Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

I can't agree more. I can not imagine me doing this work without exercising. I do two workouts per week in the gym, two hours per session, very intensive. All the other days I run at home using the treadmill for 30 minutes, and do around 60 pushups in the morning, 60 in the evening.

So it's just 2+2 = 4 hours at gym, plus 0.5*5 = 2.5 more hours, plus the pushups that is very little time. Let's say 8 hours per week of time spent exercising, but the benefits are huge: it's easy to focus during the week staying sit down without any pain, bad feeling or alike.

Even after a day of doing many things I often reach home that I'm still pretty rested, and sometimes I add a few hours of work if I feel like there is some interesting problem to fix for Redis, or to write some doc, and so forth.

Btw in the previous years I used the treadmill as I do now, but I did not used to do the bigger workouts nor the pushups. I changed my schedule only 12 months ago adding the new stuff, and it's a totally game changer, apparently just running was not enough for me.

I don't know if this is what you do, but I've definitely noticed that working seriously on the power lifts (squat, deadlift, overhead press, bench press) has made my joints feel better throughout the day.

I know exactly what you're talking about. Whenever I have back pain I know I've been away from deadlifts too long.

Deadlifts as a recommendation for back pain is, well... controversial. Maybe if you keep the weight low and the only source of the back pain is muscle soreness. I don't doubt it works for you, but in general people with back issues should stay away from deadlifting heavy weights.

Hahaha.. Yeah, I'm healthy and young. I just meant that when my back starts hurting from sitting I know it's getting weak so I need to get my ass back in the gym and strengthen it.

It does nothing, except maybe bad things, if you don't know the cause of the back issues.

Heavy deadlifts fixed my back pain and several people I know. Sure, anecdotal evidence, but back pain isn't well understood and there's no real evidence for your position either.

all people should stay away from heavy deadlifts until they have mastered good form of course.

As an aside, GPs tend to give bad advice on all matters of sports medicine.

Another anecdotal data point: I managed to make my back pain disappear with a combination of deadlifts, squats with good form and stretching of hip flexors. It also fixed some knee issue (side effect of strengthening the legs I guess.) Having recently moved I haven't taken the time to get a gym subscription. After 2 months of sitting all day I managed to hurt my back while sleeping (yep, it's ridiculous); I couldn't bend to tie my shoelaces for one week...

So yep, I'm convinced lifting heavy stuff is good for your back (IF you use good form, of course.)

Many people might have back pain because of muscle weakness or just too much sitting, I don't doubt deadlifting could help them, so could many other things. But very few of the very many people with various back issues get them properly checked, and if you have any kind of damage to the actual tissues of your spine, than adding 500lbs of extra force acting on them certainly won't help and I don't think we need extra research to see that ;) I guess it also depends what "heavy" means to you - the weight used in a deadlift will always be higher than in most over exercises, but it is not uncommon for people to lift 2, 3 or 4 times their own weight.

It's not as simple as saying that damage to the tissues of the spine are the cause of back pain. for one research example of many, see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8747239

Studies like this have shown that herniated discs and other types of damage once thought to be the cause of back pain are present in pain-free people with a high rate of incidence.

Further, it's not known what the tradeoffs are in terms of risking damage vs the benefits of increased strength.

I do think extra research is needed.

FWIW your definition of heavy and mine seem to be about the same: A weight the subject can lift with perfect form for a small number of reps, e.g. <= 5. With training, likely to be in the range of bodyweight x 2 and up.

I never claimed damage to the tissues of the spine is the sole and only cause of back pain, I only said that if you do have damage to the tissues of the spine which is not uncommon you clearly risk making it worse by putting your tissues under huge forces - it is clearly not a health beneficial thing whether it happens to cause pain at the moment or not.

It would be strange if having the strength to lift twice your bodyweight or more would somehow be necessary for a healthy back. There are safer ways of increasing strength of the weakened muscles, but first it would be good to identify whether indeed weakened muscles are the cause of one of the causes of your problem. That's all I am saying - deadlifting is not in general a safe recommendation for undiagnosed people with back issues.

Back pain can often be caused by having weak stomach muscles and having too much of a gut. The back ends up trying to support the weight at the front which the stomach muscles are unable to support by themselves.

Source: my GP when he told me I was basically fat. :)

They are also extremely hard to do correctly, and any mistake in form can and will injure you, either over time or due to one bad lift. I personally can't understand why they are so often recommended to beginner lifters.

Buying a book like Starting Strength by Rippetoe and starting with low weights goes a long way to getting your form good enough that you won't seriously injure yourself.

Just to add one anecdotal data point, I've done that and so far(for about 1 year) I have not had any problems. I do squat, deadlift, bench press, press, pullups, and situps. I've worked my way up to 230lbs + bar in deadlift and 200lbs + bar in squat. I experience a little muscle soreness in the back but that is all. I still need to watch what I eat and walk to burn calories since I still need to lose a little weight.

I think these lifts should always been done with qualified personnel. Would also recommend the olympic lifts and swimming.

I'd suggest splitting your two hour workouts into one hour chucks or even making them separate workouts.

There's been a good amount of research implying if not stating out right that an intense workout of more than an hour does more harm than good.

After about an hour you've burned most of the glycogen in your muscles and are just spinning your wheels (ie overworking your muscles rather than breaking them down to build them up).

There's been a good amount of research implying if not stating out right that an intense workout of more than an hour does more harm than good.

This is an extremely generalizing statement. Could you please provide citation(s)?

For example the term "hitting the wall" used commonly among marathoners practically means depleting the glycogen. However this generally happens around the 2 hour mark (assuming no replacement during exercise).

Not all exercises are created equally. A walk in the park is a form of exercise and so is endurance running. Shall we just assume these are equally demanding and stop at the 1 hour mark regardless?

He pointed out the gym workouts are very intensive. And I agree with the advice from experience; I have a couple of friends who are really good swimmers and they told me their bodies respond better to short training sessions. Maybe give it a try for six weeks and then compare the results.

It's been a couple years since I dug into the research myself, but doing a quick search it appears to be related to depleted glycogen, depleting bio-available testosterone, a rise in cortisol, plus various immune system changes.

It hard to find specific articles on the internet though, but here's one that's talks in a general way about it, but doens't come out and say one hour. http://chriskresser.com/why-you-may-need-to-exercise-less

Here's another that graphs the cortisol response vs time, but doesn't link to the specific article. http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/drryan6.htm

There are a lot of variables to control for, so of course it isn't that simple.

Intensity is the key. 45-60 minutes of intense (as in you can only have labored conversations during this time) exercise is about all your body can handle at a time though.

I wish I could provide direct citations, but as I said in my other post it's been a while since I was reading the research and it took me weeks of reading to find key nuggets like that directly, mostly it's this article based on that article based on these 10 papers and only one directly comes out and says it.

To me, "two-hour long" and "very intense" in the gym is a contradiction, unless antirez means aerobic work. In my experience if you do heavy squats, deadlifts, presses etc. you will be done in maybe 45 minutes, will have not much energy to do anything else for the rest of the day and it will take all the time until the next workout to fully recover. If you are interested in the best fitness results, this is necessary, for keeping the mental performance high as much as possible the intensity has to be much more moderate.

Too true. If I go heavy on squats or deadlifts I can completely exhaust myself to the point of throwing up and light headed-ness in 15 minutes (Then comes upper body :P), so I call bull-shit that you can have a two hour intense workout.

Indeed in those sessions I do both aerobic and weights in the same session. Like 30 minutes aerobic, and then all the big groups of muscles in the remaining time, but of course there are the mandatory pauses, like 60 seconds every repetition, 90 seconds between different exercises, and so forth. The order is: legs, top part, and at the end I do rectus abdominis exercises.

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