Comment by trhoad
3 years ago
Too much emphasis is put on organised exercise. I think it's an American thing, where nobody seems to walk anywhere.
Better advice is to build more functional "exercise" into your day-to-day life. This is where real lifestyle change happens without you really knowing it.
Take the stairs, walk to the shops, cycle to work (where possible), household chores that involve getting on your hands and knees and breaking a sweat, do DIY/gardening (why people pay to go to the gym and deadlift, then e.g. happily pay someone to move a load of soil around the backyard always confuses/amazes me).
All this "exercise" helps, especially if you are coming from a sedentary lifestyle but you also really need exercise where you will elevate your heartrate and be close to running out of breath. Also known as Zone 2 (or higher) cardio.
The real difference though is American cities blossomed with the same arc automobile came into fruition.
I just recently got back from Germany and the primary thing I noticed about their public transportation infrastructure is that most of it is using right of ways that have been in place for… hundreds of years.
Driving in America is an unfortunate necessity in the vast majority of places (The minority being the oldest coastal cities) and that annoys me greatly, but it’s the reality of it.
I do choose to live downtown so I can walk or bike. But those are my options :/
This is often repeated, but it misses the full story.
I myself used to believe that to be the case, but fairly recently learned that many European cities used to have significantly more car infrastructure and reversed course, while at the same time, many American cities had walkable infrastructure that was later bulldozed for cars.
There’s nothing inevitable about the way we build/built cities in America, it’s a matter of choice and priorities.
Too much emphasis is put on organised exercise.
Organized exercise allows you to set a specific goal and do targeted exercise to accomplish that goal in the minimum amount of time with minimum risk of injury.
why people pay to go to the gym and deadlift, then e.g. happily pay someone to move a load of soil around the backyard always confuses/amazes me
It's math and risk. If I make $150 per hour and have unlimited capacity to work then it makes no sense for me to do manual labor that I can pay someone $15 per hour to do. And I'll get a much better workout with an hour in the gym than 3 hours moving a load of soil around. And as I stated earlier, my risk of injury doing controlled targeted movements is much lower than randomly twisting and turning and jerking loads of soil around.
Gotta love some good ol' post hoc rationalising.
This is needlessly dismissive. I have a lot of bushes and edges to trim in addition to the usual mowing and mulching. And had a bad sprain from trimming huge bushes. Intentional exercise had its own risks, though they're lower if following a guide or trainer. (I also have a small frame so have to take care not to overdue it regardless of activity.)
Of course I could pay someone to do the gardening or rearrange it to minimize the work. Yet that's not always an option.
I think it's worthwhile to highlight the psychical activity paradox in this discussion.
This paradox describes the contrast between the damaging impact that occupational exercise has on health against the beneficial impact that leisure exercise has on health. This difference is very well documented [1][2][3] (you can easily find dozens more studies with a quick google search).
There's a diversity of opinion about what causes the paradox, but I think it's reasonable to be concerned that spending significant amounts of time on DIY/Gardening/Chores could replicate the hazards of occupational exercise. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a study which looks at these directly.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/42/15/1499/621377... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28798040/ [3] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...
Because in the gym the can progressively increase the wights they are lifting and get stronger and put on muscle. Looking at most people doing manual labor jobs all day and they almost never look great and mostly have wear and tear from the jobs they are doing.
>(why people pay to go to the gym and deadlift, then e.g. happily pay someone to move a load of soil around the backyard always confuses/amazes me).
Are you nuts? Do you lift 100Kg or more in the garden very often?
Personally, I’ve concluded that most housework isn’t anywhere close to proper exercise that raises heart rate a lot or stresses muscles a lot. Not that housework is useless, but it’s not going to offer the benefits of even an at home workout program.
I don’t need to move soil in my garden 5 times a week. As a matter of fact I have nothing heavy to move that often. I walk or cycle to most places and while it of course helps, it’s far from being sufficient to keep a good level of fitness.
> (why people pay to go to the gym and deadlift, then e.g. happily pay someone to move a load of soil around the backyard always confuses/amazes me).
I tell people I only lift weights, not boxes or bags of soil.
absolutely. The Gym of Life is a great video on YouTube talking about this exact thing. Being in a walkable/bikeable location makes you accidentally kinda fit.