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Comment by boshalfoshal | Hacker News Reader

I know this website generally likes to have discussions on things like this for intellectual stimulation, but is it really necessary to micro optimize exercise to this extent? I don't think there needs to be some sort of mathematical proof or nobel prize winning study to tell you to exercise and eat well if you want to lose fat or become fit (for average individuals looking to improve their health).

Go outside, work hard and sweat for an hour, eat a nutritious meal and get a good amount of sleep. It's not really rocket science. Don't pre-emptively optimize all your workouts based on some cutting edge science before even brute forcing it, building work ethic is far more important. As its commonly said in CS, premature optmiziation is the root of all evil. If doing the basics doesn't work, then sure consider delving deeper into more complex routines.

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I’m gonna assume you find it fairly easy, and also very pleasurable, to get some exercise. Many people find anything physical as fun and rewarding. Perhaps they don’t need to worry about optimizing their workouts to the core.

But then there are others, me included, who have a lifelong love hate (mostly hate) relationship with exercise. I’ve exercised moderately at least every alternate days for most of my adult years (for a few, I worked out quite religiously every day even), but not a single day did I find it rewarding.

If science can help me find the most effective way I could utilize the few times (and the short periods) I do muster the motivation to work out, I’m happy for it.

So in your analogy, it’s not premature optimization for many, especially the ones that need the most.

Respectfully, to say you did something for at least half of your adult days, but that it wasn't rewarding, is perhaps a misuse of the term reward.

I'd suggest that whilst you may have suffered in doing the exercise for whatever reason, there was also a parallel and strong reward process embedding and sustaining that behaviour in you.

I think that's an overbroad notion of "reward". You have a certain point, but it may be seen as kind of a behaviorist way of looking at things, and the behaviorist approach fails to provide the same insight into mind that other approaches have.

You are completely missing OP's point - you are not the case of stepping into the realm of exercising for the first time and already trying some hyper-optimized-latest-fad routines. He even covers your case, if you cared to read till last sentence.

By far the hardest part of working out regularly is to have good mental setup, which just doesn't spawn on itself but one has to work through some mental resistance. Getting into the state of enjoying the suck, for all the benefits, for the feeling afterwards, whatever makes you tick and come back. I can't agree more.

Integrate exercise into every day tasks. For instance, I am cycling now to get to work, shop groceries, etc.

For some, this just has the effect of associating the exercise hate with those other things.

Well, the dishes have to be done, and I hate doing them but I do them. People need to start looking at exercise the same way. Saying "I hate it, its boring, I'm not going to do it" is like letting dishes pile up in your sink all your life. You will be so very thankful you started regularly exercising and building flexibility today when you are over the hill later in life, and all your friends have health problems and limited mobility while you are saddling up for your 50 mile cycling ride in your 70s.

Right, I'm just saying that integrating it into everyday tasks as the parent suggests doesn't necessarily make it easier, and on the contrary the aversion can rub off on those tasks, which would be a negative.

Personally I'm riding my bike to work as well, but I go slow enough that I don't consider that exercising. Instead I do real exercise separately.

Really? Even if you don't notice you're exercising?

Because if just walking to the store is too much exercise that it makes you feel pain or really any kind of discomfort, this is not an individual quirk, this is a serious medical issue. Real talk, you gotta talk to a doctor, this is not normal or healthy.

If you don't notice you're exercising, you're not exercising. Walking is not exercising.

WTF? Walking is not exercising? Source please, that's a ludicrous statement with regards to most definitions of exercise, especially the medical context we were discussing.

Walking is the primary activity humans evolved to be able to do better than any other animal. Humans can outrun any other animal in races that last multiple days, by simply walking all day and resting at night and consistently covering more miles than any other animal, not even an elephant or horse or tiger can go as fast in the long run.

It sounds like you've internalized the local cultural concept in parts of the USA that "exercise is supposed to be unpleasant, no pain no gain" which is just disconnected from the reality that humans are meant to move.

Ask your doctor how you think going from doing nothing at all (typical american sedentaryism) to walking 3-4 miles (just one hour) a day every day will impact someone's health! Even just walking one mile a day (about 20min) will put you in much better health than doing nothing.

I am not advocating walking as the obsessive only exercise, but it's a perfect starter exercise for people like yourself and OP who think it's not exercise unless you hate it!

> I’ve exercised moderately at least every alternate days for most of my adult years (for a few, I worked out quite religiously every day even), but not a single day did I find it rewarding.

Why do you keep doing it? Suppose you burn 500 calories in a workout session, I would think its easier to eat 500 calories less than it is to slog through something you hate.

Exercise's benefits go beyond burning calories. Burning 500 calories is not the same as avoiding those 500 calories.

I agree, but the main benefits for me are feeling good. And if it doesn't make you feel good then it may not be worth it. There's probably negative effects of putting yourself through something to you hate every day.

Doing the dishes makes me feel bad usually. That being said it would be foolish to just quit doing that. Exercise is the same way but the effects on your health are externalized often decades down the line, versus dirty dishes that start smelling before long. If people got frail and immobile a week after not working out versus after decades of neglect, more people would religiously be working out like they currently do their dishes.

Life is full of nonrewarding tasks. I hate washing the dishes but they need to be done everyday. Same with exercise. When you start becoming inactive is when your health spirals into decline. I see it a lot with my relatives. Lack of exercise leads to overweight issues by middle age, then bad knees and other joints, then bad organs, maybe even diabetes, then major surgeries and exorbitant costs to your loved ones, then even more limited mobility and dependence on others, followed by death. Most modern humans sit for like 90% of the day. If you are sitting down right now when you read this comment, go take a walk around your block.

You don't need cutting edge research to fix your motivation issues, since plenty of proven exercises are out there that help so much for personal health. You probably just need a therapist. Once you get over that inertia of regularly working out, you will constantly want to work out. You will feel sore on the weeks you let your yoga regimine slide, and you will feel 10 years younger or more when you do consistantly do your yoga and other excercises. You won't get as injured in your age the more flexibile you are, and you won't get nearly as frail the more muscle mass you can keep on you through adulthood. Exercise sucks but this is the investment you make today to have a quality life decades down the road. Money alone cannot relieve issues that are brought on by a lifetime of inactivity.

> I hate washing the dishes but they need to be done everyday.

I do too. That's why I insisted my apartment have a dishwasher—they're surprisingly uncommon in entry-level New York studios. I dump everything in there, it's great. No pre-rinsing, I just throw stuff inside and it comes out clean 90 minutes later.

I don't like vacuuming either, so I got a Roomba. Also highly recommended. It goes out, cleans the whole floor, and then comes back to charge itself. I just have to empty the bin. Sometimes one or the other speakers gets unplugged, which is a tad annoying. Much less annoying than vacuuming.

I firmly believe that some day, humanity will discover an exercise pill. Sign me up. There's nothing inherent about using muscles which makes them stronger. Using muscles tells the body that it needs to make its muscles stronger, but we could just skip to the second part.

None of this really contradicts your point. As of today, we don't have an exercise pill, so you've got to exercise. But I also believe in constantly looking for ways to make life as engaging as possible.

(And I also found the dishwashing example triggering. Too many of my acquaintances don't have dishwashers. They're like $300 y'all, you spent five times that on a marginally faster iPhone but scrubbing plates is as slow as ever...)

Even with your dishwasher you still need to load plates and unload them constantly and even though its easier than washing by hand, I doubt you look forward to that particular activity out of all the others you do in your life. If its anything like the dishwashers landlords have provided me in the past you will probably have to wash the plates by hand anyhow. Dishwashing isn't the only mundane activity you need to do in life as a human. Its part of life that we do these things, and the sooner you get over yourself to doing them the easier it is to get things done.

> If its anything like the dishwashers landlords have provided me in the past you will probably have to wash the plates by hand anyhow

Tangentially, I used to be a "whatever, I just wash dishes by hand" person and got converted to dishwashers because I actually, for the first time, ended up using one that actually worked well and got everything very clean reliably and repeatedly. I had only ever used the "landlord special" machines you are all too familiar with as well. It really is such a time saver and makes me eat at home and do more involved cooking more often.

If cooking more is a goal of yours and you're like I used to be, dismissive of dishwashers, think again.

There's an optimisation available here - limit crockery/pans to the quantity that fits in the dishwasher, keep them all in there when not in use, run dishwasher frequently.

Cuts out the moving to/from cupboards part. Also frees up said cupboard. Probably sufficient for people who don't cook much but YMMV, haven't tried it myself yet.

This would work for me if I had two dishwashers. At any given time, one would be for dirty dishes and one would be for clean dishes, depending on which I had run most recently. The idea of keeping dirty and clean dishes side-by-side in a single dishwasher is unappealing.

But, it also takes me less than 60 seconds to empty the dishwasher, it doesn't really feel like work.

>, but is it really necessary to micro optimize exercise to this extent? I don't think there needs to be some sort of mathematical proof or nobel prize winning study to tell you to exercise [...] Don't pre-emptively optimize all your workouts based on some cutting edge science before even brute forcing it,

I know you're trying to help HN readers but your comments I extracted above give the wrong impression of the article's actual text.

He's not micro-optimizing and he didn't pre-emptively optimize. Summary bullet points:

- He wrote that he was already doing high-intensity bike riding in the mountains for the past 12 years.

- Each of the previous seasons, he noticed he always lost the weight he gained during the winter. This was his baseline.

- But COVID disrupted his normal bike training and when he restarted the high-intensity exercise, he noticed he wasn't losing the weight like before. To fix this, he made sure he got his max heart rate back up to 180. This seems to match some of the recent research out there.

The above timeline over a decade is the opposite of premature optimization. It's taking 12 years of baseline data and noticing something about his body changed in the 13th year and then taking steps to isolate and fix it.

Unfortunately, his wall of text about his personal anecdote makes it hard for readers to skim for his main ideas:

(1) many science articles say exercise doesn't help you lose weight but his personal experience contradicts this. He believes the explanation is low-intensity exercise vs high-intensity.

(2) even high-intensity exercise will not stop weight gain unless you actually hit max heart rate. Almost reaching max heart rate (e.g. 172 bpm) was not enough; he has to reach 180 bpm.

My own experience tells me I was only able to lose weight under either of these two conditions:

1) daily HIIT, preferably multiple times

2) not eating for 7-35 days at all (just water/electrolytes/vitamins/potassium)

Eating just a little while doing just a bit of sport just made me tired, and didn't lead to any weight loss.

Energy is conserved. A couple of hours of cardio a day plus eating well under maintenance causes weight loss pretty much linear in the deficit. Gradient is about 8k calories per kg adipose tissue.

Did you actually try it or is this just a theory "that should work"?

This. As an untrained person, you can go for a walk with a 90 bpm heart rate and lose a lot of weight and gain strength and endurance.

The psychology is way more important for the average person than an optimal training: do something you enjoy doing several times a week.

> you can go for a walk with a 90 bpm heart rate and lose a lot of weight

A 1 hour brisk walk is roughly 400 calories, which is roughly the same as a 5k run, not eating a Starbucks muffin, or not eating half a small pizza.

Exercise, even light walking is incredibly beneficial, but you won't lose any weight doing so. Weight is lost in the kitchen.

But the muscle mass will rise your metabolic consumption.

You can loose all your extra weight in the kitchen. Nevertheless, doing a sport help, a lot. I lost 15kg just by changing my eating habits (over 3 years). But the last mile is really hard to get to without exercises. I'm a sailor, but i only get to windsurf/kayak/so catamaran during summer, where i loose ~5kg i immediatly gain over the autumn-winter period. Doing a new, indoor sport did help a lot. This year, even though i only started in February, i already have my weight of October (when i usually stop enjoying myself on the water)

> But the muscle mass will rise your metabolic consumption.

Losing weight doesn't have to increase muscle, you might be trying to just actually lose weight. Also, the actual difference unless you replace an enormous amount of your mass with muscle (which unless you're doing an incredible amount of lifting you won't be doing), ends up being in the region of 1-200 calories per day, which is the difference between having a chocolate bar with your tea in the morning.

> But the last mile is really hard to get to without exercises

The last mile is the same as the previous mile. The difference is that many people realise that losing weight isn't the entire story, and the last mile is no longer about losing weight it's about gaining muscle, and _that_ requires exercise.

As I said, exercise is incredibly important, you'll look better you'll feel better, you'll sleep better, but you won't lose weight unless you're running 10k every day _and_ not eating any more to compensate for it.

> Also, the actual difference unless you replace an enormous amount of your mass with muscle […] ends up being in the region of 1-200 calories per day, which is the difference between having a chocolate bar with your tea in the morning.

If you’re middle-aged (-ish) and healthy, overweight, but not obese, what made you overweight likely is a gain of, ballpark, 3 grams a day (that’s about a kg a year, or 10kg/decade, 30kg between the age of 20 and 50)

There’s about 7,700 kilocalories in a kg of body fat, so preventing that slow but steady weight increase only takes eating about 25kCal less per day or burning 25kCal more.

It doesn’t take much exercise to get there.

> The last mile is the same as the previous mile.

Is it, though? Maybe from a biological perspective, but definitely not in terms of lifestyle.

The times I've needed to lose weight, the first few pounds came off easily, because I usually just need to clean up a few bad habits. But then I typically settle in to a set point that's still above a healthy weight. At that point, further reductions require more and more calorie micromanagement.

Of course you lose weight exercising. You've said it yourself, an hours walk is half a small pizza worth of calories you've just exhaled. Those 400 calories don't come from nowhere. If you don't change your diet at all and start removing 400 calories from the equation a day, of course you will see your weight drop. If you start adding 400 calories your weight goes up. People think there are a lot of factors at play that have a significant effect on weight, but unless you have a parasite in your gut, those factors pale in comparison to basic thermodynamic principles of energy into the system equaling energy lost to the system via work and heat. You can't violate the laws of physics.

Yes but… homeostasis is a thing. If you expend more energy, your body is going to try to make it up somehow, either by making you hungrier, or by making you expand less energy elsewhere.

So then the trick is when you take up a workout regimen to not overeat and regain all the calories you lost to work and heat

A lot of hobbies have gone away from doing it for the pleasure or intrinsic reward of it, but to do it to become the best in the world or professional at it. It can sometimes be fun to gamify self-improvement but there’s also something to be said just for having fun or to take care of yourself. Chess is an example where it seems like people are either actively training and studying to get a title or not playing at all, and it’s a shame.

All that said it’s great that different options are out there for people who are motivated in different ways.

HIIT vs. regular cardio is not micro optimization (in your words). Trying to figure out the exact heart rates might count as one.

An analogy to what you are saying would be this: Studying in MIT vs. any random university should be the same. "Go to college, study hard and you will be fine. It's not rocket really science."

Your other points are valid.

> "Go to college, study hard and you will be fine. It's not rocket really science."

Is that wrong?

If one gets a degree in some esoteric, non-practical area of study, then yeah it is wrong. Or at least very much incomplete advice.

Does there exist any advice where its impossible to do it wrong?

E.g. On this account, "stay hydrated" is bad advice, since if you drink 60L of water in a day you will die

Sure, of course not. But some advice is more clear than others…

Your analogy is true though?

FWIW, for me HIIT was the catalyst to exercising.

As someone who wanted but struggled to motivate myself to take up regular physical activities, the short duration of HIIT was what sold it to me. Sure it's "intense", but I found it way easier to just push myself for ~10min (20min door-to-door) rather than finding time for a 1-2h regular exercise - which I personally don't enjoy much more anyway.

Weight loss has never been my consideration. However, what I've found over the years (and is also supported by research afaik) is that a practice of regular short HIITs greatly contributes to endurance too. Anecdotally, by doing HIITs almost exclusively I am able to keep up pretty well with my triathlon friend during longer runs.

Couldn't agree more.

There doesn't need to some mathematical proof or nobel prize winning study, because... well, the proof is in the pudding if you look at athletes.

Most people are not doing the basics, but by doing some form of exercise often and consistently. Eat a nutritious meal, don't binge on junk food and sleep well. People love to complicate and over engineer the situation by diving into everything 100% when they have a 'I'm going to lose weight' mindset. Weight loss takes a while and you might need to be a little hungry at times to lose weight.

Just don't expect exercise to be the one reason you will lose weight, the largest reason will be your diet. As the old saying goes, you can't outrun a poor diet.

Athletes aren't a great example. A quick look at the literature and you will quickly find heaps of studies on eating disorders in athletes. There are obvious and not so obvious motivations (i.e. a boxer making a weight division vs body image concerns). The big confounding factor in athletes is that they usually have extremely high discipline/self control.

Athletes are a great example of what proper exercise and nutrition does for the body. They are living proof, otherwise if it didn't work they'd be all overweight. Now we don't necessarily expect ourselves to be at that level but clearly doing the basics will work wonders or move you in the right direction. I don't think we can nullify the impacts of lots of exercise and world class nutrition because of some eating disorders.

I'd say obesity is the greater eating disorder, not athletes being at the top of the game working themselves into the ground.

But a good thing you point out there, is that it is easy to say exercise consistently and eat a good diet. But the trouble is the discipline/self control to do so.

Many of us lead stressful busy lives which don't always leave us the room to be the healthy people we want to be. You just need to make time for it in a way that you can and enjoy, if you truly do want to prioritise it.

> Many of us lead stressful busy lives which don't always leave us the room to be the healthy people we want to be.

It is so much easier to exercise consistently and eat a good diet if one is being paid for it.

The reward of feeling and looking good and living a long healthy life can be a pretty good motivator for the amateurs.

Amateurs can make massive changes to their body composition quite quickly, which is absolutely motivator.

Optimization might not be worth the trouble at the individual level, even if that's half the fun for this crowd. But optimization is 100% worth the trouble to make the guidance as effective as possible at the population level. Even slightly better advice can make life slightly better for a zillion people -- think of that in cumulative QALYs or whatever.

If it turns out that a certain kind of exercise makes it a little easier for people to reach their health/fitness goals, and it isn't commensurately more likely to injure them, then let us leave no gains on the table.

this is an important point for structured training, i.e. for people who already have a work ethic. nobody is going to force high intensity interval training on recreational cyclists and runners, but it is important for people looking to improve their performance.

if i spend hours on the bike to get better at biking, yes, thank you, this is actually valuable and important information! no, it's not going to change how i ride on relaxing group rides with my friends or my feel-good rides for getting my head aired out; i do those too, but they're a completely different thing.

HEY LINUX KERNEL PROGRAMMERS! why do you always care about buffer overflows so much? just write some fun code! get a few features done! stop worrying about security holes all the time. accumulating LoC is far more important.

Deeper understanding of the physiology and psychology involved in exercise allows for better recommendations in cases where the general advice can’t or won’t be successfully followed.

Different types of exercise have different effects on our metabolism. It's an exaggeration to call it "micro-optimization", HIIT does not need to be complicated, just go do some sprints!

Me personal experience checks out with the author's anectdata. Following a broken leg I gained about 20 pounds over 2 years, and burned it off quickly (5 weeks) once I started with HIIT.

People are going to keep telling me that "calories in = calories out", or that "weight loss happens in the kitchen", and I'll keep not believing them. HIIT is the most effective level I have for raising my metabolism without a corresponding increase to my appetite.

For yourself and the author of the article, check the amount of fingernail growth during a week containing sprints versus a week or two without.

Warm up in a sustainable way then limited sprints at an unsustainable speed.

It's largely because people don't understand that the body will do everything possible to not lose fat due to insulin mismanagement.

The only way to legitimately say "weight loss happens in the kitchen" if the discussion is over what, and how often... any discussion that is about CICO throws something like 20 years of science under the bus.

HIIT helps override early metabolic syndrome symptoms, but so does eating a diet devoid of refined sugars, refined grains, and seed oils; combining this with a high fat diet (to purposefully keep insulin levels low) multiplies the effect of both HIIT and diets that follow the Paleo way of thinking; then, on top of those, One Meal A Day (OMAD) further multiplies the effect.

If you eat your TDEE in calories every day (ergo, neither excess nor deficit of calories), you will lose weight with HIIT, but also lose weight with Paleo, more weight adding Keto to Paleo, and then even more weight with Ketoized Paleo OMAD, and all four together would still be a weight loss powerhouse even with eating TDEE.

Yeah and the guy literally says nothing about his diet.

I've been going to the gym for 2 years now with a personal trainer - mostly a wholesome approach and even when doing HIIT intervals, I'm not getting even close to my max of 194 I've seen before starting going to the gym when I tried to climb the tiny hill close to my house on my bike.

His experience seems anecdotal at best and an extreme case of cherry picking alongside that. I do feel some nausea after a decent workout usually and it does suppress my appetite for a few hours, but I know of people that are just ravenous after working out.

> I'm not getting even close to my max of 194 I've seen before starting going to the gym when I tried to climb the tiny hill close to my house on my bike.

Are you sure that you are climbing fast enough? Gym training isn't necessarily the best way to prepare for cycling.

Gym for sure is not the best way, but I'm not really lifting heavy weights, it's more of a work on calisthenics, some cardio (usually rowing) and some mobility exercises with the occasional compound lift here and there, cycling is just my preferred cardio for multiple reasons - I can actually travel moderate distances as opposed to running, it's lower impact and I find it much more relaxing than running for instance.

Also, I'm not sure if you understood correctly - I've hit my 194 when I was out of shape and stepped on my bike and tried to climb the tiny hill (after doing about 20km or so). After about 200m of distance with about a 6% gradient, my HR was 194 and I had to step off the bike, my lungs felt like they were extending from my groin all the way to my upper arms on boths sides :D.

After going to the gym for two years I've never seen more than 187 during the HIIT sessions that we had (usually it's something along the lines 20 calories max effort rowing with 15-30 seconds rest, anywhere from 6-10 series) so my experience directly contradicts what has happened to him.

Yes, sounds like the 194 could have some extra from stress or something interfering with the measurement and 187 would be the usual maximum.

The level of intensity of a workout IS one of the basics.

Sure, while doing something is better than doing nothing, whether you push the muscles to exhaustion or not, or whether you push the cardio to max throughput or not makes a vastly outsized difference vs mere total time or effort expended.

The details of how &how much you get to that intensity are admittedly details ,but to dismiss the whole concept as unnecessary is, well, unnecessary ignorance.

Source: fmr international level amateur &pro competitor & trainer. Happy to provide more details of training if interested .

I think author's point is that

1. All workout types leads to being more in shape 2. HIITs lead to weight loss faster than other types of training.

It is valuable information, if it is confirmed to be true.

Not to discredit one of the authors points, but I don't see why its at all surprising that HIIT increased their maximum heart rate.

Your maximum heart rate isn't likely to increase unless you train and push the upper end of your HR. Sprint cyclists don't train to be fast by riding slowly, they do high intensity sprint efforts.

Your body adapts to the stimulus you provide it, if you want to increase your maximum HR you need to train at your near it.

agree it's unsurprising. hitting your max heart rate often, decreases your resting heart rate would be a more interesting finding (which research supports happens to be true)

> if it is confirmed to be true.

Is the problem. So many studies lead no where because the body is insanely complex, so what works for this person should not be generalized.

> work hard and sweat for an hour, eat a nutritious meal

This means absolutely nothing

This is the kind of empty advice that gets in the way more than helps, and I can't even start saying how "sweat for an hour" is just checkout-lane fitness magazine non-advice

In fact I'd say that that most people fail at fitness because they try to go for meaningless advice like "sweating for an hour"

HIIT is great and it is the way to optimize time and progression

If we assume that people who need to loose weight are in otherwise perfect health then it is indeed no rocket science to do so. Be outside, exercise, eat a balanced meal, get in bed and when there sleep the number of hours that good health require.

For the average individual who are looking to improve their health, it mostly likely false, because the average individual is not in perfect health, especially once they pass the age of 20. A good demonstration of this can be found in older medical science, much which was done on military recruits. More often then not they do not represent the average individual in modern society in term of health.

If we look at the average person, we found things like metabolic disorder. It obviously effects how food metabolize, but it also effects how easy it is to exercise, and it effects sleep in terms of falling asleep, staying asleep, and how long people need to sleep. It is estimated that about 1/3 of the US population suffer from a metabolic disorder, and is only one category of many different diseases that might effects people in a negative way.

It's not about optimizing (although I understand that someone might think so, given the forum), it's more about pushing the right buttons that our nature has.

I'll give you an example that has happened to me several times, I have friends who work out 3 times a week and don't understand why they don't lose their pear shape. The answer is: Do HIT and weights too!

Each type of exercise develops one of the various perspectives our physical nature has in the same way that each type of mental exercise develops one of the various mental capacities we have. You can't be in good mental shape if, for example, you only do chess. Of course it is a great and beautiful exercise, but someone should remind you that your brain has other needs that must be satisfied.

What does ‘micro optimize exercise to this extent’ mean? In the first part they mention studies showing that mere (low intensity) exercise is not sufficient to get the desired result. So if you just mean ‘do high intensity exercise’ then the article’s claim would be that it may be necessary to do it to have the desired effect.

And the second half is about the author training for cycling up mountains and it basically looks like a reasonably normal thing that someone serious at training for something might write. The point of tracking the numbers is to notice trends which someone who is serious about training would likely care about.

>Go outside, work hard and sweat for an hour, eat a nutritious meal and get a good amount of sleep.

You didn't give definitions for any of those terms, nor good values they take from their domains.

There has to be one and only one definition of each. We have to know exactly what macro and micro nutrients the human body needs, and how many calories per person, per lifestyle.

Science has no answers to this, bar the consumerist publications of the cancer-curing properties of grilled avocados or somerhing.

What I understood from your post is I can sleep for 6 hours, briskly walk to the supermarket, and cook 3 XL eggs with a handful of bacon, as a pre-lunch.

Also, there is a group of people who decide to get fit by going crazy with exercise, but continuing to eat junk food. Diet is several orders of magnitude more important than any exercise, yet some people go to the gym everyday, followed by eating two burgers, followed by a pizza the next day etc. etc. And then they look in the mirror surprised they're not getting better.

Michael Phelps is the all-time most decorated Olympian and, when training, he consumes plenty of burgers and pizza. Absurd quantities, in fact. Exercise is far more critical to fitness than nuances of diet. Of course, for many "fit" simply means "not fat".

https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/this-is-what-michael-p...

No it's less diet and more calories. Cyclists are usually rake thin from being in calorie deficit due to the workload they put in.

Phelps would be the same. Swimming is hard work.

It's generally easier to try and force the equation in favor of doing exercise rather than eating well. Generally I try and do this, I just do my baseline steps + cycling and try not to miss days and I can pretty much eat what I like. But when I'm loosing weight, I usually wake up really hungry and that's when I can tell the scale has tipped the other way into a calorie deficit.

> It's generally easier to try and force the equation in favor of doing exercise rather than eating well.

That's the first I'm hearing this opinion. I'd expect the opposite. It's definitely the opposite for me, because eating healthy is pleasurable, tasty. I'm a hedonist, so I love eating healthy. I do exercise everyday, with an odd missed day here and there, but much of the exercise is a battle of my will to keep pushing, soaked in sweat. Additionally, for exercise you need to find extra time in a day, whereas with food one way or another you're going to need to do that anyway.

For me, I like pizza, thus I know I have to work it off. I think about food that way. So I work on the exercise side of the equation.

Fair enough.

Yes, by "fit" I meant "not fat". And if a person doesn't lose weight from the exercise, then I'd say it's a strong indicator their exercise isn't an Olympic level Michael Phelps training, which would give them the metabolism to counteract the effect of junk food.

Even with heavy exercise, I have a strong suspicion your doctor wouldn't recommend you a diet like that. Just because by some miracle it works for one guy (and who knows what the consequences are going to be in a couple decades), doesn't mean it's good advice for the general populace.

It's not exercise.

It's the balance between calories consumed versus calories burned.

Swimming famously burns an immense amount of calories both due to being an endurance sport as well just maintaining body temperature in a body of cool water.

>>is it really necessary to micro optimize exercise to this extent?

Not sure much for a beginner, but even for advanced beginners yes.

The heart is very hard to optimize machine. More it gets efficient, the harder it is to make it more efficient. Hence every last bit of detail counts.

You will be surprised how hard it is to proceed to make the heart efficient by a linear scale.

> building work ethic is far more important

Consistency is #1 for exercise. I do agree that many people seem to overthink it too early on. But, some people draw motivation from the overthinking as long as they don't consider the thinking part a silver bullet or mistake it for actually doing the exercise.

This comment seems aimed a High Intensity Interval Training, while the article goes in another direction.

Notably, he's arguing against the apparent evidence supported consensus that excercise doesn't help you lose weight, so you possibly could get a nobel if you proved it did.

But large swaths of the population struggle with maintaining a healthy weight, even with regular exercise.

Regular exercise AND healthy eating AND good sleep? Too much of the population struggles with way too many things to be able to get all 3.

It depends why you're doing it. It's plausible that different exercise has different physiological effects, in which case blithely calling them all the same thing may miss many potential benefits exercise can offer.

I'm not sure to call it "micro optimize"

A different change in routine can make a big difference. Also, people have a different body composition which is important to know.

Based on your reaction, i guess you're not a Endomorph :)

modern sports forces athletes to push themselves as far as possible, including minutiae like this.

This was true with sports 100 years ago too, just we didn't know the most optimal techniques by then.

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