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Comment by david-gpu | Hacker News Reader

So many similar studies, including this one, suffer from the same flaws pointed out by Olympic coach Steve Magness.

In brief, the training protocols used in these papers are not representative at all of how actual athletes train. And athletes do not train that way because it doesn't work nearly as well as the training protocols that have become popular since the 1960s or so.

With this I am not trying to invalidate the research. What I am doing is warning laypeople from drawing overly simplistic conclusions from studies like these, such as concluding that "Exercising hard is good". Successful endurance athletes spend the overwhelming majority of their training at low and moderate intensities, because that is what works best in the long term.

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Professional athletes don't train for cardiometabolic health. They train to perform at competitions. The study is perfectly fine for the people it is intended to serve in the context of their lives. Normal people neither want nor need to train like athletes. They certainly don't need to follow a training program to compete at the Olympics. But they would still be well served to train in some form because of their increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Optimizing that form for efficiency is a key to population health. This paper is just the latest in a stream of evidence that suggests shorter but higher intensity bursts of exercise might be the more efficient way of training if you want to min-max your workout time and health as a normal person who has a real job and possibly a family and other hobbies.

I do recommend learning what Steve Magness says about the subject. He covers that as well. Even as a complete amateur you still would not structure your training as they did in that paper, because it makes zero sense.

> you still would not structure your training as they did in that paper, because it makes zero sense.

That isn't relevant. The paper is not setting out to find the optimal way for people to train.

There are a lot of studies on one side showing that high intensity training is probably better than developibg skill and efficiency for very moderate health goals and how an Olympic coach thinks lay people should train on the other. How much experience does an Olympic coach have with someone who wants to do less than 2000 calories of exercise a week for the rest of their life?

In fact professional endurance athletes have to train at low intensity because they put out so many watts at higher intensities that they can't get enough fuel in to sustain it for the number of hours they train. If they do then they end up with chronic fatigue etc. Once an amatuer is under a certain number of hours a week (10?) and relatively low wattage it doesn't make sense for them to train at low intensity. (You could be a really fast amateur and still be putting out relatively low watts compared to a pro).

misinfo. that has nothing to do with why athletes train the way they do. getting more calories in is not a limiting factor.

anaerobic lactic and alactic regime training just has a hard metabolic and fatigue thresholds where you won't see any improvements if you add volume.

aerobic regime training (which is by its nature low intensity) does, from what we know, not really have the same limitations. on the contrary a lot of its most important adaptions keep increasing with absdurd training volumes and only show up after accumulated years and decades of training (long distance endurance athletes can often peak or maintain near peak shape into their 40s or 50s because of this).

all of this necessitates large volumes of low intensity training.

Why is the pointing to Relative Energy Deficiency “misinfo”? It is my understanding that that is one of the factors that are used in explaining the overtraining in say ultrarunners. Eating 5k+ calories a day is near threshold for the hours in a waking day.

2 large pizzas is near the threshold for the hours in a day?

Sorry, bit late to the party. Eat a pizza and the energy will only come into your body in (as far as I've learned) a few hours. Eating a pizza is hard on your digestion. That why we usually go to sleep a few hours after are largest meal. We give our body the time to digest the energy and wake up fresh.

(from AI overview) "The human body can absorb and process about 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrates (roughly 240 to 360 calories) per hour during exercise when using a single or mixed source of sugars" And that's for your 14? waking hours. With another conundrum looking around the corner - work out or basicly: burn more calories, and you need more sleep.

Your body is constantly calomaxxing. Eat two pizzas (hey, once in my 20s I could as well!) and your digestion is working for the next 10-15 hours.

And this is totally the way a lot of amateurs end up being coached in some of endurance sports.

E.x. in cycling a lot of the high volume low intensity work is targeted at the elite athletes that are putting in 20+ hours a week of training time.

I guess it's different for everyone but I still train somewhere between 7-15 hours a week and have always needed some of that to be low intensity.

It is only efficient because of the short duration of 8 week study. It's like, pounding Leetcode is the most efficient/effective way to prep for an upcoming interview. But for the long term, it is better to mix up the type of work you do.

This is my frustration with AI coaches, specifically Garmin. They want me to have a 10k time goal or something when I don’t ever run competitive races and don’t directly care about times. I just want to get healthy.

Well said. If it's true that this can be interpreted as an average (let's say normally-sedentary) person getting more benefit from shorter, higher-intensity exercise as opposed to longer, low-intensity exercise... I think that is helpful information and could actually motive some people to get better exercise in.

If I could simply choose between 3 minutes of running fast versus 90 minutes of walking, of course I would always choose the shorter one and get it over with, and may not have even chosen the walking at all due to the time involved.

Just to add my interpretation of what Magness would say, which is: intense interval training tends to show significant gains over moderate work in shorter (8 weeks) study periods, but those gains level off quickly in the long term. A more blended training approach that incorporates all types of training intensities (hard, moderate, easy) will outperform just doing hard interval training, over the long term. And this advice applies to all types of athletes, not just people training at a high level.

Yes. And he emphasizes spending most of your time doing easy volume. Because especially as a regular Joe you won't recover well from doing high intensity intervals three or four times a week, especially when you haven't built a strong aerobic base through lots of easy volume.

And Magness isn't saying anything revolutionary here. Every other coach says very similar things. But Magness has the credentials to make him more authoritative than a random coach out there.

Former professional distance runner here. I’ve not read the study but I can comment on the statement regarding training at low to moderate intensities - I can agree that low intensities have an important role in endurance training but a lot of training is at or near threshold levels which can be on the moderate to high levels of intensity. Easy efforts are critical but there is a lot of effort, in a “normal” training segment, that are at or near high intensity effort.

In the study we are discussing they did six 30-second "all out" efforts, three or four times per week, and nothing else. This is far beyond threshold intensities.

I other words, I agree with you. And I think hopefully you now also agree with me.

Isn't low intensity effort generally 70-80% of the volume?

But let’s say you’re an elite marathoner running 100 miles a week. Maybe 20 are at low 5 or sub 5 pace. The other 80 are closer to 6:30/mile.

Then you might add more race specific work as race day gets closer. In one week you might do 2 days of track or threshold workouts before your long run of 14 miles at 6:00 pace with 8 at goal marathon pace (~4:50/mile).

But athletes don't have health as their main goal.

Isn't it likely that blended exercise is best for longevity anyway? i.e. per week 1-2h Zone 2 and 20 minutes HIIT (nordic 4x4?) and then as much strength training as you can fit in, say 3 x 1h PPL per week, and maybe some sauna too.

This is likely around what is best for most people and probably cutting the strength training time to 1h before cutting the rest if you "don't have time".

Thought experiment, not completely serious but something worth considering.

This would be 5 h per week, or 250 h per year, or over 10 years, 3.5 months of continuous 24/7 exercise. This is a large amount of training. 4% of your waking time would be spent on exercising. Or 6% of free time. At what point does it turn net negative, ie as time that it eats away from life. You can't attend events or hang out with family since you're always at the gym. I have understood smoking reduces your life span 8%. On the other hand, if you replace watching reels with gym, maybe it's also positive time otherwise.

You will feel better and be in hospital at the end of your life for a lot less time on average so yes it’s a lot but potentially the chances of being a fit 80 year old could be worth it.

The logic of exchanging 3.5 months every 10 years to be as healthy and able as possible for as long as you are alive seems to me to be absurdly compelling. Who wouldn't take that deal?

I totally get your thought process, especially with the dry exercise description in the comment you responded to. That’s maybe an approach for some people but it also doesn’t seem that sustainable.

My view on exercise is that it should give me something in the moment. That also helps keep me motivated.

So arduous hikes and bike tours aren’t something I do for the exercise, that’s just a nice side benefit. I do those because I want to get to exciting places or explore the world at a pace that makes sense.

I ride my exercise bike to keep in form and be able to do those hikes and bikes tours, even to go further and enable me to reach new places and do new things. Same with swimming, though that also helps me to clear my head and think about stuff. Both of those can potentially be boring, but at least I always feel amazing and energized afterwards.

Strength training is admittedly something I do almost exclusively for its long-term health benefits (and struggle the most with), though I also like feeling stronger and seeing my body change at least a tiny bit. Oh, and it’s an activity (as well as some Yoga and flexibility exercises) I do together with my partner, so it always has that social component.

Bouldering and badminton (both of which I absolutely suck at) also have that social component: it’s something I do with other people.

Oh, and then I don’t own a car, so my bike is my only means of getting from a to b and transporting things. So I automatically get moving that way and it never feels like wasted time or even exercise to me.

That’s much more than five hours per week spent exercising and very little of it is boring or feels like empty time that is merely an investment into my future. I do think that’s the trick to being and staying active. At least for me.

5 hours per week is very little training. How much time do most people spend scrolling social media or watching TV? There's your 5 hours. It doesn't have to detract from any other life activities.

Counterpoint: you can't replace Reels/TikTok or smoking time with exercise and you _have_ to displace something meaningful to do dedicated exercise.

Phone activity time is almost irreducible because it's not dedicated or de-fragmentable by design. It's almost always concurrent with something else, or in the "in-between" periods where your alternatives are limited.

One successful strategy here is to offload exercise into "snacks" that compete for this time. And that might buy back time you spend at the gym. Strength training and mobility work where the emphasis isn't on getting your HR up can easily be squeezed in here. So you might go to the gym, do your pressing exercise in 20 minutes, then come home and do pushup press variants as your accessory work in small increments over the day.

The one area this does not work on is CV training, where you need a dedicated amount of time in target zones to get the benefit. For that, you need to treat it as a first-class obligation, find some protocol that meets your constraints, and hold it sacred to get it done.

> actual athletes

Probably need to define. Are we talking about professional athletes or just people who have a lot of training experience?

Exercising hard for a person who has never trained is very different than someone with years under their belt training. An untrained person can't even tap into what hard means compared to a trained person.

I'm also confused about the focus on endurance. Yes, all people need some cardio, but everyone would do better with additional strength. The stronger someone is going into their 50s, they better they will end up in the 60s and 70s.

Most people don't exercise at all. If some of these people draw the wrong conclusion from such a study and start exercising at high intensity, it will still be better than their current couch-potato training protocol.

Probably not. They'll train like hell for a few weeks, their bodies unable to properly recover, they'll feel wrecked the entire time and they will never develop the habit of exercise.

Likely best for most people is to just start moving and once you have _actually_ established the habit of exercise, slowly add intensity. Let your body accommodate.

Good and best is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.

What are you talking about when you speak of good/best outcomes? I think especially when it comes to talking about fitness it is important to be explicit about outcomes because only with outcomes in mind can you talk about what “good” actually means.

In that context I’m a bit confused by your focus on (endurance) athletes. Their overriding goal is obviously increasing their athletic performance in a way that keeps them injury free. Their main focus aren’t health outcomes. That’s not the same. So if you focus on them you are in danger of talking past each other.

To that point: sure, those studies often have unrealistic protocols but the way (performance) athletes train is also unrealistic for most people!

If those studies are about population health they should have realistic protocols (in terms of: realistically achievable and adhered to by non-athletes, in the best case also empirically grounded in the sense of: this is a realistic range of activities non-athletes might actually engage in on a regular basis) for non-athletes.

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