For longevity, muscle strength may be as important as aerobic exercise
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Running is terrible exercise. Terrible because it’s extremely hard on the body unless you’re on the lower end of the BMI scale. If you do any sport with a high mobility requirement, you can feel how tight a single run makes you.
The killer in old age is immobility, of your knees and hips. Running really doesn’t help.
Now before people point me to some article debunking how running isn’t in fact bad for your knees, that’s not what I’m saying. Efficient running is all about maximising power through a very small range of motion. Runners by and large have terrible hip mobility for athletes.
the problem is that running/jogging is usually the first thing people turn to for "getting in shape" and these people are often significantly overweight. Starting off with a high impact exercise is a recipe for disaster. Put on a 50-100lb weight vest and try running around and feel the impact on your joints and back, not ideal
But long term overweight is hard on your joints, no disupting that.
I would consider myself above average in strength after spending most of my 20s lifting regularly but that doesn't counter the impact of being this fat. It is shocking the impact it has on your life.
The powerlifter is mobile and carrying the extra weight and has the strength to do so. The fat person is sedentary and doing whatever possible to NOT carry the fat. They do not have the strength to do so.
Alternatives like cycling and swimming are better for the knees, especially for the old and overweight.
Completely different energy systems, <90% anaerobic, and has a level of skill acquisition that distance running doesn’t have.
Can you clarify, do you mean lower than 'normal' range (i.e. < 18.5), or lower than the US average (i.e. < 26), or what? And is this mostly anecdotal or is there evidence to support it (the view that running is a bad exercise for people above a certain BMI)? Not challenging this, I just haven't heard it before and am intrigued. And can you clarify what you mean by "any sport with a high mobility requirement?
Sport with a high mobility requirement? Things like weightlifting, gymnastics, ballet etc.
It defined a large part of our genetic makeup: our (relative) lack of body hair, the way we sweat, our bone structure, the function of our leg muscles in pumping blood back to the heart, a cardiovascular system with more endurance than any other land mammal.
Also, nobody overweight nor sedentary should start with running (nor do it generally), this is 101 of getting fit.
Our bodies are not that complex, but behaving stupidly ain't reaching anything good, ie I am fat and weak, everybody is running, so out of blue lets do that... and in max 3 months joints are a mess. Heck, I'd say health and fitness is one of the most important matters in each of our lives, isn't it worth spending just few hours learning about it? Resources are literally everywhere, expert physiotherapists too if one can't wade through all available info easily. Every gym has host of trainers that tailor working out to person's abilities and goals.
Preface: like most people here, I'm not a doctor or physiological specialist.
I am decently active, and what I've found from the papers and science that gets brought up, and from my own self experimentation, is that the majority of our aerobic exercise isn't aerobic. In order for your body to use the aerobic energy system, we need a much higher base to raise our lactic thresholds to levels where we can use that system for things like running, swimming, or playing soccer. Instead, our bodies use the glycemic anaerobic systems by default because we don't have that aerobic base.
In order to change this over the winter, I've been doing workouts at much, much lower intensities to try to build up my aerobic ability. For example, this morning I did an hour long walk on a treadmill with slight incline while keeping my heart rate at a consistent 100 bpm. This is a much, much lower level than might even be considered a heart rate for the workout. But I could feel my body doing work the whole time. Other workout is on an indoor bike where I also find a pace where I'm giving effort, but super low intensity to build up my base.
Again, n=1 and I'm not an expert, but my true guess, which is one that I'm working on myself, is that very few people have a good aerobic base to where very little of our exercise is truly aerobic.
To know if this is true or not would require testing and numbers and defining what's considered "fit", rather than commenting on HN. That said, I truly have relatively high confidence in that the active population these days very much relies on the glycolytic energy system rather than oxidative, anaerobic rather than aerobic.
Most health focused runners should be walking at an incline or running downhill except for 1-2 high intensity interval days. There are huge benefits to low intensity activity and higher doses are almost always better. The sort of intense, grueling runs that most people do are likely counterproductive. It's like running a race every day as a workout. It's just not sustainable and unhealthy at high doses.
(Of course, if the goal is to be a runner and not simply be healthy, you'll need to push your body to a point where running is like walking but it takes a long time to do correctly.)
Totally, I agree, in that the reason they're intense because they're using the wrong energy system.
My half baked theory is that the reason people (like me) don't like running at all is because the our subconscious mind tells our conscious mind to not like it because it's so inefficient and a waste. If, however, we trained our bodies and mitochondria to use more fat for energy aerobic-style, we'd like running a ton more. I'm betting that'll be the case with me.
You can even do this while incline walking at a moderate pace.
100 bpm is probably just barely an increase over your typical heart rate throughout the day.
In team sports in general you are not so much in control of intensity, the game/other players are. Other sports you mention are more like that.
I’ve always thought it’s because they don’t have very much muscle to begin with, that braking a leg or something, forces you to be still so much that you loose whatever muscle you do have left. That in turn has other negative effects; socially from not going out of your house, maybe even cardiovascularly, mentally, etc.
That’s how it’s been for my grandmother, and for my wife’s grandparents. Purely anecdotal.
I strength train for about 8-10 hours a week.
I'm in my 50s, lifting weights for about 3 years now, slow steady increases in weight and am much stronger than I was in 2019. Recently while bench pressing I felt something "pop" in my shoulder and now can't do any pressing movement at all without significant pain. Diagnosed and tried to rehab it as a tendon strain with no improvement. Getting an MRI soon to see what's going on.
At my age I don't really feel "old" mentally or physically, so hitting my body's physical limits in the gym is both difficult to accept and discouraging, as I had been making decent progress up until then. I can still squat and deadlift and do many other accessories but I am paying much more attention to what my joints and ligaments are telling me.
Pushing weights continuously, in higher age, will eventually lead to injury, even if muscles would easily go even further, they are much better at repairing/building up quickly compared to ie tendons or ligaments. Even for young, there is general advice to put 1 week out of ie 10/12 of complete rest, or probably active rest. It is for all those little fractures and sprains in connective tissue to heal a bit. With age, this should be more frequent and/or longer and as usually everything is very individual.
I'm a barely functional human being who feels as though he is faking his way though being an adult.
What I can say is that two years ago in my early 40s I had a L5-S1 spinal fusion after decades of pain, tremendous weight gain, and crippling depression. My surgeon really only said two things after I woke up from the surgery. He loomed over me in what my post-anesthetic stupor remembers as a pose resembling the nun scene in Blues Brothers and said "if you want to recover, waaaaaaaalk" and then the next day when I was a little more cognizant he said "lift weights". When I asked him what else, he said "DO YOGA".
Doctor surgeon looming over my bed: https://i.imgur.com/jlMRimz.jpg
Every day I walk at least 1 mile, which takes 20 minutes. Three days per week I lift weights under the direction of a trainer specifically educated to deal with people with fused backs and I'm extremely close to "graduating" from her on to "normal people weightlifting". The other four days I do yoga, a mix of ashtanga or yin depending on how I'm feeling the day after the strength training.
It has completely, radically, transformed my physique, mental health, and life in general.
Walking and yoga cost $0.00, weightlifting costs me a lot but can be very inexpensive, and it is all more than worth it.
it makes sense, but damn is that figure staggering. 40% reduced risk of all-cause mortality?!
regardless it's good to see strength training getting some love instead of the cult of cardio. People associating fitness/working out with misery on a treadmill is why so few people workout
That being said, I think both strength and cardiovascular fitness matter. If nothing else, strength matters in terms of being able to save yourself from a stumble.