The ROI of Exercise
herman.bearblog.dev
herman.bearblog.dev
There has to be some incredible correlation between having the time and money to play tennis “a few times per week” and being significantly wealthier than the average person. And being wealthy is clearly the healthiest thing you can do.
There's a free court near me, and both balls and racquets can be gotten for peanuts.
How come it's the opposite in practice?
It’s not. “In practice” ≈ “your assumption”
There are a lot of couch potatoes that don't use their time, but they have it.
Not sure how they count, but for example I have a "free" netflix subscription through a tmobile phone plan. So it's easy to pump the numbers. I only watch like one episode of something every other year on netflix, so not exactly a real user of it.
Yes transit uses in practice get more, but it is incidental and lower quality exercise than someone who uses their extra time on a well developed gym plan. (There are of courseetransit users with a well developed gym plan)
Transit is indeed slower, but there are several big assumptions in there that don’t support your conclusion. In the US, only 15% of trips are commuting to work, the majority of trips are shopping, errands, and leisure. People with cars make more trips than transit users, and go out of their way for shopping, errands, and leisure more often, because they can, because it’s “faster” than transit. Driving commuters tend to drive to lunch, while transit commuters tend to bring one or walk. Transit users can sometimes get things done that can’t be done while driving, which can in some cases more than negate the added travel time. I think that’s a minority of transit users, but I spent a couple years commuting by train and working on the train, and I saved a considerable amount of time compared to driving. Because a lot of people spend this “more time” they saved commuting doing more driving for things other than work, drivers don’t actually have more time in practice.
The average US commute is less than 30 minutes, people aren't spending all that much time. And with a 30 minute commute, they are likely doing the same thing I am, passing by stores that are reasonable for many of their needs.
My grandmother would go collect them, and we always had a basket full of balls by the door.
By the early 2000s, people stopped using the tennis court very often, and the city tore down the chain link fence around the court to use as overflow parking for the adjacent little league fields.
The poor town that I spent time in has 4 tennis courts in great condition that are almost never used.
https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/facilities/tennis-courts
Non-athletic adult people can't step onto a tennis court and consistently get the ball back to you, even if you hit it to them.
I thought Padel was easy, but when I organized a Padel after-work I saw that that was not reality, and Padel is much easier than tennis.
Tennis you can't play truly badly since the ball is in the air, so there's a skill floor, probably not too dissimilar from the skill floor required to play baseball.
Some sports that have a lower skill floor than tennis are table tennis, pickeball, badminton, association football and ice hockey. The thing to understand is that it's not about fitness, it's the skill floor. It's that the beginner will miss the ball or not be able to control it.
I think baseball requires significantly more coordination than tennis.
Moreover, baseball (as opposed to just playing catch with a baseball) requires two whole teams, whereas tennis can be played with only two people.
> ice hockey
[John McEnroe voice] You cannot be serious
Ice skating by itself is difficult for beginners. They fall all over the place. Ice skating while trying to follow and control a moving puck is even more difficult.
> it's not about fitness
Ok, but in the current context, the ROI of exercise, it's all about fitness. What's the fitness ROI from table tennis or badminton? Even pickleball tends to be less exercise than standard singles tennis. And in baseball too, there's a lot of standing around and sitting (when your team is at bat). I would say that in terms of exercise, singles tennis has one of the best ROI. (Doubles not so much.)
Or even just one and a brick wall.
In the current context fitness matters, that wasn't the context of my statement about what makes tennis hard: what makes tennis hard isn't fitness. It's that people can't control a ball with a racket that actually keeps the energy in the ball.
> you can struggle
We may have different criteria for "fine".
In any case, the debate between hockey and tennis is largely moot, because the availability of ice skating rinks is vastly more limited than tennis courts, even in Minnesota and Wisconsin, though I can't speak for Sweden.
But everyone, even the foreigners, could skate. It was normal.
Also one cannot tennis alone. Anything one must practise with a partner is more expensive due to scheduling requirements.
Also, the whole point of the submitted article is that the investment of time into exercise is totally worth it.
Yes, there's a learning curve to tennis, as with any sport. You could just go jogging/running by yourself, but the advantage of sports, including tennis, is that they're usually a more fun and less boring form of exercise than jogging/running by yourself. If exercise is fun, then you're more likely to stick to it rather than skipping it.
I don't think they did say that. They just said wealthy people have more freedom on schedule that non wealthy people.
I'm not sure that's true though, unless by "wealthy" you mean trust fund kids. But there are millions of tennis players of various levels of income. A lot of salaried workers in upper income brackets work more than the usual 40 hour week, have less free time.
I'm guessing these engineers weren't playing a lot of tennis: https://www.folklore.org/90_Hours_A_Week_And_Loving_It.html
Another reason is that a tennis court takes significant space for just 2 (or 4) people. So unless it is subsidized, when land is at a premium like in a large city, it is going to be expensive.
Since I've been a child, living in multiple countries across Europe and Asia, there's always been either free or cheap tennis courts near me. I don't even play tennis much and I know this, I'm sure if I was searching I'd find way more low cost options.
It's more likely that the demographic who play tennis tends to be wealthy, rather than the sport itself being expensive.
What does that mean?
How can tennis be an expensive sport?
My kid just bought (a few months ago) a couple of used rackets for $5. Tennis balls can be had for a few dollars. Courts are free.
Aside from jogging, tennis seems like one of the cheapest sports possible.
I think the only cheaper sport might be swimming, but only if you live near the ocean.
Plus pickleball is popular so you will find more people to play with
"Tennis is great for you" "there's probably a correlation with being rich" "Also unhealthy people don't regularly play tennis so there's survivors bias". "But there's free courts" "Nope they turned those into pickleball courts" "Wake up at 4:30am and go for a run" "Bro if youre waking up at 4:30 when are you going to bed" etc
People will find any reason they can to be unhealthy. Its better to just not engage with them.
>"Tennis is great for you" "there's probably a correlation with being rich" "Also unhealthy people don't regularly play tennis so there's survivors bias".
But these seem like pretty reasonable objections? At the very least you should retort with a study that at least tried to control for confounders.
>"Wake up at 4:30am and go for a run" "Bro if youre waking up at 4:30 when are you going to bed" etc
I can't tell which side you're trying to strawman here. What's wrong with running at a normal time?
I disagree. The fundamental premise here is that regular exercise has profound health benefits. Tennis is simply one example.
The rebuttals to tennis here ignore the obvious truth -- there are limitless ways to get regular exercise; you just have to have some time and be willing to put some effort in. With very few exceptions there is nobody in the world for whom it's not a realistic goal.
People who simply do not want to can come up with endless excuses to rationalize it.
The source of this bug is the same reason why when someone says "I wake up at 4:30am to go on a run", you'll 100% always get someone to respond "adequate sleep also matters, what time are you going to bed, you're missing out on important life events that happen after 8pm" etc. The cardinal sin is jealousy; getting up at 4:30am is hard, playing tennis multiple times a week is hard, the opposing side feels jealousy because they aren't doing something that's hard, so they need to find any way to minimize that hard thing they're doing to feel like equals.
Even you're doing this, and you don't realize it: "What's wrong with running at a normal time?". Nothing at all. Literally, seriously, no one even remotely implied there was anything wrong with running at a normal time. Someone choosing to run at 4:30am does not mean not running at 4:30am is bad; but you think it is. Why? Because it is true that running at 4:30am is harder. Harder doesn't always even mean better, especially when it comes to getting up at 4:30am, but it does definitely mean Harder. So: You minimized their strain by asserting that running at 4:30am is "not normal".
This isn't a university, and you're not a test subject. You're a human, who needs to take care of their body. Arguing about the minutia of the results of some research paper is Mindset; its forest for the trees. Literally, no one who adequately exercises would care that much about studies on tennis which adequately control for confounding factors, because they're too busy actually playing tennis, and they've seen and felt the positive effect it has had on their body and don't need a research paper to tell them its healthy.
(I'm just using tennis as an example here; there's plenty of other sports that follow this vein)
What is true is that if you are the kind of person who can learn to play tennis well enough that it becomes fun, then you are likely to live a lot longer than if you are the kind of person who cannot do that because either your eyes, brain, your muscles or your cardiovascular system do not function well enough. For example, tennis sucks if your eyes and your brain does not work well enough for you to be able to learn to reliably hit a ball going very fast with the center of the racket, which a lot of people (and even a lot of people in the prime of their life) cannot ever learn to do.
My point is that it seems like the only people who bring up trivia like "maybe tennis isn't as good for you as you think it is because there's survivors bias in the population of people used to do studies on the sport" are people who never play tennis. Similarly, if you're a runner you've probably multiple times had people say, directly to you, "oh I could never do that to my knees, running is so bad for them!"
You're explaining micro-gravity in orbit to an astronaut [1]. Leave the science and the confounding factor enumeration and the hypothesis to the academics. Just go play tennis.
Incidentally, yes if you have knees with tendency to hurt, you should not run much. That is not controversial, that is what doctors will tell you: running regularly can often cause pain in the knees from overuse. People who self identify as runners do run a lot. They are not doing 5km twice a week, they do something like 10km every day. And not everyone, especially not older people, can do that sort of load without damaging knees.
And those overuse injuries can make you stuck at home having to skip any kind of sport for very long time.
Did every city you lived it had a free golf course as well?
Now that I think about it, many decades ago I lived in apartment complexes (Indianapolis, as if it makes a difference) that had tennis courts. I don't know if that's a thing anymore or not.
It was very common. That's where I learned how to play. I have no idea how common it is with new apartment construction though.
In NYC, it's 15/hr or 100/season. In the town I grew up in it's 20/yr for residents and 40/yr for non residents. I'm my current town it's free. And I suspect that there are waivers/discounts for folks that can't pay that amount.
My neighborhood (California) has free (city-maintained, open to all) tennis courts. Seems pretty common. Also basketball, soccer and bike trails and swimmin g pool.
I find tennis an incredibly cheap sport to do recreationally. Basketball can be cheap, too, but I think you'd go through shoes pretty fast, especially on a city hard court. Soccer maybe cheaper, but it's too much organization (hard to get 10+ people on the same page at the same time).
Wake up at 4:30am and go for a run. You’re already accomplishing more at that point in the day than most wealthy people who are comfortably laying in bed.
The hard thing is doing the thing. Just do, that’s it.
Wind down starts at 7pm, do some miscellaneous things like dishes etc, take a hot shower. In bed by 8pm.
I avoid driving as much as possible. I will always walk, run, ride a bike, or take public transit rather than drive.
Driving is tremendously expensive when it comes to time.
There is no free lunch and compromising sleep quality and amount is really a fool proof way into physical and mental issues.
About that, what hours people that wake up at 4.30 am go to bed? If they're so conscious about their well being I'd assume at least 8 hours of sleep, so maybe they go to bed at... 8~9 pm? my question is what do they do to end their day at 9pm? If you work 9-5, you have just 4 hours left after work. Less if you commute, have dinner and a "go to be" routine of maybe 30 min. How about social life after work? Run errands? In my case, if I need to do anything out of my house it has to be after work hours (because almost everything is closed between 6am and 9am when I start work).
So, what's the secret?
There isn't one. Its a trade-off. I get up between 4:15 and 4:45 (depending on the day) to exercise. I go to bed between 9 and 10 pm (usually 9:30.) I exercise with a group of people, and that ends up being most of my socializing time. 5 - 9 is family time.
My employer is fine with me working from the train to and from work. I get there early and I leave early.
Weekends are arranged to buy other items in bulk.
My bed time routine is probably 15 minutes of reading a book before I fall asleep.
My fiance and I don't have kids. I'm sure this is the biggest factor to allow me to live by this schedule.
Having a short commute helps a lot obviously, but I still was able to keep this schedule back when I had an hour commute. Back then, if we had even one errand to run after work, it was straight to bed when we got home, so we usually tried to keep errands to the weekend. Even if we had no errands, a lot of days we only had time to cook dinner and watch an episode of the Office.
Now we have a 10min commute, so after work we have time for an errand or two, then go to the gym, then we can even watch movie or something before bed.
I cook easy meals, things that don't take long and don't require more than a pot or a skillet. I don't mean microwave garbage or instant ramen either. I mean things like soups and beer-steamed sausage.
However, this usually leads me to eating the same few meals over and over. If I ever want more variety, I meal-prep on the weekend.
My fiance and I don't usually clean on weekdays. We probably live like slobs by some people's standards, but we're never more than 20min from a clean house.
As for social life... All of our friends live too far away to see them on weekdays anyway.
I don't live somewhere with sidewalks, so running is out for me. (Plus I don't like it much.) I do a basic circuit with pushups, lunges, and pull-ups, first thing in the morning, while the coffee is still brewing. It's my "I don't feel like fussing with a proper routine" bare minimum, but it's enough. Then I have breakfast, shower, and get on with the day. It takes no actual equipment (anything that supports your weight is fine for pullups) and costs nothing but time.
My kid was only 16 months old at the time. So when I got out of the hospital, I got to deal with the guilt at almost leaving her fatherless through terrible decision making.
So now I make better decisions. Running early works best for me (and I collect an immense amount of data so I can prove that). I’ll usually go to bed at around 10:30, sleep until 4:30, do my exercise for the day, have breakfast and get to work. I snack on proteins, have a very small meal for lunch and then take a nap. I’ll usually walk in the afternoon or maybe play some pickup tennis in a nearby park, rinse and repeat. I have a very full life, enjoy every moment of it and can work with the schedule I have.
It’s just a tradeoff. Angiograms suck and I don’t recommend them. Having limited unstructured time isn’t great, but it beats the hell out of a poke in the heart. :)
The 4:30 part helps me with performance in a roundabout way. One of my weirdo obese habits was this messed up relationship with productivity, where I had all these great resources to learn how to get fit but wouldn’t do it because it took time away from work. Dropping pounds and adding in running boosted my productivity a lot - I could do much more in fewer hours. With morning runs, I get a nice little productivity hit that makes exercise even more habit forming because I get the reward mechanisms from the exercise, those boost productivity which gives me another set of reward mechanisms later on in the day when I’m starting to wind down. I’m really just an addict chasing different highs.
A different time might be better for you - the key is to do something, be consistent, turn it into a habit and slowly improve.
Looking through this thread is hilarious. The top comment is a guy claiming that the author must be rich because he plays tennis (what kind of bumpkin says this?) and that’s the true secret to his health. It’s all just excuses. Those who want it go and get it.
I pay for a gym membership with group classes. You have to book your attendance in advance. I make a habit of doing it the night before. In the morning I get up at five to go to the class I booked the night before. If I wait until the morning, it doesn’t happen. Other people I know are in running groups where they plan to meet their friends at an early hour.
WFH on Friday so I can go train in the morning and have my Friday evening and week-end with wife and kids.
Some of this was harder to plan when kids were younger. Wife would 'dump' them in daycare/school and I would pick them up in afternoon, homework, diner, etc. between 3pm-6pm. Any errands, I'd stop coming back from work or do on weekends.
I used to do furniture delivery as a truck driver as my student job while in university and the waking up early stuck after being used to it. Obviously, you need to have an employer which is fine with this work schedule.
No one said correlation is 1. It's just on average wealthy people live longer.
So then it's a bidirectional correlation. You're more likely to be fit if you are wealthy and more likely to be wealthy if you are fit.
Essentially, what you're looking at is that people who engage in self improvement end up better off than those who don't.
It's a priori obvious but some people are uncomfortable with it for some reason - trauma response / coping mechanism, something like that.
It's not surprising there's a strong correlation between "rich people" hobbies (horses, golf, tennis, sailing, etc.) and health outcomes/longevity.
I have the opposite opinion - if criticism like this is so obvious (and it is), then it's up to the article to refute it immediately - this saves time of everyone reading it and gives it more credibility.
You can tell who never looks studies up on scihub because they have no idea that multivariate modeling for confounders (especially income and education) is something pretty much every study does, so it makes no sense to assume you just blindly outsmarted the study when you thought of the first confounder that came to your mind.
Yet it everyone else's responsibility to defend casual mention of every study from a critique you came up in 5 seconds.
How many of those questions do you feel is adequate to pre-respond to any time you link a study? Especially when assuming incompetence on the person asking the question thus you can't possibly know the questions they are most likely to ask (since they're incompetent)?
And if I'm incompetent, why would anyone trust my summary and pre-responses to the study?
None of this makes sense. And we're getting awfully close of just pasting/linking the study so the person with the questions can just read the dang thing.
I'm curious how affects lifespan having a private chef at home and a private driver.
Even if we lived in a world where it didn't causally extend lifespan, the extension to healthspan [0] or QALYs [1] alone would be reason enough.
Derek Thompson's written about recent research to this effect [2]:
"Last year, Ashley and a large team of scientists conducted an elaborate experiment on the effects of exercise on the mammalian body. In one test, Ashley put rats on tiny treadmills, worked them out for weeks, and cut into them to investigate how their organs and vessels responded to the workout compared to a control group of more sedentary rodents. The results were spectacular. Exercise transformed just about every tissue and molecular system that Ashley and his co-authors studied—not just the muscles and heart, but also the liver, adrenal glands, fat, and immune system.
"When I asked Ashley if it was possible to design a drug that mimicked the observed effects of exercise, he was emphatic that, no, this was not possible. The benefits of exercise seem too broad for any one therapy to mimic. To a best approximation, aerobic fitness and weight-training seem to increase our metabolism, improve mitochondrial function, fortify our immune system, reduce inflammation, improve tissue-specific adaptations, and protect against disease."
Everyone really should be making it a priority to work up to at least meeting the physical activity guidelines as well focusing on the other core pillars of health described by the Barbell Medicine guys [3]. Anyone focused on biohacking and supplement stacks without having these in order is fundamentally unserious, majoring in the minors.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/healthspan
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quality-adjusted_life_year#En...
[2] https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-sunday-morning-post-why-...
[3] https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atherosclerosis
Exercise is vital!
"Atherosclerosis generally starts when a person is young and worsens with age. Almost all people are affected to some degree by the age of 65. It is the number one cause of death and disability in developed countries. Though it was first described in 1575, there is evidence suggesting that this disease state is genetically inherent in the broader human population, with its origins tracing back to CMAH genetic mutations that may have occurred more than two million years ago during the evolution of hominin ancestors of modern human beings."
To improve physical activity at the population scale and over a lifetime, it literally has to be built into the design of the cities, so people get enough exercise while walking to work or grabbing groceries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUlgSRn6e0&ab_channel=NotJu...
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/activity-inequality...
Agreed, in so much as telling people to exercise leads to a relatively small increase in the number of people exercising.
> Gyms are for people who have plenty of intrinsic motivation and money and time.
I'd say yes most people who regularly exercise at a gym have some kind of intrinsic motivation, but that's generally true of anyone with any activity.
Gyms with almost any kind of equipment, classes, and amenities are absurdly cheap: ~$30 / month. For the vast majority of Americans, that cost is well within a reasonable budget.
Time: TFA's time of 3 hours a week as an example is not insignificant but I wouldn't categorize it as extreme or "plenty of time." This investment could easily take from the amount of time Americans spend sitting and looking at a screen for entertainment. (Saying this as an American)
> To improve physical activity at the population scale and over a lifetime, it literally has to be built into the design of the cities, so people get enough exercise while walking to work or grabbing groceries.
I'm a bit more cynical as I believe a significant increase in the percentage of Americans who get a good amount of exercise is extremely unlikely. Any program or proposed change to policies necessary to affect such a change is DOA.
People don't go to a gym because the vast majority of folks are uninterested in exercise for exercise' sake: they want to look good. Unfortunately, improved physical appearance due to exercise takes longer than folks expect it to take.
This is not true. I believe you if you say it's true in your area, but in most places it's not. I'm a traveling healthcare worker and I usually can't find a gym for under $80. There may be some that advertise cheaper prices, but that always comes with hidden fees which make them about the same as the expensive gyms.
For instance, Blue cross has Blue365. You can get significant discounts. See here:
https://www.blue365deals.com/BCBSIL/offers/active-fit-gym-me...
You're definitely right though for non-discounted prices, it seems they're up to 55-60 now unfortunately.
Sport can be pleasant and fun. It can be social for people who want social. It can fulfill more then one goal.
But, instead the expectation is that people will pick the most boring thing (running, gym), that they will commit to amounts of times and periodicity that makes life's harder and that nothing fun enough actually counts.
I find that hard to believe.
I'm a single parent and manage to find the time for exercise. I wonder what life situation you have that you have "1 spare hour".
> By the time it gets to the weekend, I'm so tired I don't want to do anything much, let alone difficult exercise.
I can't help but think you just don't want to exercise...
> The US is a significant global outlier in healthcare.
What has the US to do with any of this?
> Despite this high spending, the health outcomes are average to below-average on a wide range of key metrics
That's because health outcomes are mostly affected by lifestyle and luck, rather than high spending.
> And there's no silver bullet, you'll need multiple great solutions.
(Only slightly tongue in cheek) There is a silver bullet: Get rid of the cars, start using self-powered modes of transport, such as walking and cycling.
However you are also right that I don't particularly enjoy exercising. My point was more that life exerts various "pressures" which may reasonably reduce the likelihood of exercise (or any aspect of wellbeing). If we want to encourage higher wellbeing, we should probably reduce these pressures.
I hated exercise. Still do. People talk about a glow or a good feeling after exercise. My SO does too. I never felt it.
Until I dieted down to being 'at weight' not overweight. Only then did it feel good to exercise, and only then after I exercised. The act itself is still a terrible experience.
I've put on weight again and, yep, I hate exercise now. But now I know there is a light at the end of the dieting and weightless tunnel. Without the experimental results, I would never have known.
So, its not that I don't trust the science here, I mean, how can I refute it? It's just that my lived experience says that I'm a freak and I'm sitting out on the end of some bell curve or whatever. I know that it got a high ROI, that's why I did these weight loss experiments in the first place. It's just that for some reason, my body and mind hate exercise until I get down to healthy levels.
Thanks for letting me share this.
I don't know what you tried, but sometimes a small variation is enough to make it fun and rewarding during the exercise. For example, I find slow road running pretty boring. The only value is doing exercise and relaxing my brain. I gave up many times. But replace the roads by challenging technical single tracks, and I'm very happy and havn't gave up in years.
For reference, I've swum miles at once, run a marathon, played team sports, combat sports, pick up basketball, roughhousing with kiddos, etc. I've not done literally everything, but I feel like I've tried enough things to make a reasonable call.
Look, I just hate exercise. I don't feel energized or happy or fulfilled or whatever. I just feel exhausted and tired and sweaty and gross. There really isn't a second, throughout my life, where I've ever wanted to exercise for it's own sake.
I know, that seems like crazy talk to you probably. But, form what i know of myself and my life, it's just the way it is.
Like I said, when I was 'at weight' for my height and in a good BMI, then afterwards I would feel good and nice and that exercise was worth it. But when I am overweight, then exercise looses that feeling for me. I just feel bad.
Still, thank you for the encouragement and ideas, I do appreciate it.
It takes a certain adaptation to reach this level of fitness - and it should be no guess how you get there.
Exercise still sucks. I hate it, it's an awful experience. The only thing I feel during and after exercise is tired and sore. There is no glow, no feeling of being refreshed, energized, satisfied, or accomplished. Just discomfort.
It doesn't matter the exercise, the intensity, cardio or strength, 15 minutes or an hour and a half. It also doesn't matter how long I consistently exercise. I'm at 13 months during this attempt and it's just as miserable an experience as it was day one. Despite assurance from multiple people it'll start feeling good after just a few months more than however long I'd been doing it.
In fact, I would say my actual day-to-day quality of life has gone down since I've started exercising regularly because now I'm sore from exercising most days of the week, whereas I was never sore like this before regular exercise. I deeply wish that exercise could be a positive experience.
I'm always worried I'll fumble and lose the habit because it would feel so, so much better to just stop exercising. (A personal trainer is quite expensive to boot, but there's no way I'd get to the gym and work out otherwise)
You at least have given me some hope that this might change if I get my weight down, so that's something I'll keep in mind.
At this point the only reason I put up with it is in 30 years I'll thank myself.
I’ve tried many forms of exercise over the years, but it’s true that consistency beats everything else.
It took me ~4 years before I finally got my act together. I had found an exercise routine I tolerated well enough (Deck of Pain), but it wasn't until I did a (frankly horrible) calorie focused diet that I started weight loss in earnest. 1k calories/day of dieting was awful for a year, but it did work.
It is very much worth it though. I have more energy for the family now and my friends too. I finally got the weight off and, like I said, that's when I finally felt the good feelings about exercise. I was pretty surprised by it too, felt that I was somehow genetically doomed to just hate exercise. Nope, the MDs are right here, being overweight is really bad for you. I just didn't think that it was a mental thing too, but in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.
You got this, keep it up
What exercise is best? Why... the one you enjoy and will continue doing!
Focusing on ROI can be a good way to view it for the right personality type, but I think that mentality can be harmful for the wrong personality type who will just grind out activities they don't really enjoy until they give up in exasperation.
I suspect for most people the trick is just finding something - anything - that is physically demanding that they enjoy, and then sticking to that.
Imagine fighting ninjas and dodging bullets as your workout. You can literally get that and more with VR.
It was my gateway back into fitness.
If I can promote one myself, Synth Riders can be a hell of a workout. People like comparing it to beat saber. Unlike beat saber, there's no swords, so there's a lot less wrist movement and a lot more arm/full-body movement. It feels a lot like dancing while you're doing it. I'm no great fan of exercise, but if I'm not careful I can exercise myself deep past exhaustion in this one -- especially on the harder difficulty charts.
And beyond that there's a mode where you punch the notes instead of trying to catch them. I haven't tried it, but that sounds even more demanding.
But aside from anything else, it's just fun! Great option for training cardio, it really works out the arms.
My only criticism is that I’m not a fan of the Swing EDM music.
Thrill of the Fight
Synth Riders
Pistol Whip
Body Combat
Les Mills XR Dance
Supernatural (paid subscription)
Fix XR (paid subscription)
Holotfit (paid subscription) works with rowing machines
Racket Club
Until you fall
Blade and Sorcery
Dragon Fist Kung fu (if you want to go all the way with Pc and don’t mind wires, this one supports foot tracking)
Blast on!
Stride
Battle talent
Space pirate trainer
Racket NX
Gorilla tag
Stride
Blacktop Hoops
Masters of Light
Mothergunship forge
There’s so many other games that I missed listing.
Really any action VR game where you’re the first person hero will get you moving enough as a habit. You are now the character instead of a puppet master controlling one via buttons. Need to duck or crouch? You will feel it and sweat sooner or later.
My back pain is gone, I lost 25 kg (also with diet change of course - but from my estimates about 300 kcal daily is just from walking).
I was already walking everywhere (I live in EU), but I work remotely so it wasn't enough.
1) What kind of free space do you need? 2) What would you recommend in terms of headset if one plans to be swinging around a lot?
Meta Quest 3. Quest 2 and 3s work but there’s no point in getting a headset with a fresnel lens anymore.
Why Quest? It’s standalone wireless. i.e. you don’t need a separate PC or console and wires are not conducive to working out and moving
As you age, you will lose lean muscle and bone density. But you do have some control in maintaining a healthy level of strength for your elder years.
You can maintain strength and density by engaging in resistance training.
The total amount of training required is up for debate. I follow Dr. Peter Attia and he discusses needing about 1 hr a week of resistance training.
The other aspect of maintaining strength is protein intake. Dr. Attia describes it as a “chore”, that is to consume 1g of protein supplement for each pound of body mass. That’s a lot!
Think about your future, do you want to be strong and mobile into your later years? I see older unhealthy people walking the streets and don’t envisage myself letting that happen.
You must take good care of yourself and put in the time to exercise and eat properly.
I do think proteinmaxing is mostly food/supp industry hype + advice for people who need to tricked into replacing donuts with something healthier. So YMMV.
But I think the training until exhaustion part of your comment is the important bit.
And everything else was held constant? Moreover the claim isn't that you need absurdly high amounts of protein to build muscle, just that it's easier to build muscle if you have higher protein intake, all things being equal.
It's like when you hear that steaming vegetables retains more nutrients than boiling them so everyone repeats this bit of trivia, but then you find out it's talking about a 7% difference so who cares.
Is there anything to back this up? The people I know who work out are always complaining about their muscles and joints.
I’m a triathlete of 4 years now - love to be sore but have never been injured & unable to train.
There are three things you must do:
1. good technique: lift with the right muscles, run at the right cadence & target heart rate.
2. listen to your body when it needs less or more load.
3. treat recovery as equally important as exercise itself. Exercise’s mirror.
That said, instead of actual complaints, your friends might be social signaling! Bringing it up to bond over the joy of exercise. Humans do that subconsciously, and there is a ton of joy to bond over!
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5753318/v1 (pre-print) seems to provide a strong argument for strength training being beneficial. My search was not thorough so likely more studies out there.
You should feel the exercise and specific muscles afterwards, sometimes even a day after (like hamstrings and thighs from squats, those don't get much workout during normal life), but after initial beginner phase the continuous long term goal is to get enough workout that muscles are not sore, just notch below. Properly sore muscle needs few days rest, a well used one can be again fully loaded in 48h easily.
And overall definitely less pain or more like 0 pain, ie back from weak core is pretty typical. Another one are knees, but to train knees around some already-damaged tissues is more tricky, but definitely worth it.
After starting weightlifting (on top of some sports like ski touring, climbing, hiking etc) I can handle much more, heavier and longer. Need to move your/friend stuff to another apartment? All day carrying with them feels like mild stretch, compared to them complaining for back pain for another 3 days.
If you do nothing for 20 years and then go for a 20km walk - you'll be in pain. But it's the 20 years that caused it, not the 20 km.
I’m often complaining about soreness here, a lightly pulled there, a big joint that needs to be left alone for a few days. It’s annoying but also even kinda satisfying, and I know how to avoid serious injury.
I’m not complaining about lower back pain because my fitness activity has rid me of it. That pain would have stopped me from being able to move easily, work on my cabin, play with children, and would have eventually made me overweight and chronically ill.
The tradeoff is really a no-brainer in my case, and I don’t think my case is so unique.
Joint pain is a whole other thing, though. Usually joint pain means that you're doing some sort of exercise incorrectly, or that you're using too much weight or intensity for your current level of physical fitness. Or you have a previous injury that can't fully heal and there are some exercises that you just shouldn't be doing, but you do them anyway.
But I think the author is talking about less pain in a different way. For example, I threw out my lower back 25 years ago in college, and it's never been the same since. But doing core exercises and strengthening the muscles around that area means much less chance of pain doing regular day-to-day activities.
Not really. If you're eating/sleeping well and training consistently it's completely normal to not feel soreness (that is, excluding the immediate discomfort that rapidly subsides). I can't speak for all forms of exercise, but certainly it's normal when lifting weights, even to failure.
That said, if you're just starting out you will notice a lot of soreness. Many people look back on the early DOMS and wish they could feel that sort of "positive feedback" again.
- eating an shocking amount of spinach (works much better than a magnesium pill)
- some sort of light cardio of the affected muscles after lifting
Sorry, but overexerted muscle feels exactly the same for me as the one hit with something hard and heavy or one that received a dozen injections that had a bit of tissue damage as a side effect.
> Usually joint pain means that you're doing some sort of exercise incorrectly
Joint and ligament pain means that you do too much of exactly what you are doing and you should do something at least a bit different. There's no such thing as correct or incorrect. You can do literally anything, just not too much. You only need to be careful because for some movements in some people 1 rep is too much already.
Sore muscles -> good workout.
Once you get in a routine of doing it at least twice a week you won’t get that soreness anymore. People who start working out, then miss a month, then start back experience it all the time. Consistency is key.
I wonder what happens with muscle soreness. Do they get actually get less sore after consistent exercise? Or do you just blunt your nervous system into not detecting chemical signatures of the damage? I'm guessing it's the second case because people here are commenting that after exercising long enough you can still have gains but no pain of muscle soreness.
But I think running is higher impact on the body that a lot of of other exercise. You're putting your full body weight on a small area several times a second for many minutes every day.
But impact is just force and time and the high pressure is because contact is being made with your foot, which has a small surface area.
You can find hammers that absorb shocks better than others, but ultimately it's driving the nail because of impact and pressure. (Small hammer head striking quickly).
I don't doubt that proper form, correct training, and other interventions can reduce running injuries. But they're the most frequent exercise injuries I've seen personally and they also appear common statistically.
(Of course running is more accessible than, say, jai alai so base rates are higher anyway)
My personal thoughts and anecdote, assuming you're not talking about the kind of "bro I got in a killer workout yesterday, my biceps are still sore" Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness humblebragging:
I have a controlled autoimmune disorder like arthritis that causes me some joint pain. But it basically goes away if I do regular strength training. If you do strength training or any sport long enough you'll eventually hurt yourself. Usually that's just a pulled muscle because you woke up on the wrong side of the bed and it goes away after a few days. These micro-injuries actually seem to happen to me a lot, probably because of my condition I'm just prone to this stuff. But I prefer it to the pains of inactivity.
Even for people without arthritis, you have a question to answer: which would you rather suffer from? The pains from not working, out like having a weak core and bad posture and the discomfort of being unable to climb a few sets of stairs? Or the pains from working out, like pulling a back muscle because you didn't warm up or some shin or knee pain from too much running?
The answer is obvious to me. You're going to get hurt either way. I'll go with the path that makes me feel better, live longer, look hotter, and is a rewarding challenge.
How could it be so low? How could i not know this? How is anyone walking around ignorant (as i was) of this?
These comparisons are crap. You can‘t simply take one year, exercise 24/7, and get your 10 years of life. You have to fit it into life, which is much more time than it seems from claiming it‘s 1 year out of 80.
But it‘s still a good investment! :)
We use this sort of formulation everywhere. If I say I work 40 hours a week, no one is going to assume that I start work at 9am on Monday, work non-stop until 1am Wednesday, and then take the rest of the week off. If I say that people spend approximately a third of their lives sleeping, no one thinks I mean that they sleep continuously from birth until they're 30 years old, and then spend the next 60 years awake.
So it's not exactly the same. For people who have very little free time due to commute, work, children, etc. It's harder to spend half an hour of free time a day on exerciaing.
I mean I do agree with the premise that exercising is a good return (especially since the better sleep quality should be factored in) but I think the person you're replying to has a point when he says that saying it's one year of life is not really comparable
I mean, we all know of the university budding sports star types who probably invested in many hours training and trying to break into their sport professionally but not quite cutting it - and then "retiring into mediocrity" with the regular 9-5,2 hour commute, 3 kids and the diet to match. They exercise no differently to the regular Joe and suffer all the maladies the same.
That’s not what he said though. How would you demonstrate that it’s a good investment, do you have an alternative? For the purposes of calculating the ROI it’s a solid 24/7 year of accumulated exercise time. Of course you can’t do it all at once, but that wasn’t the claim. And sure you have to fit it into your life and sure there’s a little extra time go to and from your activities, but the ratio of exercise to time is roughly 1/80. If you exercise 45 minutes a day 3 times a week: 135 minutes out of 10080 minutes ~= 1/80. He said 4 times/week, so maybe he should have said 1.3/80, but that doesn’t actually change the point. Accounting for sleep and more exercise and lots and lots of travel+shower time, maybe it’s even as high as 1/20… still a great investment.
That said, I think the most important part of exercising is the mental boost it provides. It's like a healthy drug. There are no negative side effects, and it's highly praised by society.
Still, breaking one's hip in advanced age is often a death sentence as many people never get out of bed again.
When an old person breaks their hip around here, people say something along the lines of "we'd better hurry up for visiting them one last time".
This should be easily confirmed by analyzing life expectancy of people with squat toilets vs a traditional western camode.
My most productive days are when I just start working on my computer after tea/coffee in the morning and can keep building momentum over the day. Any distractions like exercise break my momentum.
Currently waiting for a new hip, because for some reason I've worn mine out too soon.
Now, I won't say that the fact I'm in pain 24/7 isn't making me sad, but the fact that I don't come outside as often anymore really is not helping.
Wake up at 4am, run hill repeats for miles and then go into work. I guarantee no incident or colleague will trigger a stress response. You will feel as cool as a cucumber and when an urgent issue does come up you will handle it with absolute mental clarity. That afternoon drowsiness will also not hit you at all, counterintuitive right?
By 9pm you will fall asleep no matter what happened that day.
This kind of work gives you an edge on everyone. You look at things and say, “shit this is easy compared to what I did this morning” and you will feel mentally fresh.
If you swim till 9.45, how are you out, bathed, dried, changed, home, and at your table by 10?
I do get in bed at 7:30p most nights and read, to ensure my body has the choice to get 8h of sleep.
It’s hard, and that’s why you do it. It’s also fun.
Get the fuck out there and run, climb, swim.
Correlation is not causation. All credibility is lost for this guy, in my view.
> We know from one study that people who played tennis a few times per week lived roughly 10 years longer than average. So we'll use that value going forward.
This is the study [0]. The study itself, in the conclusions, states that:
"Conclusion: Various sports are associated with markedly different improvements in life expectancy. Because this is an observational study, it remains uncertain whether this relationship is causal."
Has the author read the study at least?
As a kid I was doing BMX, tennis (still do some), swimming then as a teenager street skateboarding, rollerskating, MX (motor)bike, tennis.
Now I'm an old man (52 y/o) and I don't do much sport. Some MTBing (still can do a wheelie and trackstand, ah!) but really not much. I drive my old sportcar (yup, that is physical and you do sweat). Some tennis while on vacation. And shooting at the range (and, yup, that is a bit physical too).
But I really don't do much. I'm of this school: "Qui veut voyager loin ménage sa monture" (french) which translates to "He who wants to travel far takes care of his mount.".
The number of friends my age who destroyed their bodies by continuing to exercise as if they were 20 or 30 years old is beyond belief. I think I'm one of the only one who didn't get knee surgery yet.
Running is terribly bad as you get older. Hockey (ice or grass): body destroyer. BJJ? Don't get me even started.
My doctor says "sport is death". He knows.
Tennis is particular in that you can really play it at your own pace: just pick someone your age and hit the court gently. No crazy rallies, just fun: I'm not going to win Roland-Garros at 52 y/o and you ain't either.
And there's something else among all of my friends who regularly do sport: as soon as they stop for a few weeks, they get fat.
Which is a problem I don't have.
So exercising a lot in your teens, 20s and 30s: sure. That shall build you muscle you'll keep for decades (my legs are still very strong).
But slow down after that or you'll break your body and then get fat as soon as you have to stop exercising (for example because you have to get knee surgery because you destroyed your knees running).
Something something about Buddha / Siddhartha warning to not put too much tension in a lute's strings or in a bow's string. There's a lesson in there.
You have your age, deal with it and act accordingly.
I'd recommend a better doctor. My dad was active and sporty well into his late 70s and lived until he was 94.