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Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. Do you think we will ever get a pill to replace exercise?

Maybe centuries from now we will be able to replace movement with a bunch of chemicals that confuse the muscles to think they moved, but movement actually causes a lot of hydraulic pumping effects throughout the lymphatic system that physically diffuses toxins into a waste stream.

It’s probably not possible from a physics standpoint to replace motion induced pumping/diffusion with pure chemistry.

You don't necessarily want to mimick muscles moving, but rather the brain effects of said muscles moving

Its possibly people may isolate the two effects separately

I suspect the brain alone cannot do it. At a some point the chemistry needs to happen, and it has to be in the right place (so the physics of moving liquids inside your body is also required).

Maybe not a pill but hopefully we'll have advanced technology that can determine what kind of exercise is exactly right for your goals, take into account any injuries, and tailor your Travelator(tm) Mech Suit to provide you enough resistance for maximum gain with lowest effort as you complete your daily outdoor cobalt mining gathering allotment for LikeCoins.

Exercise is a source of enjoyment, why would you want to replace that?

Perhaps the pill we'd need is one to make everyone enjoy exercise at some minimum base level. Plenty of people I've talked to were either not enjoying exercise at all, or did enjoy it while they were doing it, but have a lot of resistance to getting started every time they plan to do something.

Love this idea. As I’m on the couch in my running outfit, avoiding running, I clearly need to pop a Motimove.

The trick is it's not a source of enjoyment for everyone; if it were there probably wouldn't be such an obesity/heart disease problem in this country.

This is kind of where I always have been, I find exercise to be a loathsome and boring chore, a necessary evil that gets in the way of things I would rather be doing.

Same for me, I hate exercise for exercises sake. I always have to make it a side effect of something necessary or fun I'd rather be doing - commuting by bike, mountain biking, standup paddling or windsurfing etc.

I exercise on a strict schedule, both weight lifting and cardio. It is never enjoyable for me. I don’t get runners high, or pleasure from the exertion. I just make myself tired, sweaty, and add on temporary pain to my muscles.

It’s worth it for the global effect on my energy levels and health. But it remains true that for some of us, exercise is never a source of enjoyment, and I understand why many people can’t get through that to do it anyway.

I’m in the same boat. Sports is a great shortcut but it’s just a lot of mental effort to meet new people.

> I don’t get runners high, or pleasure from the exertion. I just make myself tired, sweaty, and add on temporary pain to my muscles

I feel the same way with exercise. People tell me that you feel good after and I never do. People tell me that you feel a "good" soreness in your body and I never do. I just feel sore.

I wonder what's different about people like you and me where we don't enjoy this process the way some other people do? Do you think it's been studied?

I used to struggle to build muscle the same way, until I switched to a paleo diet.

Most of it's less enjoyable than several other things I could do with that time instead. Focused cardio, especially, is miserable enough that I'd rather do a bunch of other things I find unpleasant instead (IMO). The parts I find enjoyable enough that I'd choose to do them over other not-unpleasant things mostly require a bunch of other people (sports) and are hard to schedule, and then become another thing to schedule around for other activities or things that come up. Weight lifting's fun as far as such things go, but takes up space or requires trips to the gym.

The feeling after's nice, though. Would take that in a pill form, for sure.

> Exercise is a source of enjoyment, why would you want to replace that?

I wish I felt like this. Exercise is tolerable when I'm doing something at the same time (walking, chatting, listening to music) but that's enjoyment despite the exercise, not because of it.

Yeah, nothing is going to replace eyes, ears, memory muscle experience. Imagine something would replace table tennis sensing experience?

Probably not to replace excercise, although who can say with gene editing.

Reducing, stopping, counteracting mental decline is a holy grail in medicine. I think there has been some progress here.

And on the general mental acuity note there are things like modafinil.

The best things known work are do what you need to do to get good sleep, and find some way to exercise routinely.

While we don't have this we do have two simple technologies which massively amplify the benefits of whatever exercise you do: whey protein and creatine (plus a whole host of others where the risk/reward profile is less straightforward)

I like the joke "If exercise were a pill, every doctor would prescribe to everyone."

We already have many, the side effects however are... problematic.

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