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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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!

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.

> 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.

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.

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