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Comment by itsoktocry | Hacker News Reader

>In conclusion, if you're out of shape, you can improve a limited number of fitness measures just as much doing 3x8 minutes of higher intensity exercise as much 3×45m less intense exercise over 12 weeks

This seems like a pretty negative reading. How about:

Sedentary people (who have the most issues and highest healthcare costs), can see significant improvements in health by exercising for a fraction of time normally recommended.

Sounds like wins all around.

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It's a win _if_ the barrier to getting sedentary people to improve their health through fitness is time cost and not all of the other costs associated with habit formation. My guess is for most sedentary people the biggest thing is that they manage to talk themselves out of doing anything, or once they start, talk themselves into allowing cheating/skipping rather than drilling in the habit.

(Not that this is bad news regardless, it's good to have tools in the toolbox and some people might prefer lower time higher intensity stuff, but I do think the result is pretty limited)

Time cost is one of the major obstacles for more than just the reason of "it takes this X minutes out of your week". If you tell me I have to spend 45 minutes doing exercise 3 times a week my mind will be filled with excuses and the dread of how exhausted I will feel after 45 minutes and how it will likely be more like a 2 hour time commitment every time I do it. It's a much easier sell to say: 10 minutes where you're only spending 1 minute of time doing something intense and the rest is spent doing something quite light.

45 min is a streaming series episode. I've found that the only way to get my ass on a stationary bike is to stick it where I can see the TV and watch something brainless. Ideally fast paced and violent so I can pick up the rythm :)

And admit it, no matter how busy you are you do watch some entertainment once in a while.

Of course I do but I watch stuff with my fiance, the idea of putting an exercise bike in the living room with her would likely not go down well.

Likewise, in 10 minutes you can watch some short youtube video. The point is not that you can sweeten the deal of the 45 minute work-out to make it more bearable, the point is that when faced with 10 minutes of exercise vs 45 minutes of exercise, 10 minutes is a much easier pill to swallow _and_ is infinitely better than 0 minutes.

I have yet to hear an _honest_ "i don't have time excuse". Everyone that has said this to me watches hours of netflix, dicks around on phone, etc. etc. Everyone has time, they just don't actually want to be healthy or in good shape. They want to want it

Nobody has time for anything they don't make time for, and making time for 2 hours of exercise related activities is far more difficult to muster (in terms of willpower) than making time for 10-20 minutes of the same.

I'm glad that you have unlimited reserves of willpower and have no trouble with procrastination and as a result can just do any task on demand no matter how seemingly unpleasant it sounds, but unfortunately almost nobody on this planet is like that.

This research is very positive and useful to get people who are currently doing 0 minutes of exercise a week to do 30 minutes of exercise a week, it flies in the face of a lot of "if you don't exercise for at least x minutes a week, you might as well not be exercising" bullshit.

30 minutes of exercise per week (it doesn't really matter if it's high-intensity or not) is really much much better than 0.

I'm not saying i'm perfect, just more honest with myself than using the "don't have time excuse"

You're right. I get asked regularly about exercise plans from people who don't exercise at all. My response is always, 'don't over think it'. Just start doing something. All this focus on elite athletes lets people procrastinate by looking for their perfect plan.

I've gone through phases of being sedentary(ish), and I think it wasn't just time cost or cheating, it was going straight to high-intensity exercise because I thought exercise was "meant" to be difficult and unenjoyable.

Most fit people have pretty good intuition about their bodies. They choose appropriate workouts, they don't run at high intensity too long and give themselves a stitch when they're meant to be doing endurance training, they know what it feels like to be lazy versus what it feels like to need a lower intensity rest day, they enjoy at least some of the exercise they do. When a sedentary person starts exercising on their own, they often don't know the benefits of training at a lower intensity, and adopt a "no pain no gain" approach, which is counterproductive if it doesn't build on a solid foundation of good habits.

Actually speaking as someone who is trying to become less sedentary the issue for me is a lack of knowledge, not a lack of time or whatever. I literally didn’t know what exercise was appropriate or even how to perform the ritual around exercise and everyone’s “just do something” was supremely unhelpful. I didn’t know what was normal soreness and what was an injury. I didn’t know what’s an appropriate warmup or cooldown. I didn’t know about eating and exercise, and would sometimes eat too close to exercise and throw up, or not fuel myself and feel extremely lightheaded/about to pass out. This made exercise much more challenging and intimidating, because there’s so much woo on the internet and you don’t have enough knowledge to sift through it. It’s like asking a layman to “do their own research” about idk flat earth or something.

There are channels on youtube with prepared sets of workouts. I have seen people follow them with success. And also, I used app (freeletics, but there are plenty of others) to give me workouts which worked well for me.

Prepared sets don’t tel you about fueling yourself so you don’t feel too faint to continue, what’s soreness vs injury, etc. they also don’t confirm whether or not your form is good, so you can often injure yourself because super out of shape people very rarely have the body awareness/coordination to be able to self correct.

I think that it is just overcomplicating it for the beginner. What happens when beginner cant continue or it hurts is that beginner will take a break until he/she can continue. I dont think beginner with no trainer to push him would overdo it till fainting.

With a form, if you are going to claim that everyone must start with personal trainer to correct their crunches or squats form, pretty much no one will start exercising anymore. That is just going to be too expensive and time consuming. And among people I know who regularly exercise, none of them started with a trainer.

I’m not claiming anyone should invest in a personal trainer. You’re putting words in my mouth. I’m just saying that things aren’t as easy or as simple as people describe due to a lack of basic body awareness and knowledge that comes with exercise. For example when I first started I developed severe back soreness the next day, to the point where I worried I had severely injured myself. Google was obviously unhelpful here, as “lower back sore exercise injury or not” is full of SEO spam. It was only when I got to speak with other friends who weightlifted more regularly that it was determined to be probably just soreness from not stretching.

> It's a win _if_ the barrier to getting sedentary people to improve their health through fitness is time cost and not all of the other costs associated with habit formation. My guess is for most sedentary people the biggest thing is that they manage to talk themselves out of doing anything, or once they start, talk themselves into allowing cheating/skipping rather than drilling in the habit.

I had exactly opposite experience. Time cost is rather major thing. Especially in the beginning, because it makes organizing your day much harder. Add an hour of anything and suddenly you dont have time to shop or cook or socialize or simply for your favorite hobby. Small time investment make it easier to transition and change lifestyle.

And second, allowing myself to cheat and skipping does miracles for my ability to keep the activity long term. Whenever I set hard requirements on myself, following up became impossible in the long term. And since the attitude is all or nothing, it dropped to nothing.

And third thing that does miracle for gaining long term habit is to prioritize pleasurable exercise, the one I actually like, rather then theoretically most effective one that sux.

Out of shape people don't stick to high intensity training.

It takes awhile to get your lactic clearance up. Most people will quit after a few workouts because literally feeling like you are going to throw up is not fun.

It is January so the gym is loaded with the New Years resolution crowd still. Most the people who started doing HIT on Jan 1st will quit by mid Feb. It is almost like clockwork and why I always reset and make January my recovery month.

If anything HIT is probably a net negative because if you are out of shape it is just reinforcing the idea that the gym is a painful and miserable experience.

Remember to make that bias explicit, also in part for yourself: "Out of shape people who join a gym don't stick to high intensity training".

There is a huge difference between killing yourself over your lunch break/before dinner at home, and then taking a quick shower, and having to cut more than an hour out of your day because you need to drive to the gym, kill yourself for a very short period of time, then take several minutes to recover enough to feel you can safely drive home as a gross sweaty mess because you're far too uncomfortable showering around a bunch of strangers at the gym, and then do that multiple times a week. That's not just a commitment, that's a complete daily habit overhaul. Your life is now dominated by having to go to the gym.

Folks who decide "yes, I think I can spend 15 minutes a day, three days a week, on this" at home, with some expert advise from reputable fitness coaches who run also youtube channels, without any of the time investment, inconvenience, and complete upending of daily routines that comes with attending a gym, might have a different success rate (and we'll never hear from them. If they keep it up, they just get in a bit better shape and move on with their lives).

> can see significant improvements in health

Where are you getting that from? Are the changes seen in the fitness factors especially significant, and if so, how significant? What's the expected health outcome here?

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