There's inherent risk in simply living. If people want to have fulfilled lives by pushing their body's to the limit, that's their choice and to be honest, a choice we should all be encouraged to try in our lives to some capacity. Also, to pretend they're unaware of the risk is ridiculous. It's not like the Olympics is the only competitive arena for these disciplines.
Wanna rock climb and take the risk? We should allow it just like we allow sky diving, climbing the Everest and sailing.
This kind of thinking leads to degradation of the society where no one will be allowed to take risks.
That's different from broadcasting a free soloing climbing tournament across the world, and giving rewards to the winners (survivors)
"Allowing" need not meen "encouraging"
Football, both kinds, have lots of permanent injuries throughout the body and brain. If you want to talk about rewarding people for pushing themselves to the extreme, those are far better examples than free soloing.
It's interesting when people are fine with stopping passion sports like climbing, skateboarding and now sledding, but they're too scared to say the same about the 800-pound guerrilla, money making machine sports with a lot more TBIs and deaths. Especially since a lot of people go for football more for the reward than for the actual passion.
Again, it's not like anyone participating in any of these sports are unaware of the risk. An argument might exist for 20-30 years ago. But not today. That takes flat-earther mental gymnastics to think they aren't putting themselves at risk. But at the end, if you're complaining that, "These people push their body's too far", that's not you caring about their well being. That's you seeing your own weakness, laziness and cowardliness to attempt the same feat. These folks are going to push themselves some way, some how, because they want to not die wondering "what if". No one is ever safe from "mental demons" and it's terrible when someone takes their own life, no matter what the category root cause was. But I know very well that choosing to achieve nothing due to fear is a bigger open door for those issues.
I wrote "not encouraging", that's different from "ban all". Why did you reply to "ban all" instead?
I like MMA and UFC, however, the fighters get brain scanned to find out about underlying problems, and if you get knocked out, you cannot compete again for a long while (because of TBI risk).
Whilst the sledding sports seem to ignore brain injuries.
But this generally doesn't case suicide
And can be treated, by going to the gym. (I had back, knee, elbow pain myself, from office work — and the gym, made it disappear. In my particular case)
> bad knees
Agreed, I'd be ok with bad knees.
But when it's the brain, it's ... to some extent, the end.
As their parent comment said, any sport that compels you to reach for the extremes of physical human performance carries a risk of injury and wear that's obviously greater than just exercising for health and casual fitness. In most cases that's to something else in your body than your brain.
But that reaching for the limits is also what makes those sports enjoyable to some people, and nothing else might quite equal the experience.
Second, general public knowing that top sport damages body influences parents, teachers and coaches decisions. When we make that topic taboo, people are more likely to push kids toward maximum performance in sport. To teach them set of values that pushes it.
When we know serious clubs can damage them, we are more likely to pick less serious clubs (which prevents future top engagement).
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetorch/2016/08/16/490074935/t...
OP is probably not aware that the Olympics does not have ultra-marathon type events which are generally very unhealthy for participants, only a 10K and a marathon (and shorter sprints of course)
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/will-continuing-to...
Almost all studies use untrained vs trained athletes. They rarely qualified what "trained" means and could be anything from a lifetime athlete to someone who self-reported following a 6 week plan prior to the study and now we consider this person "trained". Most athletic studies are used to compare a sedentary person to someone who workouts casually (less than about 10 hours per week). Once you pass this point, you're in diminishing returns territory and you've got to actively sacrifice some parts of your overall health to make gains in a single activity (sprinting, jumping, etc.).
So will running a few times a week help fight mild arthritis? Probably. Will training like an Olympic athlete? No. Same thing applies to the OP article. Will sledding down a hill give you brain damage? No. Will constantly sledding at Olympic athlete speeds and g-forces? Seems like it.
/s
Diminishing returns doesn't mean that you have to sacrifice anything (besides some idealized notion of efficiency). The hurt-your-overall-health point is somewhere much closer to Olympic athlete than it is to 10hrs/week. If you just vary the activities a little, you will have no trouble with spending a lot more time on exercise. People who literally do only the one physical activity they compete in are straw men.
PS: The number of people completely clueless about fitness on HN would be hilarious if it weren't so sad.
Let's say you create a sane schedule of 3 days on, 1 day off (or similar) and you workout 2 hours per day (20 hours in 2 weeks) and let's assume you're sleeping the necessary 10 hours per day for this training schedule. And we'll make the very generous assumption you manage to not get injured for an extended period of time. You're still at higher risk of infections due to suppressed immune system[1] and also at a certain FFMI, your cardiovascular health actually starts to decrease[2]. Plus the chances that your nutrition, mobility, sleep schedule, and training plan are all good enough to not get you injured or sick during training, are astronomically low.
I only workout 60-75 minutes 5 days/week and I'm already at or above the FFMI level where my heart health is worse than if I just stuck to moderate intensity exercise for less time.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19336500/ [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00256...
The thinking behind my post was that if you add up training (for the activity they compete in) and all the other physical activities people do, the differences in training volume will be dominated by the other differences -- consider people with jobs that involve manual labor, or, to a lesser extent, bike commuters. Perhaps this was controlled for in the studies?
The other thing I had in mind was people whose sports involve lots of different movements one can practice -- say, ice hockey. I have no idea whether ice hockey shooting practice counts as high intensity... but it's not nothing, and doesn't seem much like ultra running either.
Source? I would expect these are much more common in obese people than in habitual runners. My understanding is that runners have been found to have healthy knees, e.g. with a bit of googling I find [1][2] (but haven't read them).
> significant negative hormonal changes for men over 50 miles/wk
They have found somewhat lower testosterone levels, but I don't know of any study finding negative health impacts. Do you have a source for "significant negative"?
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5179322/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2556152/