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Comment by kingkongrevenge | Hacker News Reader

> KKR - the idea here is to get in shape, not maintain a reasonable level of fitness.

I am in shape. I ran a 56 400m the other day. That's not competitive, but it's in shape. I average about 2.5 "workouts" per week, but it's not rare that I go a week without exercising at all. Nothing I do takes over 35 minutes, except for long bike rides, which I don't really do regularly.

Unless you're training for an endurance event, you do not need to spend a lot of time exercising to get into the top 20%. And if you ARE training for endurance I would recommend against it if your goal is health, because endurance athletes have health problems.

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I'll ignore your "endurance athletes have health problems" phrase. Not sure how you are defining an "endurance event" nor sure if there's any empirical data to back that up.

The idea of the post, is not for those, such as yourself apparently, who are already in shape. Rather, it was written for those who are in different stages of trying to get into shape.

You're essentially arguing that quality of workout is more important than the quantity. I agree, but I think most people, including yourself probably block out a certain quantity of time -- by 35 minutes I suspect you mean the actual minutes you are working out. Great, but perhaps for others there are certain steps involved -- commute, warm-up, cool-down, stretch, et. al

"... I would recommend against it if your goal is health, because endurance athletes have health problems ..."

There is some truth to this statement. Endurance athletes do have the tendency to train beyond their limit running the risk of damaging cardiac systems for example. Especially as they age. I can think of 2 Olympic athletes in Aus who recently had to undergo medical checkups & procedures for this, Mark Tomkins a rower ~ http://www.nbcolympics.com/athletes/athlete=736/bio/ and Lisa Curry-Kenny an Olympic swimmer ~ http://www.finda.com.au/story/2008/08/24/lisa-curry-kenny-he... Both these athletes probably trained beyond what was probably good and suffered irregularities in their heartbeats. The risk of other injuries profiles include http://www.google.com.au/search?q=endurance+athletes+and+ris...

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