stressed the same topic - dealing with when improvement "gets hard" and what steps can be done to help curb some of those issues.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term-Fulfil...

I found BJJ (Brazilian Jujitsu, aka "pajama wrestling") to be the thing I enjoyed and could integrate into my life. This isn't going to be for everybody - hardly anyone (statistically speaking) steps onto the mat to begin with and the drop-out rate is savage. However, it's been the thing that keeps me fitter and saner than I would be otherwise - and it's a brutal reality check when you start getting fat and/or lazy.

I don't think the specific thing I do is likely to work for you - or most people - but I think having a real sport to work on that's a sane distance from your house (my gym is a 12 minute drive) is a good chance. Ideally take a look at the profile of the sport and see if (a) you like the idea and (b) there are actually people your age and fitness level doing it in any substantial numbers (i.e. at 47, I'm not going to take up gymnastics). My wife likes tennis, which is about a 5 minute walk away and there are plenty of middle-aged weekend warriors doing that too.

TBH if everything out of the house is that inconvenient you should be rethinking where you live, but that's just my prejudice - one of the major factors in selecting city/neighborhood was proximity to a wide variety of activities in easy walk/drive distance. Obviously you may have a lot of other factors keeping you where you are that are more important.

I personally find bodyweight fitness (aka calisthenics) incredibly challenging and satisfying. Good routines are based on progression from easier forms to more difficult forms, emphasis on form over quantity, and at the end of the day, you'll learn some very impressive skills that require tremendous, functional strength. Equipment is minimal - a bar to hang from, a floor to resist you. There is enough complexity, challenge, and progression to last a lifetime. I gave up climbing for it. Reddit's bodyweightfitness subreddit is excellent. Head there for more info. The community's recommended routine is a perfect place to begin.

If you want to throw money at it, try hiring a personal trainer for 2 or 3 days a week.

(I had a personal trainer for a while who trained me and a friend, just having the commitment to trainer at least made me show up, and it was his job to keep things fresh. Having a friend there also helped make it less boring).

Try team sports. Playing the sport is exercise that's fun, but also your team practice sessions are largely exercise as well. You're doing it alongside your buddies so there's lots of joking around and whatnot so its fun.

What's more is it makes the practical effects more immediate. Delayed gratification is hard. Results that are going to be realised soon are much more motivating.

So when you're doing something like running by yourself, it's still easier because you're not running out of some vague sense of being more attractive in a year, or avoiding a heart attack that you may or may not have in 10, you're running so that next weekend it's ever so harder for the opposing teams front rowers to flatten you.

I've had the same experience with exercise as you, but instead of rock climbing I really started to enjoy group yoga for a while. I used to attend a free class given by a friend and his wife in their home. The only reason I stopped was because it was a half hour drive each way on Monday, Wednesday and sometimes Friday night. It ran from 7:30pm to 9pm.

The people there were very serious about practicing yoga and I was completely out of my element. What I liked about it was that it was very challenging, fulfilling and I saw a great results within a month. My energy levels were way up, I felt balanced in more areas of my life and I was losing weight. Being part of a group really motivated me to do my best and to go the entire 1.5 hours without quitting. I also enjoyed the bit of socialization before and after class. The hour of driving started annoying me after a few months though and work got in the way at times, so I eventually stopped going.

Recently, I've been thinking I'm going to turn my 2-car garage into a gym to hold my own regular practice. I love the idea that people would come to me instead of me going to them. I'm still thinking about ways to attract the right kind of people to join in. I am no Yoga Guru. Perhaps I will see if I can find some newly certified yoga teachers and ask if they want a place to practice with a group. If I can't find a real teacher, I think I might just fake it. Sometimes if you can't find the Guru, you just have to be the Guru...

It depends. There are certain aspects that you can treat like you do grocery shopping. Weight training, for example. Three sets for three exercises three times a week, with five minutes rest between sets. Bring a book, set a timer. When the timer goes off, you spend less than a minute doing the set, and then go back to reading. Once you've done squats, deadlifts, and the like for a few months you can focus on your form without losing the context of the book.

For rock climbing, is there anything else you need to do in that direction so you can climb once a week?

You can also try to add loads back to your life elsewhere. Where can you replace sitting down with squatting, machines with lifting, and car trips with walking or cycling without compromising your time? Can you put rings or a bar by your workstation so when you pause to thing you can reach up and hang? Katie Bowman is a wonderful person to read on the topic of adaptation to loads.

You can probably get a rock climbing / bouldering setup built at home depending on how plenty your plenty of money is.

Then anything you do cardio and weight lifting wise could be in support of your climbing goals depending on where your weaknesses are once you reach a certain level.

I enjoy weightlifting because it makes me eat better, sleep better and thus feel better and I like how precisely you can measure progress (compared to team sports for example). A squat rack, bench and Olympic barbell at home is all you need for a simple program like StrongLifts 5x5 which takes very little time.

At the end of the day, you can be Jeff Bezos rich but Jeff still has to do the actual work, perhaps with a little steroid help though he seems jacked. Fitness is one of the things you can't just buy outright.

> Has anyone had success with particular workouts or strategies to keep motivated?

What worked for me was ballroom dance (social, then social + performance, then that + competitive formation team, then all that plus teacher training)—well, until I had kids, still trying to work back into something that works with that but frankly I don't see anything stabilizing in that area for me until they’re a little older.

Much of what a sibling comment says about team sports applies here (and competition is a team, or pair in the case of the more common couples rather than formation team format, sport.)

Essentially, if getting into shape isn't enough to motivate you to stay with exercise (and for lots of people, it's not), you need to find something that also serves other needs. Providing a social third place, competitive outlet, and some kind of feeling of achievement besides what you get from raw fitness measures (the scale, tape, etc.) all can help this.

But while I think those general concerns are broadly applicable, the specific activity that works for any given person is going to vary a lot, because everyone's reward function works a bit differently.

Same. I just find it boring, and all the 'find exercise you like' advice doesn't help as it would be something with even less return on time investment (e.g. group sports). I also wish I could just throw money at it, get augmented or something so I don't have to do it at all. I like doing things with my brain, and for me no sport seems like a novel experience worth spending time on.

That said I still exercise consistently. Basically, since it seems rational: you get more time in return that you spend doing exercise (presumably returns diminish at some point, but that seems to be true for 'reasonable' amount of exercise)?

I'm also treating this as a 'quantified self' project, and collecting/visualising data makes it a bit more enjoyable.

I write a bit more about it here: https://beepb00p.xyz/tags.html#exercise

Some people cannot find motivation to exercise alone. Did you enjoy rock climbing itself or the community aspect of it and socializing with people. May be you need a partner for your workouts to keep yourself motivated. I tried Peloton bike in the gym a few times. I am not a fan in general of stationary bikes and treadmills, but Peloton workouts are fun, and you a part of an online community. The bike is expensive though, but if it works for you it may be a great long term investment.

The Peloton wife would like a word with you...

But in all seriousness, it sounds like a Peloton bike might be a good fit for you. You don’t need to leave the house and the live classes should alleviate some boredom. It can probably even help with your desire to throw money at something. I’ve not used them myself, but have seen a neighbor who has one in her garage. She got into good shape impressively quickly after having her second child.

> the nearest gym is 45mim away in low traffic - it's a 3 hour commitment to get a good session.

> I work from home.

> There's not really a price I wouldn't pay for a more durable and comfortable body.

These three facts lead me to offer the likely over-simplified advice-as-a-question:

Why not move closer to the gym?

I haven't reached my goals, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

But I'm focusing on my environment and the habits. Doing the daily habit as best I can.

Being fat is hard; being fit is hard too. You get your abs in the kitchen, not on a treadmill. Also, exercising so one can get away with indulging a higher caloric count sounds dangerous and reads like "exercise bulimia." Sweating so you can cheat and eat some cake or candy is still going to tax your pancreas, gallbladder, and liver. YMMV Walking outside in colder weather will make you lose more weight than sweating on a treadmill with no breeze. Running, cycling, and swimming are great too, for you can do races which are more communal and a future goal keeps you at it.

You're going too far here. "Never happens" is wrong. If anything, perhaps cardio doesn't help on average. But I know individuals who have lost huge amounts of weight through serious cardio activity and no special diet work. I mean 'serious' cardio though: 2-3 hours/day on a treadmill. I've personally leaned out a lot through cycling.

> The research always shows that humans who expend extra calories during one activity will, over the course of the rest of the day, expend fewer calories to, on average, expend essentially the same amount of energy as those who did not engage in the strenuous activity.

It's quite possible to adopt an exercise regime where one, on average (even taking into account rest days), expends more in strenuous activity per day than one would expend in total per day without strenuous activity, in which case it is physically impossible to offset the additional calorie expenditure in activity with reduced calorie expenditure at rest (and since the body does actually have irreducible needs at rest—and since exercise, by creating microinjuries that require repair, increases that minimum, even if it also increases resting efficiency) the actual limit where this becomes impossible is a much lower active expenditure.

It's possible that there is a range in which additional strenuous activity is offset, and it's possible most practical attempts to boost strenuous activity for weight loss end up within that range. But it's also certainly possible to get outside of the range where that effect can operate.

> Cardio has its uses in fitness, just not for losing fat.

Um, no. This goes against all mainstream, tried and true research and practice.

> Women who train for their first marathon gain, on average, 2-3 lbs of fat

Marathons are an extreme activity. If this is true it doesn't disprove that cardio causes the average person to lose fat.

Abs are made in the kitchen.

Yeah this is the bare minimum for what qualifies as exercise. I’m really surprised the author took the liberty to opine on all of exercise based on this...

So many points. The major ones for me, in order of importance:

1) Running on a treadmill is much friendlier to my joints than concrete or asphalt. For us city dwellers, that adds up over time.

2) I can quit the treadmill at any time. If you're outside on a 6 mile run and you have a muscle cramp up at mile 3, limping back 3 miles is the result. That's surprisingly little fun ;)

3) Can't speak for other people, but usually the treadmill is a warm-up, that's it.

4) It's cold and rainy outside. I'm soft and coddled and like being in a warm place :)

(OK, realistically, the first two are the ones that really matter, the rest you can get over)

Personally I hate treadmill walking or running. Anything outside is better.

I've had a weightlifting habit for many years and I always look forward to it. Either increasing weights or reps or improving a movement is always enjoyable. And I look the better for it.

I found a treadmill in a basement gym with dance music pounding made it easy to "zone out" and keep running, whereas when I tried to exercise in the "real world" I'd end up stopping for a coffee or something.

6PM smog is antithesis if outdoor jogging.

> Weightlifting is almost pointless from a calorie perspective

Maybe in terms of the energy you burn directly by lifting weights, but it raises your base metabolic rate significantly for quite some time after a workout. The extra muscle mass you built also raises your BMR in a longer lasting way. Especially when combined with interval training, weights are very effective.

>I've found that calories-in/calories-out logic only gets you so far. It's foundationally true, of course, because energy is conserved, and we use all of the calories that we eat, with few exceptions, either for energy or for fat storage.

Unfortunately it is not true that we use all the calories that we eat in the same way, or that simple calories in/calories out is all that matters[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhzV-J1h0do

To me the main issue with the calories in/out way of thinking is that while generally correct your body deals with different types of calories very differently. Obviously high quality protein and processed sugar cause very different hormonal responses in the body. The calories in/out way of thinking sort of brushes this under the rug.

The weight regain phenomenon you mention can be explained in part by the hormone ghrelin. I’m no nutritional scientist but from my understanding ghrelin is involved in meal initiation and is a driving factor in the weight regain after a period of weight loss. Conversely the hormone leptin acts to suppress food intake and would cause someone to lose weight after a brief period of weight gain. Together when functioning correctly these work to “stabilize” ones weight. Obese individuas are thought to be leptin resistant.

As you mention, hormonal effects are king and you want to take great care to not overly stress or break your body’s systems, for example, by becoming insulin or leptin resistant.

I think people sometimes shy away from this because it's seen as a young, vain person's pursuit; something you do primarily to look good.

But past middle age, it becomes critically important. Once your muscles, joints, and bones begin to weaken, keeping muscle mass can mean the difference between maintaining balance or not, breaking bones in a fall or not, and retaining motor function or not. It has all kinds of second order effects on general health and longevity.

Aye. My own goal in my late 40s, a bit overweight, is to get strong first, lose weight second.

I'd hardly ever get an endorphin rush/hit from cycling, but I get them regularly from weights. They certainly help the mind settle, even after a short stint.

My best tip would be to get your own equipment, if possible, to have the ability to do it frequently and without making it a mission to go to the gym.

It's amazing what you can do with a squat rack, bar bell, a bench, and a set of plates. (Starting strength / Rippetoe, Stronglifts 5x5, etc).

Weight is in fact regulating itself somewhat naturally as a consequence, but just being able to feel the body getting stronger is the real pleasure. I've been doing this for a good few months now and I know I'm adding years if not decades to my usable life span as well.

I think it's fun with a friend (did that years ago), but trying to get back into lifting by myself now... is boring. I quit each session sooner than I should, so I don't see the same gains. I'm not sure how to get excited about it when I am by myself, other than playing music to pump me up, which I'm not always in the mood for.

If I could do this at home, I would. Otherwise, I dont feel like losing an hour of my life a day, for something that's going to minorly improve my life a year+ out. It's a flaw, but I cannot get motivated for anything where the reward isnt short term.

But for some people it takes forever to actually see results. Even by following strict dietary plans and trainings regimes it is just super slowish to see the impact.

It is also a great activity to help burn fat.

Just remember that the gains will stop after a while if you don’t start taking steroids or something. People seem to have difficulty finding a stable workout routine they enjoy without improvements. Otherwise lifting is good but watch for form and don’t ignore nagging injuries.

I wholeheartedly support (1). Earlier this year I lived closer to work and biking to work every day is extremely natural, and I easily close every ring on my Apple Watch with basically no effort. Now that I live farther away from work and my commute involves a car, it is a struggle everyday to close the rings.

It took me about 3 months (two different times a bit over a year apart). Each instance only lasted for about 4 months when I'd just lose motivation. Maybe it was because I made an accomplishment each time (being able to jog half an hour without stopping for the first time in my life was the last one), and that feeling of satisfaction meant I no longer had a drive to accomplish something anymore.

I still have my goal of being able to run indefinitely, but I'm just not motivated to start back up again.

I run hill trails, and they’re so much more interesting than gyms and tracks.

I second that.

I can very much relate to the author's thoughts about the whole exercise routine, including a lack of general enjoyment of it, and when I set out to improve my body in the gym, I lasted a few months or so and gave up: too much time and effort and motivation and money needed at the same time for something so dull - and that was e few years ago and I stopped doing much exercise except for some week end walks and the like.

Now for a few months I have been commuting to work by bike, driven by the time gain vs car or subway, and I have to say even though it's a bit of an effort on rainy days, it's really a very good combination of low cost, low friction, useful in its own right, means of doing exercise.

I think you’re right, but your comment is so dense it’s impossible to decipher unless the person has read specific literature.

TL;DR it’s not all about calories, bodies adapt their energy budget, carbs have a stronger impact than other food.

I agree that's ideal, but there's plenty of people who won't find any form of exercise enjoyable. Or perhaps will only find some types of exercise (after years, I really only like hiking and biking, which doesn't help much with upper body strength).

The other thing that works is just being motivated. I find I feel like crap if I go for a long time without exercising, so I will.. even if I don't particularly enjoy doing it.

That's... pretty much nonsense.

Maybe some people feel better after exercise than before, but for the vast majority of people I've talked to, they're mostly exhausted after exercising. Same goes for me. And yes, I regularly exercise significant chunks of time at 80%+ of MHR.

And yes, I've done it for extended amounts of time, too. I've done half marathons. I've run somewhat decent times for my age. I was bored out of my skull while doing it. I certainly didn't feel a big endorphin rush.

This is fundamentally true.

Keep in mind that this doesn't mean "100% effort, 100% of the time". Rather, the body is extraordinarily effective in responding to brief sessions of intense activity.

For cardio, high intensity interval training (HIIT), and Tabata intervals in particular (20 seconds effort, 10 seconds recovery, repeated 8 times). This can be done with virtually any activity -- low-weight squats, rowing machine, sprints, burpbees, spinning, running.

For strength -- a small number of moderate-to-high weight sets (3-8 reps, 3-4 sets) -- 2-3x weekly, is more than sufficient to build muscle.

Long, low-intensity effort -- cardio or strength -- has relatively low yield . You can and generally should train efficiently.

The most important factor, though, is consistency over time. That is: get your workout in, and do that 2-3x a week, every week, year in and out. Rewards don't come from a heroic effort in a single workout, but consistency over time, with progressively (over weeks and months) greater challenges (more weight, effort, reps).

I've been doing HIIT for a while. Always very intense and I end up demolished and definitely not feeling better afterwards, just really tired.

I asked my trainer if it ever gets any easier, in his words, "No, you just get stronger".

Feeling subjectively better after a workout session might be in the same line as "happens to some people".

This might be true of some people at some intensities but it is not universally true. The more intense my exercise the worse I feel afterwards. @ 70% of max hr I feel pretty good afterward. 80% and I start feeling pretty tired. At 90-95% I get super irritable, nauseous, and can't sleep.

I love being totally exhausted but it took me a while to accept that a lot of people don’t like it. People are different. I never had weight problems and it also took me a while that what’s easy for me is hard for others. But then I can’t wean myself off chocolate which is easy for others.

The current recommended best practice for most athletes is to do only about 20% of training near max heart rate and the remaining 80% at much lower intensity. Otherwise you won't recover correctly.

This has been my experience as well. You need to start out slow and let your body adjust, and at different points I’ve had different levels of highs. The rush came for me when I was pushing myself towards my limit without pain, and that didn’t happen until I had set a certain baseline of endurance.

This is such a bizarre mindset. It's sort of like "the beatings will continue until morale improves."