I personally went through this journey where I was sedentary for about 10 years and in my late 20s I could not run, I could not walk long distances, by back was killing me, I had wrist issues. Seeing a physical therapist who could help rebuild my body while starting with light exercise and gradually building up worked for me. I spent 2 months just strengthening my ankles and feet before I could run because they were so atrophied.
Eventually I got past that local maxima and now I can run 25 km with 2km elevation gain up a mountain and back which would have killed me before.
Lastly I will say that exercise should be gradually eased into, a lot of people are put off by exercise because they start too hard and make themself miserable. For cardio you should try to keep your heart rate within a lower range (zone 2 cardio at around 70% of max heartrate). For most people this means your cardio starts with walking up a hill, and you won’t get to actually running until later.
And for muscle training, nothing beats a few kettle bells and a rubber mattress in the corner.
I think that's where I am at right now. I have always been exercising to some extent. But it feels like the older I get the less one kind of exercise focusing on some set of physical and physiological aspects transfers to another set. Meaning, to go biking a lot, doesn't mean you can run.
> strengthening my ankles and feet before I could run because they were so atrophied.
Even after years of semi-regular weighted calf raises and yoga I just recently noticed that I could barely do a few hundred rope skips cause of my feet. 15 years ago I remember cardiovascular obstacles and the usual DOMS but I don't remember that my feet hurt.
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Currently my lower back / sciatica is giving me serious issues. I think I got it from some overexertion due to prolonged pelvic motion ... so that's yet another physical department to keep in mind.
Another thing to consider is that sciatica can manifest in your feet depending on how the nerve is being pinched. It can be very confusing when your feet hurt but the source of hurt is not actually in your feet.
I hope for the best on your journey.
100% this. Whenever I've had longer breaks from strength training, clocking in the kind of hours I do in a desk chair eventually gets me to back pain, Aeron chair be damned.
The only thing that works for me then is to hit the weights; squats and deadlifts to be specific. Obviously not doing 1 rep max, relatively high rep range (8-12).
- Week 1: muscle soreness is horrible.
- Week 2: muscle soreness is quite OK and the regular back pain is all but gone.
- Week 3 onwards: gravy.
This is really under-rated. People will happily keep pushing exercise as a health intervention (hidden implication: instead of other interventions?), and forget that quite a lot of people have health conditions that get in the way of their ability to exercise. Especially older people. Who have poor health outcomes.
I'm sort of in that local maxima now.
A good reminder that getting past the hump, it gets better.
Then our body instinctively hoards calories like a squirrel hoards nuts, because evolution takes thousands to millions of years and this era of abundant calories and sedentary lifestyles emerged in the last few decades.
It doesn't matter how potent it is if nobody wants to take it.
There is no more potent stressor (in regards to the degree of adaptations that result---I guess getting shot in the face is a more potent stressor, but it's hard to recover from) than weightlifting. For example, you can radically change your physiology just doing a single (hard) set of 5 deadlifts a week. Spending just ~30 seconds a week under acute stress can take a human male who cannot lift 185 lbs to one who can lift 405 lbs in a number of months. It's radically, stupidly, unreasonably, and absurdly effective.
We have the most understanding and most effective tools to take advantage of the adaptive mechanisms of our bodies than ever before.
I think people think that "exercising" has to be this pervasive, incessant thing that invades every facit of life and requires constant discipline. Even the linked article hints at this---walk 45 minutes daily, stand all the time, etc. All that shit constitutes (for all but the most untrained) extremely small stressors that are rapidly adapted to (and hence no longer do anything but maintain your existing level of fitness) and that take a lot of time (and can be rather uncomfortable, like standing for hours). More is not better. If you disrupt homeostasis with one set of 5 deadlifts, you've disrupted homeostasis! The adaptation is in motion. It doesn't matter that it only took 30 seconds. And unlike standing or walking, it's easy to effectively increase the stress to reap more adaptations: add weight to the bar. (To be clear, I'm not discouraging walking/standing/Zumba/whatever---they're all better than doing nothing and they can complement weightlifting. I'm just pointing out that there are much more efficient ways to rapidly accrue useful stress (well, I'd argue the amount of useful stress you can accrue from walking or Zumba or whatever is limited because the activities themselves can't be effectively scaled to result in more stress) and if you were to choose only one, the choice should be weightlifting.)
Deadlifts are life's panacea. You should be doing them.
185 lbs is 83 kg; 405 lb is 183 kg.
As someone who has been doing a 5x5 deadlift set every week (plus other stuff) for about three years: this is a wild exaggeration that sounds like some sort of supplement marketing claim. Perhaps you forgot a few hidden variables? For example, I'm over 40.
(It was also very apparent when I had COVID and was out of the gym for over a month that I "lost" about 25kg from my working weight)
I have been lifting for 18 years now and it’s become like brushing my teeth: I just do it without thinking much about it. Just basic stuff - squats, bench, deadlift, few vanity additions. The older I get the more I see how much my peers physically suffer without it.
One can also do 10-20 seconds of cardio a few times per week and have real results.
Lots of overweight people have never been hungry in their whole life. They eat on a schedule, so have an appetite, but real hunger? Never more than the grumbles of an empty stomach.
But it would benefit them to not eat until they are hungry. Then have a small meal. Feel what it's like to be satiated, not full, just satiated. The notice how long it takes to feel hungry again.
Then try being really hungry. Like "I woke up from a deep sleep at 3am and felt a ravenous need to eat something".
I've found that my sense of hunger was reset by this process. I get hungry if I don't eat a meal, but it's not a big deal. I can ignore it. Another 6 hours and I'll start to be really hungry. Then I can have something small.
I don't find it hard to keep a healthy weight any more. It's not difficult to eat to a slight caloric deficit and lose weight if needed.
That is the way to begin the process of getting a little hungry and then appreciating it as it grows. Taking that extra time then makes finally eating more enjoyable, in my experience.
And your tip on fully chewing food is subtle but powerful. It's very much in the spirit of being more engaged in the moment, where gratitude settles us down and keeps our worries at bay, for at least some small moments.
Much more still than hunger, you have to fight the “I would like to eat something” feeling.
I recommend to be constructive and make actionable recommendations, and have a positive tone. I know it’s not easy in the current state of affairs though.
“ stop constructing a society where ….” really doesn’t tell anyone what you think we should do.
And I agree with you btw, I think the root cause is, we have anonymised too much, revenue is the only thing that matters, because before that, there were things like traditions, shame, ethic, etc. but they went all out the window when money making became possible anonymously via funds, VCs, etc. You can switch to child labor to save 0.1% margin because, guess what, no one is responsible anymore: the shareholders, these anonymous mass, want it.
I got a nice exercise bike, which I use for 30m most days. I got one for my parents too, but my mom refused to use it and promptly got a heart attack. Can't win them all. I do what I can, but I've stopped trying to lift mountains.
There is one more funny twist to the picture you've painted. What little physical labor we have left is piled onto as few people as possible while others are dying in cubicles.
As Dr Ashley says in the OP, if you can just walk 30-45 minutes five or six days a week, you're already doing your health a great service. The hard part isn't the walk itself, it's the motivation to start, and the discipline to make it part of a routine.
Once you have ingrained exercise into your routine, it becomes easy. Not exercising feels uncomfortable; feeding your body with things which do not support your more healthful state will feel more innately uncomfortable. Once you establish a routine of exercise, you have the basis for a virtuous cycle.
Getting used to exercise every day will in no way make you like McDonald's less.
Nobody? I can't agree, lots of people want to, and do "take" exercise. Most of my friends are super active and they look good and feel good and are living really healthy lives.
It's true that a lot of society is set up such that we can totally avoid exercising, but on the flip side we've probably never had more access to great ways to be fit that are tailored to personal interest, aptitudes, needs.
Sadly I agree that most (north Americans at least) are extremely under-exercised, but it is a choice.
Many people have to actively fight that default to overcome it, day in and day out, and it’s hard.
Psychologically manipulative gamification can address that.
Soon after I got an Apple Watch the reminders and rewards for the activity rings got me to make sure to close all three of them daily. That was 2063 days ago and I've not missed a day.
Before I got the watch I rarely deliberately exercised. I would choose stairs over elevators, and for a while I would do a 10 to 15 leisurely bike ride a couple times a week (but that stopped about a year before I got the watch due to problems with my bike that weren't worth fixing), but other than that it was mostly sitting at my desk or on my couch for me.
I'd get in about a mile of walking during normal daily activities and maybe 2500 steps. Those are both 2.5x to 3x as much after the watch.
What's interesting is that there were no days during that 2063 (and counting) streak where I had to force myself to continue. I got sick occasionally with a cold or a flu (or something flu like--I never got sick enough with flu like symptoms to actually go get tested to see what it was), but never bad enough that I just wanted to stay in bed until it was over.
In the several years before that I would maybe once a year get something that would leave me with no will or energy to get out of bed for a day or two. So something seems to have changed, and increased exercising seems like a decent candidate.
We completeely design our cities around cars. Just the act of walking 30 minutes a day makes a huge difference. If you can get that just going about your day, then it's kind of built into your life, almost "free". But walking (like every other form of exercise) has to be an intentional activity in a car-centric city.
Car-dependence didn't just happen. It was intentional and relates heavily to economic segregation.
So what about capitalism? Well, leisure time, from the perpsective of capitalism, is lost revenue. Where once you needed 1 full time job, now you need 2 plus 3 "side gigs". Housing costs, student loans, education costs, your cars and student loan debt are all designed to keep you working, creating wealth for someone else.
+1. Car-centric design stands 99.9% for US. In contrast, many cities in EU have grown organically over decades both with walkability, accessibility in mind and quite decent public transport. With business offices often still being pretty centric.
I've been moving around EU, working in different big cities and had a luck of renting flats within walkable 30-45 mins from the workplaces / client offices. If the weather sucks, I can count on public transport. It's always a bit of extra budget stretch to rent something more centric, but it's really worth it imho.
A morning walk to the workplace, while grabbing a coffee / breakfast on the way or a walk back home while disconnecting from the virtual world is a routine that can highly recommend. It gives also more motivation for either passing by the office or marking the work/leisure boundary when working in hybrid/remote mode. No need to live in a constant hustle mode.
It’s hard to overstate how poisonous cars are to your physical and mental health.
That sounds like a problem with modern life rather than a problem with exercise.
Our bodies are insanely efficient at using and saving energy.
They fact that I can walk for an hour or more on the calories from a single snickers bar is depressing. Ha.
And the body is convinced a calorie shortage is around the corner, but in modern society calorie shortages never occur.
I think GLP-1 medications, and other medications that attack hunger signals at the source are the only viable long term solution.
Exercise is much more than weight loss; it is heart health, bone health, immune health, etc.
You can walk an hour on the calories of a candy bar, but you’ll get malnutrition relying solely on candy bars.
Healthy nutrition requires more than eating less.
If someone develops an injection that makes you want to cook yourself some whole foods then we’ll be talking.
I go to the gym regularly and when I look around and see other women who have been working out for a long time, they are pretty much the same body shape I’ve always seen them.
Once you reach a new weight, that’s just your body’s new normal. I stress to people now that they should aim to never gain weight in the first place unless it’s muscle.
It seems that it will be easier than ever to get back to a healthy weight.
I found it very funny that I spent about 2 years eating less so I could get better at cycling, then suddenly had to start eating more, once I was down 50kg, because I was getting faint on very long cycles.
Only that it's a minor contributor and I would argue that's the case.
One of your examples, swimming, will put on weight as it will builds muscle mass which obviously is heavier. But one of the side effects of this is that your appetite will increase. And without careful diet management it's very easy for this exercise to be a net negative.
People tend to offset that energy expenditure elsewhere in their life, often without being conscious of it. The body is really good at balancing out your energy consumption.
If I go for a 40 mile bike ride today then I'm pretty sure I'll zombie out in front of the TV tonight.
If you simply cut back on calories by 20% - 30%, your body will adjust to the new norm within a couple months, and you just expend 20% - 30% less energy. You have maintain some baseline activity levels in order to continue burning fat.
So, people don't necessarily need to diet. They need to train their appetite just like they train their body.
If you intake X calories, your body will use them to provide you energy for exercise. If you don’t exercise, you won’t always just turn it into fat - your body will find another find other uses of the calories such as producing stress hormones.
Exercise is important but will not make you lose weight alone.
The saying is you can't outrun a bad diet.
For being supposedly a website for smart, or at least above the average intelligence users.
No, semaglutide won't do the same for you. Fucking leave the house and move.
https://old.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...
Also, embracing the suck helps a lot as well.
Greg Doucette's cookbook shows how you can add "bulky" food that are lower in calories. I'm not a fan of the propensity of artificial sweeteners, but the principles are the important thing.
As an aside, I also wonder if this fascination with having "quick fixes" (aka let's add GLP-1 agonists to reduce appetite) is a generational thing, or just that in HN we have a bio-hacking mindset?
It's quite a contrast to the other article in HN today, "An Unreasonable Amount of Time", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42557098
[edit] typos
American culture. We want maximum results with minimum effort.
Unsure if it has to be in some stomach-acid resistant packaging or slow release or something though.
> We knew from studies in the 1950s comparing London bus drivers and London bus conductors that lived in the same environment, but one — they had the bus drivers who were sitting, the conductors were standing, and the heart disease rate among the drivers was twice that of the conductors.
Yeah, uhhhh, driving a bus in an urban centre built before motor vehicles doesn’t sound like the most calming of careers.
"He said that he had been a tank-driver during the war and that a tank would have had no trouble getting on to the other side and decided to see if a double-decker could do the same.Some places in the UK are having problems retaining/recruiting drivers because of safety issues: attacks on bus drivers, either by angry passengers or random yobs :(
I also remember that London bus drivers had a very high mortality rate right at the start of the pandemic: https://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/resources-reports/lo...
[0] https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...
Quite often if you get into the habit of doing it often, how much you do increases in is own
"It doesn't matter whether you do it in the morning, at lunchtime, in the evenings. It's particularly good after meals, so the evening is a fine time to take a brisk walk"
Government TV goes MAHA!
That isn't saying exercise doesn't improve health it looks like it does, but compared to other pharmaceutical interventions its not very impressive.