Hacker News Reader

Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

> removes strain from your heart

If anything, I think our largest (modern) collective societal health problem is that we do wayyyy to much trying to avoid straining the heart. For how much of human history were we not working mostly sedentary? It has a cost. The body is meant to be worked. It loses strength and stamina when it isn't. I don't think the answer is to do even less. Besides, do you know how many involuntary naps I'd take if I was laying down all day?

View on HN

This is heavily contested, yes exercise is healthy but straining yourself regularly also has a cost. Most people either exercise really hard or not at all, I think what’s actually healthy is a moderate amount of exercise and the best type differs with age and occupation.

More importantly is having a variety of moderate exercise mixed in throughout the day.

Your lymph system relies on the movements of your skeletal muscles to push anything not water soluble through your body. This includes fats, various local inflammation signaling molecules, etc.

Interesting, had no idea about that with the lymphs

I think this is one of the most important health information most people have no idea about.

When you feel sick don't stay in bed, go for walks, a large part of your immune system is passive and rely on muscle contraction to work optimally.

> When you feel sick don't stay in bed, go for walks, a large part of your immune system is passive and rely on muscle contraction to work optimally.

Do you have a source for this? I haven't heard this before and genuinely want to learn more about it. A cursory Google search didn't find anything related to this

Not the OP, but:

https://www.mdanderson.org/publications/focused-on-health/ex....

I have doubts about that. The feeling of sickness is basically our body telling us not to move. Sick animals also don't move much.

And a common reaction to being sick is shivering, so maybe the body is already compensating for the lack of movement.

Guts too. Whenever I walk/jog/ride my BM are better. Nature likes to scavenge energy it seems.

And exercise kind too. Walking is actually a good example, it's surprisingly deep and integrated. When I was ill, it was the only thing that was soft yet deep enough to maintain my cardiovascular system flowing. Other activities like yoga play on the geometry to change your blood circulation without doing anything. Crawling makes a lot of muscles coordinate in ways other sports don't.

Sawing trees also pulls muscles differently.

I'd love to spend a year on such life. More manual labour (but not harmful nor too risky), and see how your body and mind evolve.

I thought it is often important to exercise stronger when you have been out of shape for a while. Then once you have core goals met, you can find your stride and sustain.

Not really, ideally you'd want to start with what feels good to do and learn to maintain that then slowly push it until you increase your activity and intensity. If you train hard all at once up front, it'll be harder to build the habit and learn to sustain it.

It is other way round. You risk injury if you start too strongly while the body is unprepared. You should slowly increase the amount of exercise.

I don't know if heart working while sitting/standing to overcome other body parts not working to assist it like they would during and exercise is a good thing.

It's not really possible to understand human health without understanding Selye's General Adaption Syndrome and hormesis. In short, stressors that don't overcome an organism's ability to more or less maintain homeostasis cause adaptations that make that organism better suited to withstand similar stresses. Athletic training is a classic example of a stress that, if all goes well, results in improved fitness. But there is something called overtraining, which results when the athlete applies more of a training stress than his or her body can handle, and in that case one sees a rapid and even catastrophic[1] decrease in fitness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabdomyolysis

To be fair most of us regular humans are way way too concerned about overtraining. It’s really hard to get there.

If you have a typical office job, you almost certainly don’t even have enough time in the day to overtrain.

Yes you could, because since you don't train regularly, going out for a 5k run could be very stressful. I've been there, when young 5k was, you could say easy, I could do it any day without warmup or specific training. But now, I can't run 5k without injuring myself. I need to prepare for several weeks before running 5k.

Well sounds like you should train regularly then :)

But overtraining isn’t just getting over exerted and having to rest for a few days or even weeks. It’s a very gnarly condition that’s ridiculously hard to get to. Most of us would mentally tap out long before.

It’s a lot like the difference between needing a break and being burned out. Getting tired and needing a break is normal, being burnt out is a serious condition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtraining

I would guess it also depends on concentration. If you're at the gym exercising a specific muscle group, you could over-exert that muscle easier than generic overtraining while playing a sport.

This makes sense, but I believe it’s incorrect. Overtraining is a fairly serious condition that can take months to recover from, not generic over-exertion of a specific muscle group that requires days of rest.

It happened to me with job and kids. It is very easy to over train or get injury. It does not require hours and hours, just intensity.

And if you had not done sport for a long time and suddenly get back to it, trying to "continue" where you left, that is when injuries happen.

I'm having similar issues but at the mental level. By studying too many topics at once i'm overloading my brain to the point of pain (unwillingly). Things have capacity.

Involuntary? I’d be taking voluntary naps all day long ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com