Hacker News Reader

Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

What's a weighted vest? Something for diving?

It's a vest that you can fill with stuff to increase the intensity of a workout.

There was a time in my life when my legs started hurting and shaking from muscle atrophy because I was programming too much and moving too little.

I was looking for a way to fix that issue and I didn't want to waste time going to a gym, so I started talking walks with a weighted vest. Walking is nice because you can think while walking and with a weighted vest you don't have to walk for hours for it to have a useful effect on your body.

For information, the current research shows that the intensity of the exercise is much less important than the duration. So if you did so little exercise that you get muscle atrophy, a weighted vest isn't going to do much for you.

> For information, the current research shows that the intensity of the exercise is much less important than the duration

For what goal? Increasing strength? I have my doubts.

They're probably referring to some contrived fitness study on hypertrophy.

Anyone who has actually done both low-intensity exercise, e.g. walking, and high-intensity, e.g. heavy compound lifts, will tell you that statement needs a lot of additional caveats.

You’re gonna need to provide a source to that. For caloric burning? Sure, I’d agree. For cardiovascular health? Eh, the answer lies in the middle. For strength and muscle building? No, quite the opposite really. At some point the intensity of an exercise is so low it provides no meaningful muscle stimulus.

haha yeah nah. This needs a lot more additional context and caveats.

If I'm working on increasing my deadlift's 1rm, doesn't matter if I practice deadlifting for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, but never go above 10% of my current 1rm

FYI going to the gym is hardly a waste of time. You feel refreshed and your body will thank you after a while.

Working out without the commute saves time.

What is a waste of time is going in and out of the gym.

It's a way to increase the risk of injury to your knees and ankles and strain your back and shoulders while taking walks, and in general make walking more unpleasant.

Some people think it's an exercise 'life hack'.

Is it worse than carrying a backpack?

I went 0' 5' 10' 15, 20kg over 3 years after an embolism. N=1 (rather like yourself: or you spoke to/ read about people that don't quite understand 'pacing'. Do you/ them struggle with 1 bag of shopping? I make three or more light(er)trips.

The risk of injury while walking in a weighted vest is not much higher than walking normally. A very high weight of vest is probably ill advised, but walking on a very flat/regular surface for long periods is far more damaging than walking with a little extra weight. Weighted bracelets/limb weights are dangerous though, and shouldn't be used unless you know what you're doing and take care not to move too quickly and put excess strain on joints.

How much weight on a weighted arm band is considered dangerous? I'm considering 500 gram bands for my arms, that's just about twice the weight of a cellular phone today.

Ehh, I've been doing fitness boxing and knockout home fitness (Nintendo switch) with 1.5 kg wrist/hand weights for ages now, no issues to speak off. I think he's taking about the 2-5kg weights, these are way more dangerous then you'd expect from wearing them. (I did that for a while, after getting slightly In shape - at least until I read up on it)

Strong recommendation for Nintendo switch for baseline fitness btw, these games are great for a 1-2 day 20 minutes workout/week for unfit office workers. Way better experience then the equivalent VR games.

What are the equivalent VR games? Just curious.

I don't play too much VR these days, but enjoyed Beat Saber for "stationary movement", Gorn for beating up stuff and the VR ports of the original Serious Sam games for "run and shoot like a maniac".

These can be pretty physically challenging too! my issue with arcade style games for fitness is that they stop whenever you fuck up. That's not really great when your goal is to get moving for ~20 minutes or so.

The one's I've currently got installed on my quest 3 are

Supernatural Fitness (I need a VPN to play because they're geolocking it to USA). I find the way they try to "get personal" with the trainer super awkward.

FitXR (only one with decent passthrough gameplay) I dislike how most exercises are centered around "gyms", whenever you enter a session, there are others around you doing the same exercise as you and you get a scoreboard. It really doesn't vibe with me whatsoever. I also don't believe that I almost always get first or second place - I'm pretty sure this is showing you numbers to make you feel good about yourself.

XR workout It's the most "indie" of these and with the highest difficulty ceiling. It's biggest downfall is that it doesn't really give you a generated "I wanna exercise for 20 minutes" button. At least I couldn't find it.

There are also others, but I don't have them installed. I.e. Les milles etc

But as I said before: purely from a workout perspective, the Nintendo games work way better in my experience.

It's just so awkward in VR compared to Knockout Home Fitness, worse signalling what you need to do next - you're wearing a headset while getting sweaty - no center stage youre watching, instead youre just trying to guess which movement you're supposed to do while things randomly float around.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ctLdgFf5GCQ

It depends on what you're doing, but 500g shouldn't be dangerous as long as you wear the weights tightly bound so they don't bounce or slide. What you want to watch out for are anything that overextends or puts pressure on the joints - those movements can cause damage even unweighted and having weights just makes the danger worse.

I'd be worried about blisters/rashes/rubbing if the weights slide around. I use an exercise-bike like device and realised I was getting a blister on my hands from the constant motion of the grip.

Thank you.

Your body weight varies by more than that during the course of a normal day. Carrying 1kg should not increase any sort of risk of injury unless you exceptionally weak (as in, have trouble walking at all).

For the same reason, you probably won't see much benefit from such light weight over just walking a little faster or a little further.

The problem is that when you put weight on your limbs you are creating levers and inertia which get transferred to joints in ways those joints are not good at dealing with.

How to you carry groceries (or, basically, function at all) if you can't handle a 500g weight attached to your arm?

One usually doesn't do much with their arms while carrying groceries, they just hang at the side or move the bag around when putting it down or picking it up. When performing other movements, especially when they are fast or forceful, the extra weight can add momentum that is potentially hazardous, especially if it bounces or moves around (makes it very hard to compensate for reflexively). If present during repetitive tasks, extra weight can increase the risk of repetitive stress injuries occurring.

If you're injuring yourself by walking around with a few extra kilos then you are so, so hilariously out of shape that any advice you can give is competely disregardable.

I avoided injury when backpacking through the Himalayas by tying helium balloons to by backpack for neutral buoyancy. Had to make slight adjustments as altitude changed, but it all worked out. I had my porter carry the helium tanks.

I do not know if that is satirical, specially the last sentence?

God must have created America, humans wouldn’t have been capable of trekking with such weight.

The OP said their legs were shaking just standing due to lack of exercise. So, they were literally that hilariously out of shape.

Some people have no, zero, none understanding of sensible limits. "If X is good then more X must be better" applied to one or more aspects of their life. Hence protein in their diet, vitamin supplements, weight in a vest, and of course, infamously, having a presence on social media.

In the same way that consuming food and drink is? Or carrying a backpack of things you need, not just dead weight?

Maybe I misundertand - how much weight are we talking about here?

Used in running to add extra resistance.

I've used them on and off in the past; useful in limited circumstances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com