The health benefits of exercise are most likely due to improved blood flow and related physiological effects. In principle, pills could theoretically achieve similar outcomes by enhancing circulation or other underlying mechanisms.
Not taking sides here, just reasoning out loud.
Rejecting all evidence, denying observations, and leaning heavily on half-baked hypothesis that culminate somehow on a gotcha. That sounds an awful lot like something someone who "does their own research" would say.
Yes, extreme levels of high-intensity exercise have adverse side effects. Cross-fit and rhadbo is an example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabdomyolysis
Drinking water also does everyone good, and everyone's health will improve if they increase their water intake, but drinking water in excess can also be fatal. Does this mean that the idea that drinking water does you good "does not make a priori sense"?
No, it doesn't.
I suspect you’re not going to find a pill or combination of pills that can achieve those outcomes. And again, we’re ignoring the mental health benefits.
Yes, overtraining is possible (and not infrequent, particularly by those who fail to read or ignore the evidence). But an absolutely sedentary lifestyle is exceptionally fatal.
Medications (as with exercise) come with both intended and unintended consequences, as well as costs and inconveniences. Generally the more extreme the condition you're treating, the more likely that medications will carry some of these disadvantages (e.g., chemotherapy against cancer, where the goal is often to kill the malignancy at least slightly faster than one kills the patient). Exercise operates through complex feedback cycles and mechanisms, not all of which are well-understood (as an example, why muscle grows in response to strength training being a fundamental case despite much information on how muscle responds to which specific training protocols). Medications can amplify training response (e.g., anabolic steroids for strength training athletes), but often don't by themselves substitute for it.
This is why, in a broader sense, that the Baconian scientific method does not rely simply on a priori hypotheses, but tests these with experiment and evidence, that is, empirically. The ultimate critique of pure reason is that whilst it can be a useful guide for what you then want to test empirically, it has a phenomenal tendency to lead one to utterly fallacious and/or irrelevant conclusions.
One of the more robust sets of evidence on both the negative effects of a zero-stress lifestyle and of the benefits of regular cardio and strength training is that accumulated through long-term space missions, largely aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Microgravity would be the ultimate low-stress environment, and it turns out to be seriously harmful. Astronauts there are tested before and after missions, with various measures of fitness loss. With time-in-space being an immensely valuable resource, astronauts also spend two hours per day engaged in physical exercise (<https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronauts/living-in-space/phy...>), or 1/8 of their waking schedule.
Online, ExRx (<https://exrx.net/>) has a large library of fitness information, including a list of online journals (<https://exrx.net/Journals>) and expert talks (<https://exrx.net/Talks>). Good books on fitness will link to research substantiating recommendations (Lou Schuler's New Rules of Lifting series is a good example of this).
The best results are achieved when these are working together toward some health or fitness goal. It's far more effective to align your lifestyle, diet, exercise, and medications than to have these working against one another (I'll take this pill to compensate for my drinking / smoking / drug use / pollution exposure / stress, etc.). Of course, that's not always possible, and there are circumstances where it's difficult or impossible to attain some of these mechanisms (parapalegic, living in a highly polluted environment, inherently stressful living conditions, GI compromise limiting eating or diet, congenital or genetic conditions or predispositions). Even here, if the patient can make some progress in a specific modality, they'll probably see some benefit.
Some of the most impressive athletes I've seen, from a sheer grit perspective, are those who are working against some major limitation: the swimmer at a health club long ago paralyzed in both legs, the one-legged open-water swimmer, old farts with their pacemakers showing through their chests swimming in the San Francisco Bay, patients with diabetes, heart failure, Parkinsons, recovering from cancer, with various injuries or scars, still at it. Some are astonishingly good by any measure, many aren't, but damned if they're not trying and generally living far better than if they weren't.
This isn't "don't take your meds", it's "use all the available tools". Lifestyle, diet, an exercise are underrated and powerful tools.
"You don't look like your medical history" is a high compliment coming from a doctor, and I'd strongly recommend earning it.
Agreed - low dose daily cialis/tadalafil (e.g. 5mg/day) is very common among elite athletes, bodybuilders, etc. As are GLP-1's despite elite athletes rarely being overweight.
Tadalafil is taken for its endothelial benefits (erections are a convenient side effect), and GLP's for its nutrient partitioning and insulin sensitization effects.
Medications are very often most effective when paired with good lifestyle habits, rather than one of the other.
It also depends on what your goals are, obviously.
Beyond that, if goals are for specific performance targets, in some athletic or competitive activity, you'll want to tune your training toward that. Again, the baseline is remarkably consistent, it's the high-performer tuning which varies.
Going off-label on prescriptions, especially without a doctor's supervision, carries its own set of risks. If you're lucky, it's only wasted money. If you're not, it's markedly worse.
