I can directly tie my mood to how much exercise I’ve had in a given week. It’s also easy, given how busy life feels, to let the proverbial frog boil in water when it comes to this.
My partner often comments when I’ve been a little grumpier than usual by saying, “you should go on a bike ride.”
It really works wonders on the soul (and the more physical heart and lungs) getting out for a spin in the fresh air.
There is something about riding a bike that lifts people's mood like nothing else. It's the closest thing to flying like a bird that most of us will ever see. It lets you experience your neighborhood in a different light.
Riding a bike lifts my mood certainly but it doesn't let me experience my neighborhood. I zoom past the neighborhood and at 15mph you can hardly experience it. You might have some vague ideas about architectural styles in the neighborhood but that's it. If the neighborhood has shops, you can't easily visit them without first parking the bike. You need to walk to really experience a neighborhood.
I don’t think it’s unique to bikes - lots of people have the same/similar feelings from other forms of exercise. There’s a runners high too. I used to row in university, and there was no better feeling (to me) than being in the middle of a lake in a tiny boat and clocking in 16/20k on a crisp winters morning.
Absolutely, as much as everyone says eating right, exercising and sleeping well are the answer I totally neglected myself. Boosting cardio and dropping some weight has been an absolute lifechanger
The fact that just by being on the bike for two hours, my brain doesn't go into negative pathways, but it just focuses on the road always brings me out of a slump.
I can also recommend easy, restorative yoga exercises, which is the lightest exercise there is, but it will help you with: sitting too much, improve sleep, stretch and reduce stress.
i keep up exercise for health reasons and because i do have a higher energy level if i'm in better shape.
however, both during and for two or three hours after exercising, the emotional effect is very negative. i feel much more anxious, prone to negative thoughts, self-critical, pessimistic, sometimes angry.
the benefits are definitely real but I feel like I am paying a very large cost to get them. i've tried lots of different forms of exercise and they all have this effect if i push to a reasonable level of intensity.
i'm wondering if anyone else has had this experience and managed to find a place where exercising makes them feel happy.
Have they all been in a gym environment? If so, it could be the reason. Going to the gym in the winter, I do get the benefits but it doesn't do as much for my mood as sports outdoors when the weather is nice.
> The author Daniel Lieberman has put it well: Exercise is healthy and rewarding even though it’s something we never evolved to do.
We have ostensibly spent much of our evolutionary budget on the ability to run ~indefinitely no matter what. Compared to virtually any other animal, we can vastly outperform them in the most arduous environments. Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level. We have connective tissue that stores and releases energy. Our bodies can reject on the order of 1kW+ of heat steady-state through the magic of evaporative cooling.
Yeah, I realized this one time while watching a documentary on some tribes hunting methods. They were hunting by running after the animal until it basically dropped from exertion. Hunters didn’t sprint. They paced but continuously and simply followed animals foot prints and droppings. They said these hunters would run for many hours each time. And sometimes they’d even be unsuccessful.
> Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level
My flat feet (and those of my mom, and those of one of her parents, ad infinitum) would beg to differ lol
Also, most of the energy our bodies burn to run just turns into heat, it's all very inefficient... even if sweating itself works pretty well, and even if our heat tolerance is high assuming we have a source of fresh water
I had flat feet most of my life, until I started a 5x per week yoga practice (ashtanga based). One day about a year into it I noticed that I had defined arches, something I hadn’t expected at all. All those one leg standing balancing poses really develops your ankles, knees, and feet.
Some years later when I started running with typical arch supporting running shoes, picked out for me at a specialty running store where they record your stride etc, I developed pretty bad plantar fasciitis as soon as I started hitting 8k on my runs. Swapped them out for zero drop Altras and I haven’t had issues since.
All that is to say our feet are pretty well designed as long as you give it the strengthening it needs. You should take care of your feet, but not coddle them, is how I’ve come to view it.
My wife's a podiatrist. I can conjure what I've heard her tell a thousand people over the years: invest in arch supports. Shoot for the ones that run about $50 and are rigid. Don't start with the $500 custom ones, and skip the $10 soft ones you see at the pharmacy. Go to REI or a running shop or a sporting goods store and get those instead.
My knees freaking killed me when I was running. I started using the supports my wife bought for me and it instantly improved, and far beyond any placebo effect. Before: my knees ached after I ran 100% of the time. Now: they never ache anymore.
My friend has fixed his flat feet by focusing on yoga poses that engage the “knife edge” of his feet (ie: the outside). It took some time but he reckons it’s very noticeable. Maybe worth a try?
I’ve read in a few places that the flat feet comes from wearing shoes that don’t allow your toes to splay, which causes the muscles that create the arch to atrophy. Not a scientist and have never had flat feet, so can’t confirm, but I recently started wearing zero drop shoes and definitely feel a healthy soreness as my feet get stronger.
Flat feet are often a problem of foot muscles and posture. Physiotherapy and strengthening your feet can most likely work wonders even if your family has genetic predisposition for the problem.
It's a tradeoff. Having two general purpose limbs is useful for all sorts of things, but not escaping scary things, so endurance can somewhat make up for that.
> Compared to virtually any other animal, we can vastly outperform them in the most arduous environments. Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level.
I'm not sure from where you got this because any documentary/book/article and simply real life experiences related to this subject states the opposite (take a common animal such as a dog as an example)
This is not an obscure theory, it's called the "Endurance running hypothesis" [1], and it does seem that humans are one of very few species exceptionally well-adapted to very long-distance running (though dogs and wolves are another one). The idea is that ancient hominids in Africa practiced "persistence hunting"[2], where they would hunt e.g. antelopes and similar species by repeatedly chasing them down. The prey would sprint off when humans got close, but doing this repeatedly causes the animal to exhaust their energy or die of heat stroke, humans being much better adapted to running for many hours on end (this kind of hunting is known to happen to this day). It's plausible that persistence hunting also contributed to evolving our other super-powers, as it requires good spatial awareness, tool-use and communication.
Have you ever went running with a dog? Dogs can go fast over a short distance but they overheat quickly. People just keep on running way past the time the dog has collapsed.
“Real life experience” tells me I’ll run any dog into the ground if it’s over 50F. Cooler than that? The dog still better be part of a trained sledding team.
This is specifically about long distance running, where basically no animal can keep up.
A key hunan advantage was persistence hunting - track and run after a deer (or similar) prey. Tgey can burst outrun the human, burt hemshe keeps on running, eventually, often after double-digit kilometers, the human can just trot up to the exhausted nimal and kill it. That's what the tendons and evaporative cooling do.
There's a famous Uktramarathon race, iirc, the Western States 100, 100 miles in the Sierra mountains that was a horse race, until some people started running without the horse, and winning.
Ask anyone in the army how all those years of running drills have affected them as they got older. It’s not so rosy. Lots of knee problems in that group. Above average practice of running throughout life also increases likelihood of requiring pacemakers later in life.
US Army veterans do have a higher rate of arthritis but their days are quite different from the "run 3-5 days a week" that most people think of when talking about recreational runners.
And the pacemaker comment stood out so I did a bit of digging and found a study [1] you might be referring to. Again, the effects were strong only in the heavy-duty-exercisers/pro/semi-pro cross-country skiier group. Additionally, this didn't offset the gains to cardiovascular or mortality risk - that group was still "healthier."
People in the army are also regularly carrying an extra 50 pound ruck, 25 pounds of body armor, and enough other various and sundry items to add up to about 100+ lbs of total kit. That's probably what's destroying people's knees more than the running by itself
It's more that the military's goal isn't to produce adults that are indefinitely healthy, but rather a robust geopolitical deterrent that only requires its employees to be physical capable for about twenty years, after which their service life is over. Running is not the issue. Even a car designed for driving can be driven irresponsibly.
I can’t be sure, but my impression is that army drills (1) push uniformly (rather than let you improve at your own pace) and (2) often involve carrying your kit, which is 20-40lbs. Neither of these is similar to the kind of running GP describes, namely unburdened, at a comfortable speed, over ~arbitrary distances.
I was going to say, I don't believe that sitting on a chair for 40 hours a week is great but I've also never seen so many wounded and disabled people than with people heavily into sports.
Hm, I'm skeptical. I think the data might be a little equivocal on that one.
I'm also part of the barefoot running army and tend to think that the braking forces from shoes have a role to play in knee problems (I personally stopped having them when I started running barefoot so that's where my bias comes from.)
I guess there are a lot of confounding variables in there, having taken up running a few years ago my resting heart rate is very low, and I'm far more aware of it than a non-runner. I suppose folks with a family history of heart problems may take up exercise to try and get ahead of it too.
To be fair, it was the weight not the distance that destroyed my knees and ankles. But still, I've aged a lot better than many of my friends and family who were more sedentary, so who knows.
Just because our ancestors did something doesn't mean it's automatically good for your health. After all, prehistoric men weren't known for their long life expectancy.
The evidence for exercise reducing all-cause mortality is more nuanced than many assume. It's crucial to distinguish between findings from RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials) and observational studies.
A meta-analysis of RCTs with ~50,000 participants concluded that exercise did not reduce all-cause mortality or incident CVD in older adults or people with chronic conditions [1].
However, for specific high-risk groups, the causal evidence from RCTs is strong. A separate meta-analysis found that for cancer patients and survivors, exercise led to [2]:
- A 24% reduction in mortality risk
- A 48% reduction in recurrence risk
The commonly cited large benefits (e.g., 40% lower mortality) come from observational studies [3]. These are very susceptible to the "healthy user bias" or reverse causation—people who are healthy enough to exercise are already at a lower risk of dying. This makes it difficult to prove the exercise caused the benefit.
So, while exercise is strongly associated with lower mortality, the direct causal evidence for the general population isn't as definitive as it is for specific subgroups like cancer survivors.
There are positive physical and mental change that happen with more intensive cardio and with resistance training that you can't get from walking no matter how much you walk. And there's nothing herculian about those modes of exercise.
You're right of course, consistency is safer and more sustainable but ego is a bitch and nobody is ever bragging or impressed about an average adult being able to walk their dog daily, or doing ten 50kg squats twice a week, or even jogging a mile three times a week (except maybe your doctor, and probably only then if you're over 40).
True, but if you can afford to hike in the mountains, you can then brag about seeing a groundhog, a chamois, a valley, joining paths, waking up with the sun (never hike in afternoons because storms and night approaching).
Which is the best of both worlds: You don’t index yourself against an herculean performance, and yet you still do exercise. And walking 8hrs in the mountains actually does wonders to weight, MUCH better than my herculean 1000m-in-70-minutes climb.
I walk every morning and hit 80-80% of my max heart rate for parts of it. Walking can be quite good exercise, unless you live somewhere very flat. My V02 max continues to climb steadily 0.1/week like clockwork, and no running yet. Granted, it's got a ways to go, it's just barely above average, but still, walking is working.
The point is there are those for whom one of the only forms exercise within reach is walking but it isn't thought of as exercise. Not all people are able to do more intense cardio or lift weights. Regular walking can bootstrap the body toward other exercise.
Tai chi actually is another amazing tool - it is a dynamic calisthenics exercise that builds core strength, balance, and stretches connective tissue.
I find it interesting that the article is about exercise and the title picture is yoga. In fact near the top
> 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.
Yoga is neither aerobic fitness nor weight training
note: I do yoga probably about twice a month (should do more) so I'm not dissing yoga. I'm only noting that the picture of yoga seems to have nothing to do with the article.
I do several styles of yoga. Most provide substantial strength training via moving and suspending body weight. All feel like they have exactly the increased heart rate of aerobic exercise. Flowing e.g. from standing to high plank to low plank to cobra to downward dog and back to standing N times in a row is quite the workout. Maybe there are gentle, stretching-only forms that would not, but I haven't found them. Slower and more careful, yes, but from an effort point of view, really not much different from the burpees or calisthenics I used to do in Crossfit.
If the proposition is "exercise is a miracle drug," my experience at least is that yoga 100% qualifies.
I think you might've misunderstood the parent comment. Yoga is exercise, no one doubts that, but it specifically is not aerobic exercise (like running) and it is not weight lifting (like gym).
There are different yoga styles - there is Yin Yoga which is more still, there is Ashtanga Yoga which is more Strength-Based. Something like a Hot Vinyasa or Bikram will definitely be a great cardio workout. So telling us that you are doing yoga is like telling you've eaten pizza. There is lot of different toppings mate :P
When I got laid off from my first job, I used the extra time to start going to the gym. Years later the habit has still stuck, and I actually think I was so incredibly lucky to get laid off. Working out has been such a massive improvement in all areas of life. Health problems went away, mental health got better, sleep quality got better, it truly is a miracle drug. It’s a shame that the habit is hard to form.
For a long time I tried to start an exercise habit, but it didn't stick. I could jog 15 minutes every day for a month and instantly be sick of it a few days after.
I was only able to gain an exercise habit by addressing my mood and anxiety first. First, with my mental improvements I became actively motivated to exercise and didn't hate it anymore. I kept at it for several weeks, only stopping every so often due to fatigue. Eventually I did earn the habit of exercise. This wasn't intuitive to me, but the typical causality was backwards. Exercise was not what directly made me healthier, but being healthier (mentally) from the start allowed me to initiate and keep exercising, from which I earned even more health benefits.
A mental deficit in being able to form habits is arguably even worse than a lack of exercise, since you would try to apply the "exercise cure" advice and just burn out after a while like I did. It's not like you didn't exercise, but you could not internalize what all those people typically say must be the case if you just exercise a lot.
Even as my mood fluctuates I am now able to still go for a jog once in a while. These days I understand that if I had started off exercising in a state of low mood, I would have no chance of making it stick. The habit carried over from when I persisted at it in my limited window of improved mood.
The expectation that a healthier globe = global economy will be healthier for the US economy, even if it's not literally an interest-bearing investment vehicle?
Worse, it never even attempts to answer the question the title poses. It gives some recent evidence that exercise is good for you, and then goes off on a topic so unrelated it can’t even be called a tangent.
The best way to make a happy, healthy person into an unhappy, unhealthy person is to keep them lonely and keep them still. It should come as no surprise that the inverse also tends to hold true.
On a tangent, I think that's part of why volunteering can be so rewarding.
This is an interesting comment because I've lived a lot of sides of this.
At my first job (where I kinda 'weaseled' my way into doing software vs my job title) it was an incredibly collaborative experience. It started with finding ways to make tools that helped my colleagues do monotonous tasks faster. Which then evolved into fun dialogue. "Hey can you make a button to do X" and we'd get to talk about it, I'd hack the feature together, hit publish and wait for the team to give feedback. "Oh I got this error" I'd get up and walk over. It wasn't perfect but I was never lonely and only as still as I wanted to be.
At my second gig, It started a little lonely but thankfully the culture was just laid back enough I got to socialize (thankfully it was a shop full of fun and interesting people!).
Third gig, Uggh it was very 'heads down' for most of my time there, nobody liked small talk except the conspiracy theory guy. I learned a lot about what I did and didn't like in company culture there. It did get a little better before I left...
Fourth gig was a dream. It was the second place where I didn't just get to collaborate with my team, but the first place where it was a lot of software engineers. We even had a teams room for nothing but sharing music and it was always heartwarming to see a reply to some obscure tune and someone would reply with something that yes you would absolutely appreciate given what you originally posted. And it was hectic enough that I did get a reputation for being a 'floor runner'.
Fifth Gig... well it was 100% remote. And in fact one day I was so focused on a problem I sat in the wrong position too long and permanently fucked up my left ulnar nerve... But that was such a good group, and Ironically I was able to -take- the lessons from #4 and #2 and turned them into traditions that stuck around even after I left (hell even after they fired everyone, we kept doing the 'game night' for a while...)
Won't say anything about my current place, that's all still a work in progress <_<
There were no restrictions on running or biking in the pandemic. Quite the opposite. Because indoor entertainment venues like bars weren't available, I saw way more people embracing the outdoors.
If you ever struggle to exercise consider: for thousands of years humans needed to walk and hunt and cook and run from predators just to survive. It’s sedentary lifestyles that are the anomaly.
Not exercising is a miracle NOT drug! Exercise is what your body is engineered for by nature and thousands of years of evolution. So exercising is the more normal thing, not sitting around :)
Get out there and have fun with it! Even walking you’ll get to see the sky, sunset, sunrise, and all the big houses in your neighborhood.
Exercise "simulate the arduous tasks that were once necessary to make it through a life" makes sense, as most of our ancestors were blue-collar workers and farmers. I try to integrate more physical activity in my life, which seemed like labor before, but now feels like life-saving activity. For example, I am intentionally trying to fix/diy things with my house like painting my garage, mowing my lawn instead of hiring someone else to do it, and even learning woodworking and gardening. Even in the heat of the summer, I feel more invigorated working outdoor whenever I can, and helps offset the sluggishness I feel after a day of sitting, coding, and staring at the monitors at work.
The human body didn't evolve to do farm work, or mow lawns, or more generally to do "blue collar" work. Also, our ancestors weren't known for their exceptional lifespans.
If you exercise a lot, be sure to fuel your workouts. Eat a healthy calories surplus so your body doesn’t go into panic mode and sacrifice muscle and bone tissue.
I’m in my 40s and have exercised my whole life. But still did intermittent fasting (skipped breakfast). I’m a standard deviation below average bone density and have lost some cartilage in my knee from underfueled long runs (I was diagnosed with RED-S). Now I work with a sports nutritionist, and do a mix of strength, running, cycling with good rest days.
I’ve learned I’d rather have a bit of a belly now but very strong than underfueled and lost muscle/bone mass
I took up climbing a couple of months ago and for the first few weeks felt really rough, it took me that long to realise there were days when between the actual climbing and walking to and from the gym I was burning an extra thousand calories. I’ve since started making an effort to track how much I’m eating and how much I’m burning and feel tons better, if slightly full on the days I get home and realise dinner should be as much as I’d eat in a typical day before I was exercising.
I go for a decent walk most days and it doesn't require effort or get boring. It goes well with listening to headphones and relaxing the eyes on the horizon plus seeing a bit of nature and humanity in action.
This does me a lot of good however the only upper body exercise I get is playing the piano! I can't see myself joining a gym or doing press-ups reliably in the long-term. I need to find a suitable hobby which has upper body + other benefits while being fun/interesting and low-risk. Carrying logs has helped but we have enough firewood now.
Maybe not a drug. But if the improvements in health come from bio chemical signals, it should be possible to activate those signals without engaging in exercise. Eventually?
Strictly speaking, any intervention other than exercise is going to give you a subset of the total stimulation. A drug acting on the tissues directly would bypass the neurological component, for example.
If the idea is to avoid the effort of exercise, perhaps it would be worth considering the possibility that the effort itself is essential.
It would take a lot of different drugs to simulate what exercise does.
- Impact and stress strengthening the muscles, bones and tendons / ligaments
- energy use that leads to better sleep
- increased blood flow, development of new capillaries, stretching of blood vessels
- if you exercise outside, exposure to sunlight
- the release of all the associated neurochemicals
I have a suspicion that anything designed to mimic exercise would hurt as much as the actual thing given that so many of the benefits of exercise involve damaging bone and tissue then repairing it
Steroids. You will be growing muscle while sitting on a couch, even better than someone that naturally trains. However, you very likely will develop asymetries or other weird complications because you didnt properly work out.
My point is that, even though we might find even more ways to improve/modify our bodies, they will come with slew of risks that are just not worth it if you can achieve it naturally.
On another note, I feel like there is severe muscle inflation in media which would distort how fit a person should be. You really do not need to kill yourself in the gym or hop on a some reddit-approved juices to get very fit. Just gotta experiment and find a comfortable full body workout that you can do consistently, like you brush your teeth every day.
Actually, that's not how steroids work. It's a common misconception that one can take "roids" and just sit on the sofa while munching on potato chips and get shredded and pack on muscle but in reality what the steroids do are to move ones natural limitations further away thus enabling larger muscle mass than naturally. But this still requires one to put in the work, i.e. the stimulus to trigger the muscle growth and to rest and eat properly.
That's not how steroids work. Muscles need stimulus to grow even with steroids. What steroids do is make your body recover faster so you can train more often and build muscle right away.
> 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.
Time is short, I’ll take the walk and lift the weights but if I can get the results faster using biological engineering, I’m willing to spend and accept greater risk to make it happen (both for metabolic profile management a la GLP-1RAs and muscle growth). There is no extra credit for making life harder than it has to be, and we’re all dead eventually.
It's difficult to overstate how much better my life has become after starting tirzepatide, consequently losing weight, and steadily increasing exercise as I've gotten lighter. If I were the richest guy in the world, I'd negotiate with Eli Lilly to make tirzepatide (or maybe the forthcoming orforglipron) basically free for anyone who wants it.
>Like someone already said: what if you get an injury going to hard at it?
There's no need to go hard, even steady walking for 20 minutes a day is healthy. And recent studies show that you don't need to jog or run, walking is almost as efficient and less stressful for your joints.
One of the best ways to exercise as long as you aren't a brain in a jar is to use an indoor rowing machine. Rowing will engage about 80% of your muscles.
For me I don't think walking 20 minutes a day is enough. I did more than that right after graduation. It didn't change any of the metrics usually used for measuring healthiness: my resting heart rate didn't change, my VO2max didn't change, my weight didn't change, etc. it was when I started regularly running 2 hours per week (aka around 20 minutes per day) that I started observing my health improve. YMMV.
Humans evolved to run but rowing is much better in many ways.
I'm up to 1.3 million meters this year so far (C2 Model D / PM4). I've missed zero days since the first of the year. The only way this is possible is because the impact is whatever you want it to be. You can scale all the way to ~zero if you are having a really shit day and just need the mental checkmark. You can throw the MacBook on a chair next to the rower and watch some dopamine slop to keep you distracted for the 30 minutes. Whatever it takes. Achieving 500 calories/hr is not difficult even if you've never looked at one of the machines before.
Going outside in any capacity has a lot higher physical/mental barrier. Other erg machines like treadmills and stationary bikes are something that my particular monkey brain doesn't like as much for whatever reason.
The C2 machine is fine, I use it regularly in a nearby studio besides other training and it's perfect for training. If the studio wouldn't be easily available I would buy a C2. And, by the way, my wife too started to be an avid rower after giving the machine a try.
I was rowing on real boats during my school and university days, but sadly never found the time afterwards to get join a club and row in teams.
Rowing machines with a water container are en vogue, but they are heavier (if filled with water) need regular water maintenance and the training effect isn't better.
I tried to outrun my depression but then I became too depressed to run. It's so frustrating to feel that exercise doesn't give me the boost it used to.
GLP-1 is a rare opportunity for our overweight nation to "get back on the treadmill" in both a literal and figurative way.
If you have been sedentary for a long time and are overweight, you obviously have too much weight for your muscular strength and connective tissues, which have concurrently atrophied with inactivity, in addition to reduced neuro-biomechanic maps in your brain since you haven't used the circuitry.
This all adds up to a high initial injury risk in starting exercise even if you have the mentally focus.
But GLP-1, if it is the miracle it purports, should be able to drop overweight people, even if it is temporarily, to the point where you can being exercise much more safely, and/or with more intensity and duration to get more benefits sooner.
On a macro level a universal health care system that is cheap and effective is really a generation or two away with heavily incentivized exercise, and not without precedent, if I am to understand what Iceland did.
We will live longer, live far better, feel better, look better, be happier, more connected, less anxious, more adventurous, smarter, more productive. These aren't 1-2% improvements at macro levels. 10% improvements, which in pharma land are considered exceptionally effective drugs, and a minimum, and 30-50% miracle drug levels of outcomes are on the table.
But our medical establishment is either drugs or surgery. The extent of insurance company inducements are "silver sneakers".
The perverse accounting involved in extreme obesity may demand a national level program of "Biggest Loser" (although, not to that insanity) for financial inducements to get people to lose weight, because the loss of "caring" for the obese (FORTY PERCENT of Americans are obese and it keeps getting worse each decade).
> We will live longer, live far better, feel better, look better, be happier, more connected, less anxious, more adventurous, smarter, more productive.
I injured my knees by running more than my knees could handle. Instead of never exercising again, after a 2 month long break I started incorporating other forms of exercise in my run schedule. Now I run longer and have other parts of my body feel better.
There’s a hundred reasons to not exercise but you only need to focus on the one reason why you need to keep doing it.
I'd rather be outside exercising / having fun and get the occasional twisted ankle or whatever, then staying home sitting on the couch and feeling like crap.
Personally the only, very minor, sports injury I have had is jamming my thumb pretty badly when my skis came off (poor bindings). Was better in a couple of weeks - no big deal. I'm 64 and started skiing 6-7 years ago, now happily going down blacks.
I did partially tear my shoulder muscle off the bone (rotator cuff tear), but that wasn't due to sports - was due to carrying my daughter around for too long (as she got bigger/heavier) with one arm and the constant bouncing. Painful at the time, but not a big deal - got better in the end just by using it and building up the joint strength again. You could also twist an ankle at home tripping over the dog - stuff happens.
Due to age/genetics I don't have the best knees, but still run, just on a rubber running track rather than on the road/sidewalk which is too jolting. You adapt.
Hmm, what else ... I have an occasional inner ear balance issue (age again?) that gets brought on by too rapid head movement or jolts, so I just avoid that. I swim outdoors in the summer all the time, and just avoid the crawl since side breathing is the kind of thing that may cause it. Again, not even caused by sports, and swimming has to be about as safe a type of exercise as you can get.
Get out there and enjoy yourself, and get some exercise!
Now tell me how many years extra you live compared to the you that just eats healthy but doesn't exercise outside of 3000 steps a day (not bedridden, not intentionally exercising)
The vast vast majority of injuries are recoverable from and you will be able to return to what you did before. There are some bad ones, but even people with hip replacements, ACL tears and all sorts of nasty “career ending” injuries will be able to run/bike/play tennis/golf/weightlift.
It’s pretty well understood that stopping moving is incredibly bad for your body, and modern recoveries focus on pain management, pain avoidance and getting you moving again as quickly as possible.
> That I was born in the capital of the world’s richest country is one of the greatest strokes of luck in my life—a pure accident of timing and gametes. There is no way to pay back this good fortune, and wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either.
Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way? How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt? This has to be as unhealthy as exercise is healthy.
Grateful, yes, appreciative, absolutely, motivated to do good, of course. Having to pay "back" (to whom?), feeling guilty? Absurd and corrosive
When you see how much suffering is allotted to those less lucky than yourself it’s natural to feel a little bad or guilty. It shows that you care about the wellbeing of others. Not helpful to beat yourself up but to shrug your shoulders and go “sucks to suck” is bad.
I've traveled to some of the poorest parts of the world. I try to donate regularly to the less fortunate. Yet, I've never felt guilt. What does guilt have to do with admitting the world is a cruel place?
> Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way? How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt?
The author themselves said:
> That I was born in the capital of the world’s richest country is one of the greatest strokes of luck in my life—a pure accident of timing and gametes. There is no way to pay back this good fortune, and wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either.
You mentioned "noblesse oblige" which is
> a French expression that means that nobility extends beyond mere entitlement, requiring people who hold such status to fulfill social responsibilities
It seems that everybody is talking past one another in this exchange. The author acknowledges that guilt over this is unproductive and implicitly admonishes readers of means to help those less fortunate in the same paragraph:
> The quiet miracle of charity and global aid is that the uneven distribution of global wealth creates an asymmetry by which relatively trivial amounts of money from the rich can prevent immense suffering and death among the poor.
One can simultaneously shed feelings of guilt over their fortunate socioeconomic position and give to those less fortunate. These two things are not mutually exclusive. To say that somebody should feel bad over something over which they had no control is nothing more than a secular version of original sin. I know I'd prefer to have a privileged class that pays it forward out of an intrinsic motivation to do good instead of a negative one like guilt... seems more stable and less prone to class warfare, but then again I'm no historian or anthropologist.
The author doesn’t say they feel bad about being lucky. Quite to the contrary, they are implying that one shouldn’t feel bad about it. One might feel a certain responsibility from particularly good fortune, however.
I am confused. Just in that small excerpt you quoted it reads "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either", explicitly rejecting the larger part of idea you are critizing?
Guilt? Maybe not. Feeling bad about seeing all the injustice in the world and wanting to change it is pretty natural.
The world is unjust and 99.9% of it is not our fault. It's caused by nature and other people and bad luck and history and bad systems. But nonetheless, many important institutions exist to make the world somewhat less unjust. This happens because people make it happen.
I think you might feel differently if you spent some time in sub saharan Africa. I went for the first time this year and was amazed at the warmth and generosity of the people I met. I was also shocked at how solvable most of their problems are with even just a little bit of money. Like I felt guilty, not in like a pay back way but in a "wow i can't believe how much time this lady would save if this village had can openers" kind of way.
I guess it is the same as taking a multiple-choice test, filling it out randomly and getting a perfect score.
Yes, you are lucky. But also: you should feel guilty about it.
Same with random things happening in your life and turning out well. If you don't know why they happened then who says you will be lucky the next time? Better feel a little guilty and try to understand how you can turn the odds your way (and perhaps also so others can benefit).
> Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way?
For the same reason you have survivors guilt. When you see the similarity in others, ie empathy, and you see a divergent fate from yourself (either positive or negative), you can feel an incongruence when real world picks vastly different outcomes. This is deeply human, and likely goes further back to primates or even mammals.
Conversely, this is the sympathetic effect that can trick people into buying lottery tickets because if they see a ”nobody” winning big, ”they can too”, despite the odds. Or the American version: working at Walmart and seeing a billionaire on TV and thinking ”that’s me, soon”.
Recognizing the luck of birth conditions isn’t any different. I can relate because they are extremely strong predictors of welfare and success, but it’s also not something I go around and dwell on or causes me any pain. I think most people who get frustrated with others recognizing their own privilege is it can undermine their sense of identity, such as ”everything i have is a result of my individual hard work, and those who have less are lazy”. You can build a false identity on either premise.
What on earth are you talking about? The text you quote says literally "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing" and you're asking "How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt?"???
Most communication isn’t a legal contract, and a lot of meaning is implicit, not just what is explicitly said.
I’m not saying I agree or disagree with the statements you mentioned, but "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing" implies wallowing in guilt is a natural or even expected feeling. The person you’re replying to is questioning why someone would wallow in guilt in the first place.
I don't know about the author specifically but in many different cultures people have different understanding about what being rich means.
There are many concepts in christianity, islam etc. on it and varies a lot. In some cultures being rich is viewed as a mission given by god to do something great with it for example. In others its said that property is owned by the god and you are just given some limited time to use it for the good of humanity and preserve it, So it's not something to be proud of and you may feel sorry that others were not given such a mission.
These things not only depend on the specific religion, i.e. Christianity vs Islam but also within stuff like Protestantism and Catholicism.
Lots of stuff that the current right wing American narrative freaks out on is just a school of thought among Christians, Jews and Muslims. Many time those people are not woke or PC or whatever, just Christians that are taught by their parents to be modest and avoid bing flamboyant on their wealth. Even when people are not religious, these things run deep and defines your worldview.
My family literally died on the boat coming to the USA, leaving only a 9 year old girl orphan, another leaving a teenage girl orphan arriving alone in the USA. Luck had nothing to do with it. Some brave ass tough as nails women did though. Honor the people that put in effort/sacrifice to get your here. They were real, not some nebulous magical 'luck'.
The writer didn't actually say they feel "guilty" about it, nor that they should feel "guilty" about it.
But that term triggers libertarian sociopaths. Any idea of care for others as a priority threatens their desire to be allowed to take whatever they can.
I can directly tie my mood to how much exercise I’ve had in a given week. It’s also easy, given how busy life feels, to let the proverbial frog boil in water when it comes to this.
My partner often comments when I’ve been a little grumpier than usual by saying, “you should go on a bike ride.”
It really works wonders on the soul (and the more physical heart and lungs) getting out for a spin in the fresh air.
There is something about riding a bike that lifts people's mood like nothing else. It's the closest thing to flying like a bird that most of us will ever see. It lets you experience your neighborhood in a different light.
Riding a bike lifts my mood certainly but it doesn't let me experience my neighborhood. I zoom past the neighborhood and at 15mph you can hardly experience it. You might have some vague ideas about architectural styles in the neighborhood but that's it. If the neighborhood has shops, you can't easily visit them without first parking the bike. You need to walk to really experience a neighborhood.
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I don’t think it’s unique to bikes - lots of people have the same/similar feelings from other forms of exercise. There’s a runners high too. I used to row in university, and there was no better feeling (to me) than being in the middle of a lake in a tiny boat and clocking in 16/20k on a crisp winters morning.
Absolutely, as much as everyone says eating right, exercising and sleeping well are the answer I totally neglected myself. Boosting cardio and dropping some weight has been an absolute lifechanger
The fact that just by being on the bike for two hours, my brain doesn't go into negative pathways, but it just focuses on the road always brings me out of a slump.
I can also recommend easy, restorative yoga exercises, which is the lightest exercise there is, but it will help you with: sitting too much, improve sleep, stretch and reduce stress.
i keep up exercise for health reasons and because i do have a higher energy level if i'm in better shape.
however, both during and for two or three hours after exercising, the emotional effect is very negative. i feel much more anxious, prone to negative thoughts, self-critical, pessimistic, sometimes angry.
the benefits are definitely real but I feel like I am paying a very large cost to get them. i've tried lots of different forms of exercise and they all have this effect if i push to a reasonable level of intensity.
i'm wondering if anyone else has had this experience and managed to find a place where exercising makes them feel happy.
Have you tried eating a snack after? Maybe you're hangry
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> i've tried lots of different forms of exercise
Have they all been in a gym environment? If so, it could be the reason. Going to the gym in the winter, I do get the benefits but it doesn't do as much for my mood as sports outdoors when the weather is nice.
Are you drinking alcohol ocasionally? I observed that there are two kind of pepole: - one who spend their spare time drinking - others who exercise
Both are fine for the soul :)
I like drinking while I'm doing it, and not after I've done it, but exercise is the other way around.
(OK only some exercise, and usually I already like it while I'm doing it, I just don't want to go out to do it.)
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Some people exercise to get fit.
I exercise to work up a thirst.
I exercise drinking
I don't drink in my spare time , but I can understand you comment and :)
> The author Daniel Lieberman has put it well: Exercise is healthy and rewarding even though it’s something we never evolved to do.
We have ostensibly spent much of our evolutionary budget on the ability to run ~indefinitely no matter what. Compared to virtually any other animal, we can vastly outperform them in the most arduous environments. Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level. We have connective tissue that stores and releases energy. Our bodies can reject on the order of 1kW+ of heat steady-state through the magic of evaporative cooling.
Yeah, I realized this one time while watching a documentary on some tribes hunting methods. They were hunting by running after the animal until it basically dropped from exertion. Hunters didn’t sprint. They paced but continuously and simply followed animals foot prints and droppings. They said these hunters would run for many hours each time. And sometimes they’d even be unsuccessful.
> Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level
My flat feet (and those of my mom, and those of one of her parents, ad infinitum) would beg to differ lol
Also, most of the energy our bodies burn to run just turns into heat, it's all very inefficient... even if sweating itself works pretty well, and even if our heat tolerance is high assuming we have a source of fresh water
I had flat feet most of my life, until I started a 5x per week yoga practice (ashtanga based). One day about a year into it I noticed that I had defined arches, something I hadn’t expected at all. All those one leg standing balancing poses really develops your ankles, knees, and feet.
Some years later when I started running with typical arch supporting running shoes, picked out for me at a specialty running store where they record your stride etc, I developed pretty bad plantar fasciitis as soon as I started hitting 8k on my runs. Swapped them out for zero drop Altras and I haven’t had issues since.
All that is to say our feet are pretty well designed as long as you give it the strengthening it needs. You should take care of your feet, but not coddle them, is how I’ve come to view it.
My wife's a podiatrist. I can conjure what I've heard her tell a thousand people over the years: invest in arch supports. Shoot for the ones that run about $50 and are rigid. Don't start with the $500 custom ones, and skip the $10 soft ones you see at the pharmacy. Go to REI or a running shop or a sporting goods store and get those instead.
My knees freaking killed me when I was running. I started using the supports my wife bought for me and it instantly improved, and far beyond any placebo effect. Before: my knees ached after I ran 100% of the time. Now: they never ache anymore.
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My friend has fixed his flat feet by focusing on yoga poses that engage the “knife edge” of his feet (ie: the outside). It took some time but he reckons it’s very noticeable. Maybe worth a try?
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I’ve read in a few places that the flat feet comes from wearing shoes that don’t allow your toes to splay, which causes the muscles that create the arch to atrophy. Not a scientist and have never had flat feet, so can’t confirm, but I recently started wearing zero drop shoes and definitely feel a healthy soreness as my feet get stronger.
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Nobody claimed we are intelligently designed.
Evolution is not perfect. We are still better at running long distances for long stretches of time than any other animal.
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Flat feet are often a problem of foot muscles and posture. Physiotherapy and strengthening your feet can most likely work wonders even if your family has genetic predisposition for the problem.
We're optimized for walking, not sprinting.
And if you think our moving->sweating is bad, check out horses and dogs.
Most energy used for any work (in the physics sense) ends up as heat, eventually.
I mean, would you prefer we add in some evolutionary pressure?
Note also that there are numerous champion runners with flat feet.
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How much of that is due to only using two limbs? Which also makes us slower I guess.
There is actually some evidence that, in a sprint, humans might be able to run faster on all 4 limbs than on 2
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27446911/
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It's a tradeoff. Having two general purpose limbs is useful for all sorts of things, but not escaping scary things, so endurance can somewhat make up for that.
"We have ostensibly spent much of our evolutionary budget on the ability to run ~indefinitely no matter what."
This appears to be the case and this idea is explained, in-depth, in the excellent book:
_Born to Run_
... by Christopher McDougall.
I highly recommend it.
A few books have changed my life, Born to Run is one of them.
> Compared to virtually any other animal, we can vastly outperform them in the most arduous environments. Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level.
I'm not sure from where you got this because any documentary/book/article and simply real life experiences related to this subject states the opposite (take a common animal such as a dog as an example)
This is not an obscure theory, it's called the "Endurance running hypothesis" [1], and it does seem that humans are one of very few species exceptionally well-adapted to very long-distance running (though dogs and wolves are another one). The idea is that ancient hominids in Africa practiced "persistence hunting"[2], where they would hunt e.g. antelopes and similar species by repeatedly chasing them down. The prey would sprint off when humans got close, but doing this repeatedly causes the animal to exhaust their energy or die of heat stroke, humans being much better adapted to running for many hours on end (this kind of hunting is known to happen to this day). It's plausible that persistence hunting also contributed to evolving our other super-powers, as it requires good spatial awareness, tool-use and communication.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting
Have you ever went running with a dog? Dogs can go fast over a short distance but they overheat quickly. People just keep on running way past the time the dog has collapsed.
“Real life experience” tells me I’ll run any dog into the ground if it’s over 50F. Cooler than that? The dog still better be part of a trained sledding team.
This is specifically about long distance running, where basically no animal can keep up.
A key hunan advantage was persistence hunting - track and run after a deer (or similar) prey. Tgey can burst outrun the human, burt hemshe keeps on running, eventually, often after double-digit kilometers, the human can just trot up to the exhausted nimal and kill it. That's what the tendons and evaporative cooling do.
There's a famous Uktramarathon race, iirc, the Western States 100, 100 miles in the Sierra mountains that was a horse race, until some people started running without the horse, and winning.
Ask anyone in the army how all those years of running drills have affected them as they got older. It’s not so rosy. Lots of knee problems in that group. Above average practice of running throughout life also increases likelihood of requiring pacemakers later in life.
This is a gross simplification on both accounts.
US Army veterans do have a higher rate of arthritis but their days are quite different from the "run 3-5 days a week" that most people think of when talking about recreational runners.
And the pacemaker comment stood out so I did a bit of digging and found a study [1] you might be referring to. Again, the effects were strong only in the heavy-duty-exercisers/pro/semi-pro cross-country skiier group. Additionally, this didn't offset the gains to cardiovascular or mortality risk - that group was still "healthier."
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39101218/
People in the army are also regularly carrying an extra 50 pound ruck, 25 pounds of body armor, and enough other various and sundry items to add up to about 100+ lbs of total kit. That's probably what's destroying people's knees more than the running by itself
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It's more that the military's goal isn't to produce adults that are indefinitely healthy, but rather a robust geopolitical deterrent that only requires its employees to be physical capable for about twenty years, after which their service life is over. Running is not the issue. Even a car designed for driving can be driven irresponsibly.
I can’t be sure, but my impression is that army drills (1) push uniformly (rather than let you improve at your own pace) and (2) often involve carrying your kit, which is 20-40lbs. Neither of these is similar to the kind of running GP describes, namely unburdened, at a comfortable speed, over ~arbitrary distances.
I was going to say, I don't believe that sitting on a chair for 40 hours a week is great but I've also never seen so many wounded and disabled people than with people heavily into sports.
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Army personnel in general is unnaturally beefy and I'm sure these running drills often are done carrying load, no?
Humans are evolved to run, but not to have heavy frames and not carrying material for fighting wars.
Hm, I'm skeptical. I think the data might be a little equivocal on that one.
I'm also part of the barefoot running army and tend to think that the braking forces from shoes have a role to play in knee problems (I personally stopped having them when I started running barefoot so that's where my bias comes from.)
I guess there are a lot of confounding variables in there, having taken up running a few years ago my resting heart rate is very low, and I'm far more aware of it than a non-runner. I suppose folks with a family history of heart problems may take up exercise to try and get ahead of it too.
Older soccer players, and other professional sport players have physical issues BUT they train at extremes.
To be fair, it was the weight not the distance that destroyed my knees and ankles. But still, I've aged a lot better than many of my friends and family who were more sedentary, so who knows.
Just because our ancestors did something doesn't mean it's automatically good for your health. After all, prehistoric men weren't known for their long life expectancy.
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The evidence for exercise reducing all-cause mortality is more nuanced than many assume. It's crucial to distinguish between findings from RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials) and observational studies.
A meta-analysis of RCTs with ~50,000 participants concluded that exercise did not reduce all-cause mortality or incident CVD in older adults or people with chronic conditions [1].
However, for specific high-risk groups, the causal evidence from RCTs is strong. A separate meta-analysis found that for cancer patients and survivors, exercise led to [2]:
- A 24% reduction in mortality risk
- A 48% reduction in recurrence risk
The commonly cited large benefits (e.g., 40% lower mortality) come from observational studies [3]. These are very susceptible to the "healthy user bias" or reverse causation—people who are healthy enough to exercise are already at a lower risk of dying. This makes it difficult to prove the exercise caused the benefit.
So, while exercise is strongly associated with lower mortality, the direct causal evidence for the general population isn't as definitive as it is for specific subgroups like cancer survivors.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10512580439138189...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7273753/
[3] https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m2031
Walking is exercise. Never forget that.
Consistency over sporadic herculean efforts always wins out.
There are positive physical and mental change that happen with more intensive cardio and with resistance training that you can't get from walking no matter how much you walk. And there's nothing herculian about those modes of exercise.
long-term evidence isn't clear at all for the benefit of these
You're right of course, consistency is safer and more sustainable but ego is a bitch and nobody is ever bragging or impressed about an average adult being able to walk their dog daily, or doing ten 50kg squats twice a week, or even jogging a mile three times a week (except maybe your doctor, and probably only then if you're over 40).
True, but if you can afford to hike in the mountains, you can then brag about seeing a groundhog, a chamois, a valley, joining paths, waking up with the sun (never hike in afternoons because storms and night approaching).
Which is the best of both worlds: You don’t index yourself against an herculean performance, and yet you still do exercise. And walking 8hrs in the mountains actually does wonders to weight, MUCH better than my herculean 1000m-in-70-minutes climb.
Walking is definitely better than sitting down all day, but that shouldn't be the goal. Weight training and more intense cardio are more important.
I walk every morning and hit 80-80% of my max heart rate for parts of it. Walking can be quite good exercise, unless you live somewhere very flat. My V02 max continues to climb steadily 0.1/week like clockwork, and no running yet. Granted, it's got a ways to go, it's just barely above average, but still, walking is working.
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The point is there are those for whom one of the only forms exercise within reach is walking but it isn't thought of as exercise. Not all people are able to do more intense cardio or lift weights. Regular walking can bootstrap the body toward other exercise.
Tai chi actually is another amazing tool - it is a dynamic calisthenics exercise that builds core strength, balance, and stretches connective tissue.
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I find it interesting that the article is about exercise and the title picture is yoga. In fact near the top
> 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.
Yoga is neither aerobic fitness nor weight training
note: I do yoga probably about twice a month (should do more) so I'm not dissing yoga. I'm only noting that the picture of yoga seems to have nothing to do with the article.
I do several styles of yoga. Most provide substantial strength training via moving and suspending body weight. All feel like they have exactly the increased heart rate of aerobic exercise. Flowing e.g. from standing to high plank to low plank to cobra to downward dog and back to standing N times in a row is quite the workout. Maybe there are gentle, stretching-only forms that would not, but I haven't found them. Slower and more careful, yes, but from an effort point of view, really not much different from the burpees or calisthenics I used to do in Crossfit.
If the proposition is "exercise is a miracle drug," my experience at least is that yoga 100% qualifies.
I think you might've misunderstood the parent comment. Yoga is exercise, no one doubts that, but it specifically is not aerobic exercise (like running) and it is not weight lifting (like gym).
There are different yoga styles - there is Yin Yoga which is more still, there is Ashtanga Yoga which is more Strength-Based. Something like a Hot Vinyasa or Bikram will definitely be a great cardio workout. So telling us that you are doing yoga is like telling you've eaten pizza. There is lot of different toppings mate :P
Hiit yoga too. Also in a hot room too.
When I got laid off from my first job, I used the extra time to start going to the gym. Years later the habit has still stuck, and I actually think I was so incredibly lucky to get laid off. Working out has been such a massive improvement in all areas of life. Health problems went away, mental health got better, sleep quality got better, it truly is a miracle drug. It’s a shame that the habit is hard to form.
For a long time I tried to start an exercise habit, but it didn't stick. I could jog 15 minutes every day for a month and instantly be sick of it a few days after.
I was only able to gain an exercise habit by addressing my mood and anxiety first. First, with my mental improvements I became actively motivated to exercise and didn't hate it anymore. I kept at it for several weeks, only stopping every so often due to fatigue. Eventually I did earn the habit of exercise. This wasn't intuitive to me, but the typical causality was backwards. Exercise was not what directly made me healthier, but being healthier (mentally) from the start allowed me to initiate and keep exercising, from which I earned even more health benefits.
A mental deficit in being able to form habits is arguably even worse than a lack of exercise, since you would try to apply the "exercise cure" advice and just burn out after a while like I did. It's not like you didn't exercise, but you could not internalize what all those people typically say must be the case if you just exercise a lot.
Even as my mood fluctuates I am now able to still go for a jog once in a while. These days I understand that if I had started off exercising in a state of low mood, I would have no chance of making it stick. The habit carried over from when I persisted at it in my limited window of improved mood.
> This is a staggering return on moral investment.
What exactly is moral investment and why should government be in the business of making moral investments, especially for foreign countries?
The expectation that a healthier globe = global economy will be healthier for the US economy, even if it's not literally an interest-bearing investment vehicle?
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This article feels like a bait-and-switch. Why isn't it two articles - one on the benefits of exercise and one on US foreign aid policy?
At a minimum, I don't feel the HN post title properly reflects the full contents of the article.
Worse, it never even attempts to answer the question the title poses. It gives some recent evidence that exercise is good for you, and then goes off on a topic so unrelated it can’t even be called a tangent.
The best way to make a happy, healthy person into an unhappy, unhealthy person is to keep them lonely and keep them still. It should come as no surprise that the inverse also tends to hold true.
On a tangent, I think that's part of why volunteering can be so rewarding.
> The best way to make a happy, healthy person into an unhappy, unhealthy person is to keep them lonely and keep them still.
So becoming a software developer?
Most non-freelance software development I’ve done has been a group effort.
I’ve met a lot of my gym partners, biking friends, and climbing friends through software work.
Or taking up any white collar job! There's a reason I spend a lot of my free time swimming and hiking.
This is an interesting comment because I've lived a lot of sides of this.
At my first job (where I kinda 'weaseled' my way into doing software vs my job title) it was an incredibly collaborative experience. It started with finding ways to make tools that helped my colleagues do monotonous tasks faster. Which then evolved into fun dialogue. "Hey can you make a button to do X" and we'd get to talk about it, I'd hack the feature together, hit publish and wait for the team to give feedback. "Oh I got this error" I'd get up and walk over. It wasn't perfect but I was never lonely and only as still as I wanted to be.
At my second gig, It started a little lonely but thankfully the culture was just laid back enough I got to socialize (thankfully it was a shop full of fun and interesting people!).
Third gig, Uggh it was very 'heads down' for most of my time there, nobody liked small talk except the conspiracy theory guy. I learned a lot about what I did and didn't like in company culture there. It did get a little better before I left...
Fourth gig was a dream. It was the second place where I didn't just get to collaborate with my team, but the first place where it was a lot of software engineers. We even had a teams room for nothing but sharing music and it was always heartwarming to see a reply to some obscure tune and someone would reply with something that yes you would absolutely appreciate given what you originally posted. And it was hectic enough that I did get a reputation for being a 'floor runner'.
Fifth Gig... well it was 100% remote. And in fact one day I was so focused on a problem I sat in the wrong position too long and permanently fucked up my left ulnar nerve... But that was such a good group, and Ironically I was able to -take- the lessons from #4 and #2 and turned them into traditions that stuck around even after I left (hell even after they fired everyone, we kept doing the 'game night' for a while...)
Won't say anything about my current place, that's all still a work in progress <_<
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Haha.. ouch.
No, they mitigate this by getting paid a lot of money.
> The best way to make a happy, healthy person into an unhappy, unhealthy person is to keep them lonely and keep them still.
That's pretty much what was done during the pandemic unfortunately.
There were no restrictions on running or biking in the pandemic. Quite the opposite. Because indoor entertainment venues like bars weren't available, I saw way more people embracing the outdoors.
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If you ever struggle to exercise consider: for thousands of years humans needed to walk and hunt and cook and run from predators just to survive. It’s sedentary lifestyles that are the anomaly.
Not exercising is a miracle NOT drug! Exercise is what your body is engineered for by nature and thousands of years of evolution. So exercising is the more normal thing, not sitting around :)
Get out there and have fun with it! Even walking you’ll get to see the sky, sunset, sunrise, and all the big houses in your neighborhood.
Exercise "simulate the arduous tasks that were once necessary to make it through a life" makes sense, as most of our ancestors were blue-collar workers and farmers. I try to integrate more physical activity in my life, which seemed like labor before, but now feels like life-saving activity. For example, I am intentionally trying to fix/diy things with my house like painting my garage, mowing my lawn instead of hiring someone else to do it, and even learning woodworking and gardening. Even in the heat of the summer, I feel more invigorated working outdoor whenever I can, and helps offset the sluggishness I feel after a day of sitting, coding, and staring at the monitors at work.
The human body didn't evolve to do farm work, or mow lawns, or more generally to do "blue collar" work. Also, our ancestors weren't known for their exceptional lifespans.
30-60 minutes pushing a lawn mower is good low-impact exercise. Riding around on a lawn tractor with a beer, not so much.
Ah yes, the evolutionary pressure of being a blue-collar worker.
If you exercise a lot, be sure to fuel your workouts. Eat a healthy calories surplus so your body doesn’t go into panic mode and sacrifice muscle and bone tissue.
I’m in my 40s and have exercised my whole life. But still did intermittent fasting (skipped breakfast). I’m a standard deviation below average bone density and have lost some cartilage in my knee from underfueled long runs (I was diagnosed with RED-S). Now I work with a sports nutritionist, and do a mix of strength, running, cycling with good rest days.
I’ve learned I’d rather have a bit of a belly now but very strong than underfueled and lost muscle/bone mass
I took up climbing a couple of months ago and for the first few weeks felt really rough, it took me that long to realise there were days when between the actual climbing and walking to and from the gym I was burning an extra thousand calories. I’ve since started making an effort to track how much I’m eating and how much I’m burning and feel tons better, if slightly full on the days I get home and realise dinner should be as much as I’d eat in a typical day before I was exercising.
I go for a decent walk most days and it doesn't require effort or get boring. It goes well with listening to headphones and relaxing the eyes on the horizon plus seeing a bit of nature and humanity in action.
This does me a lot of good however the only upper body exercise I get is playing the piano! I can't see myself joining a gym or doing press-ups reliably in the long-term. I need to find a suitable hobby which has upper body + other benefits while being fun/interesting and low-risk. Carrying logs has helped but we have enough firewood now.
VR boxing, sword fights or tennis. Synthriders is very nice
In this vein, Ring Fit Adventure is pretty cool if you have a Switch
Consider rock climbing
Maybe not a drug. But if the improvements in health come from bio chemical signals, it should be possible to activate those signals without engaging in exercise. Eventually?
Strictly speaking, any intervention other than exercise is going to give you a subset of the total stimulation. A drug acting on the tissues directly would bypass the neurological component, for example.
If the idea is to avoid the effort of exercise, perhaps it would be worth considering the possibility that the effort itself is essential.
not entirely true. you can have drugs that directly act on the respective receptors, either inhibit or excite them.
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It would take a lot of different drugs to simulate what exercise does.
- Impact and stress strengthening the muscles, bones and tendons / ligaments
- energy use that leads to better sleep
- increased blood flow, development of new capillaries, stretching of blood vessels
- if you exercise outside, exposure to sunlight
- the release of all the associated neurochemicals
I have a suspicion that anything designed to mimic exercise would hurt as much as the actual thing given that so many of the benefits of exercise involve damaging bone and tissue then repairing it
Steroids. You will be growing muscle while sitting on a couch, even better than someone that naturally trains. However, you very likely will develop asymetries or other weird complications because you didnt properly work out.
My point is that, even though we might find even more ways to improve/modify our bodies, they will come with slew of risks that are just not worth it if you can achieve it naturally.
On another note, I feel like there is severe muscle inflation in media which would distort how fit a person should be. You really do not need to kill yourself in the gym or hop on a some reddit-approved juices to get very fit. Just gotta experiment and find a comfortable full body workout that you can do consistently, like you brush your teeth every day.
You get plenty of asymmetries working out too, it's natural. Don't think just weight lifting, think of: tennis, boxing, baseball
Actually, that's not how steroids work. It's a common misconception that one can take "roids" and just sit on the sofa while munching on potato chips and get shredded and pack on muscle but in reality what the steroids do are to move ones natural limitations further away thus enabling larger muscle mass than naturally. But this still requires one to put in the work, i.e. the stimulus to trigger the muscle growth and to rest and eat properly.
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That's not how steroids work. Muscles need stimulus to grow even with steroids. What steroids do is make your body recover faster so you can train more often and build muscle right away.
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The article has an opinion on this
> 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.
sooner than later glp + myostatin inhibitors seems to be a big winner.
https://diabetesjournals.org/diabetes/article/72/Supplement_...
yes and no. A couple thousand myokines at work here.
Even lactate, formerly regarded as simply a waste product, is one.
But sure, a cocktail may be possible at some point, beyond getting a blood transfusion from someone fitter and maybe younger.
Yes we could also in potentially in the future manage to block pain signals when we stick our hand on hot stoves and that should be super!
This is so bleak. Go for a walk.
Time is short, I’ll take the walk and lift the weights but if I can get the results faster using biological engineering, I’m willing to spend and accept greater risk to make it happen (both for metabolic profile management a la GLP-1RAs and muscle growth). There is no extra credit for making life harder than it has to be, and we’re all dead eventually.
Why? My best friend uses a wheelchair and has dexterity issues in his hands due to a stroke.
Exercise for him is (a) expensive and (b) really really really painful.
If he could take a pill that simulated this it would be amazing for his life.
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It's difficult to overstate how much better my life has become after starting tirzepatide, consequently losing weight, and steadily increasing exercise as I've gotten lighter. If I were the richest guy in the world, I'd negotiate with Eli Lilly to make tirzepatide (or maybe the forthcoming orforglipron) basically free for anyone who wants it.
> Exercise is healthy and rewarding even though it’s something we never evolved to do.
OTOH we have billions or more mechanisms (basically all of them) that assume that we exercise regularly, at least when we are healthy.
>Like someone already said: what if you get an injury going to hard at it?
There's no need to go hard, even steady walking for 20 minutes a day is healthy. And recent studies show that you don't need to jog or run, walking is almost as efficient and less stressful for your joints.
One of the best ways to exercise as long as you aren't a brain in a jar is to use an indoor rowing machine. Rowing will engage about 80% of your muscles.
For me I don't think walking 20 minutes a day is enough. I did more than that right after graduation. It didn't change any of the metrics usually used for measuring healthiness: my resting heart rate didn't change, my VO2max didn't change, my weight didn't change, etc. it was when I started regularly running 2 hours per week (aka around 20 minutes per day) that I started observing my health improve. YMMV.
> use an indoor rowing machine
Humans evolved to run but rowing is much better in many ways.
I'm up to 1.3 million meters this year so far (C2 Model D / PM4). I've missed zero days since the first of the year. The only way this is possible is because the impact is whatever you want it to be. You can scale all the way to ~zero if you are having a really shit day and just need the mental checkmark. You can throw the MacBook on a chair next to the rower and watch some dopamine slop to keep you distracted for the 30 minutes. Whatever it takes. Achieving 500 calories/hr is not difficult even if you've never looked at one of the machines before.
Going outside in any capacity has a lot higher physical/mental barrier. Other erg machines like treadmills and stationary bikes are something that my particular monkey brain doesn't like as much for whatever reason.
Any recommendations on a rowing machine?
The C2 machine is fine, I use it regularly in a nearby studio besides other training and it's perfect for training. If the studio wouldn't be easily available I would buy a C2. And, by the way, my wife too started to be an avid rower after giving the machine a try.
I was rowing on real boats during my school and university days, but sadly never found the time afterwards to get join a club and row in teams.
Rowing machines with a water container are en vogue, but they are heavier (if filled with water) need regular water maintenance and the training effect isn't better.
Edit: here's a good intro to using such a machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHHy0KpFKvE
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for those who are biochemically inclined:
Myokines aka exerkines
I hate exercise. The only thing I hate more is not exercising.
I tried to outrun my depression but then I became too depressed to run. It's so frustrating to feel that exercise doesn't give me the boost it used to.
GLP-1 is a rare opportunity for our overweight nation to "get back on the treadmill" in both a literal and figurative way.
If you have been sedentary for a long time and are overweight, you obviously have too much weight for your muscular strength and connective tissues, which have concurrently atrophied with inactivity, in addition to reduced neuro-biomechanic maps in your brain since you haven't used the circuitry.
This all adds up to a high initial injury risk in starting exercise even if you have the mentally focus.
But GLP-1, if it is the miracle it purports, should be able to drop overweight people, even if it is temporarily, to the point where you can being exercise much more safely, and/or with more intensity and duration to get more benefits sooner.
On a macro level a universal health care system that is cheap and effective is really a generation or two away with heavily incentivized exercise, and not without precedent, if I am to understand what Iceland did.
We will live longer, live far better, feel better, look better, be happier, more connected, less anxious, more adventurous, smarter, more productive. These aren't 1-2% improvements at macro levels. 10% improvements, which in pharma land are considered exceptionally effective drugs, and a minimum, and 30-50% miracle drug levels of outcomes are on the table.
But our medical establishment is either drugs or surgery. The extent of insurance company inducements are "silver sneakers".
The perverse accounting involved in extreme obesity may demand a national level program of "Biggest Loser" (although, not to that insanity) for financial inducements to get people to lose weight, because the loss of "caring" for the obese (FORTY PERCENT of Americans are obese and it keeps getting worse each decade).
> We will live longer, live far better, feel better, look better, be happier, more connected, less anxious, more adventurous, smarter, more productive.
There's a song about that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4SzvsMFaek
Until you injure something particularly nasty, like a joint, tendon, muscle tear, etc...
I injured my knees by running more than my knees could handle. Instead of never exercising again, after a 2 month long break I started incorporating other forms of exercise in my run schedule. Now I run longer and have other parts of my body feel better.
There’s a hundred reasons to not exercise but you only need to focus on the one reason why you need to keep doing it.
Use it or lose it!
I'd rather be outside exercising / having fun and get the occasional twisted ankle or whatever, then staying home sitting on the couch and feeling like crap.
Personally the only, very minor, sports injury I have had is jamming my thumb pretty badly when my skis came off (poor bindings). Was better in a couple of weeks - no big deal. I'm 64 and started skiing 6-7 years ago, now happily going down blacks.
I did partially tear my shoulder muscle off the bone (rotator cuff tear), but that wasn't due to sports - was due to carrying my daughter around for too long (as she got bigger/heavier) with one arm and the constant bouncing. Painful at the time, but not a big deal - got better in the end just by using it and building up the joint strength again. You could also twist an ankle at home tripping over the dog - stuff happens.
Due to age/genetics I don't have the best knees, but still run, just on a rubber running track rather than on the road/sidewalk which is too jolting. You adapt.
Hmm, what else ... I have an occasional inner ear balance issue (age again?) that gets brought on by too rapid head movement or jolts, so I just avoid that. I swim outdoors in the summer all the time, and just avoid the crawl since side breathing is the kind of thing that may cause it. Again, not even caused by sports, and swimming has to be about as safe a type of exercise as you can get.
Get out there and enjoy yourself, and get some exercise!
Now tell me how many years extra you live compared to the you that just eats healthy but doesn't exercise outside of 3000 steps a day (not bedridden, not intentionally exercising)
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Then we switch sports and start rehab. Aerobic exercise can be done in so many ways.
You can also walk and bike, it doesn't need to be crazy intensive.
As if no one, ever, in the history of time, was injured by walking or biking?
The vast vast majority of injuries are recoverable from and you will be able to return to what you did before. There are some bad ones, but even people with hip replacements, ACL tears and all sorts of nasty “career ending” injuries will be able to run/bike/play tennis/golf/weightlift.
It’s pretty well understood that stopping moving is incredibly bad for your body, and modern recoveries focus on pain management, pain avoidance and getting you moving again as quickly as possible.
A proper training plan makes you more injury resistant and makes it easier to bounce back from injuries if you do happen to get hurt.
For example, just look at the data for sarcopenia: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9654071
Lack of exercise is vastly more likely to cause injury to your body than exercise is.
Unless you're an elite athlete pushing your body beyond what is reasonable, but that really doesn't apply to most people.
Exercising wrong is more likely to cause you injury than either of those things. Do a bit, and do it carefully
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It will happen. But, that’s part of the game. The alternative? A mind in a useless body.
There will be mind but not a healthy one.
Love the description!
> That I was born in the capital of the world’s richest country is one of the greatest strokes of luck in my life—a pure accident of timing and gametes. There is no way to pay back this good fortune, and wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either.
Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way? How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt? This has to be as unhealthy as exercise is healthy.
Grateful, yes, appreciative, absolutely, motivated to do good, of course. Having to pay "back" (to whom?), feeling guilty? Absurd and corrosive
When you see how much suffering is allotted to those less lucky than yourself it’s natural to feel a little bad or guilty. It shows that you care about the wellbeing of others. Not helpful to beat yourself up but to shrug your shoulders and go “sucks to suck” is bad.
I've traveled to some of the poorest parts of the world. I try to donate regularly to the less fortunate. Yet, I've never felt guilt. What does guilt have to do with admitting the world is a cruel place?
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Noblesse oblige used to be a virtue among the noble but it seems now people consider it "Absurd and corrosive"
OP said of the author:
> Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way? How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt?
The author themselves said:
> That I was born in the capital of the world’s richest country is one of the greatest strokes of luck in my life—a pure accident of timing and gametes. There is no way to pay back this good fortune, and wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either.
You mentioned "noblesse oblige" which is
> a French expression that means that nobility extends beyond mere entitlement, requiring people who hold such status to fulfill social responsibilities
It seems that everybody is talking past one another in this exchange. The author acknowledges that guilt over this is unproductive and implicitly admonishes readers of means to help those less fortunate in the same paragraph:
> The quiet miracle of charity and global aid is that the uneven distribution of global wealth creates an asymmetry by which relatively trivial amounts of money from the rich can prevent immense suffering and death among the poor.
One can simultaneously shed feelings of guilt over their fortunate socioeconomic position and give to those less fortunate. These two things are not mutually exclusive. To say that somebody should feel bad over something over which they had no control is nothing more than a secular version of original sin. I know I'd prefer to have a privileged class that pays it forward out of an intrinsic motivation to do good instead of a negative one like guilt... seems more stable and less prone to class warfare, but then again I'm no historian or anthropologist.
Good old colonial times, free of workplace regulations
The author doesn’t say they feel bad about being lucky. Quite to the contrary, they are implying that one shouldn’t feel bad about it. One might feel a certain responsibility from particularly good fortune, however.
I am confused. Just in that small excerpt you quoted it reads "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing, either", explicitly rejecting the larger part of idea you are critizing?
Because its not preemptive, this is them reaching the right side of the guilt bell curve
For people raised to be susceptible to guilt from a young age
Guilt? Maybe not. Feeling bad about seeing all the injustice in the world and wanting to change it is pretty natural.
The world is unjust and 99.9% of it is not our fault. It's caused by nature and other people and bad luck and history and bad systems. But nonetheless, many important institutions exist to make the world somewhat less unjust. This happens because people make it happen.
I think you might feel differently if you spent some time in sub saharan Africa. I went for the first time this year and was amazed at the warmth and generosity of the people I met. I was also shocked at how solvable most of their problems are with even just a little bit of money. Like I felt guilty, not in like a pay back way but in a "wow i can't believe how much time this lady would save if this village had can openers" kind of way.
I guess it is the same as taking a multiple-choice test, filling it out randomly and getting a perfect score.
Yes, you are lucky. But also: you should feel guilty about it.
Same with random things happening in your life and turning out well. If you don't know why they happened then who says you will be lucky the next time? Better feel a little guilty and try to understand how you can turn the odds your way (and perhaps also so others can benefit).
Why is the guilt necessary?
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> Why in the world does the author have to feel so bad about beibg lucky in some way?
For the same reason you have survivors guilt. When you see the similarity in others, ie empathy, and you see a divergent fate from yourself (either positive or negative), you can feel an incongruence when real world picks vastly different outcomes. This is deeply human, and likely goes further back to primates or even mammals.
Conversely, this is the sympathetic effect that can trick people into buying lottery tickets because if they see a ”nobody” winning big, ”they can too”, despite the odds. Or the American version: working at Walmart and seeing a billionaire on TV and thinking ”that’s me, soon”.
Recognizing the luck of birth conditions isn’t any different. I can relate because they are extremely strong predictors of welfare and success, but it’s also not something I go around and dwell on or causes me any pain. I think most people who get frustrated with others recognizing their own privilege is it can undermine their sense of identity, such as ”everything i have is a result of my individual hard work, and those who have less are lazy”. You can build a false identity on either premise.
What on earth are you talking about? The text you quote says literally "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing" and you're asking "How does luck deserve the feeling of guilt?"???
Surely I'm missing something.
Most communication isn’t a legal contract, and a lot of meaning is implicit, not just what is explicitly said.
I’m not saying I agree or disagree with the statements you mentioned, but "wallowing in guilt over it would do nothing" implies wallowing in guilt is a natural or even expected feeling. The person you’re replying to is questioning why someone would wallow in guilt in the first place.
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I don't know about the author specifically but in many different cultures people have different understanding about what being rich means.
There are many concepts in christianity, islam etc. on it and varies a lot. In some cultures being rich is viewed as a mission given by god to do something great with it for example. In others its said that property is owned by the god and you are just given some limited time to use it for the good of humanity and preserve it, So it's not something to be proud of and you may feel sorry that others were not given such a mission.
These things not only depend on the specific religion, i.e. Christianity vs Islam but also within stuff like Protestantism and Catholicism.
Lots of stuff that the current right wing American narrative freaks out on is just a school of thought among Christians, Jews and Muslims. Many time those people are not woke or PC or whatever, just Christians that are taught by their parents to be modest and avoid bing flamboyant on their wealth. Even when people are not religious, these things run deep and defines your worldview.
Its to preempt "oh you are so lucky" distraction
My family literally died on the boat coming to the USA, leaving only a 9 year old girl orphan, another leaving a teenage girl orphan arriving alone in the USA. Luck had nothing to do with it. Some brave ass tough as nails women did though. Honor the people that put in effort/sacrifice to get your here. They were real, not some nebulous magical 'luck'.
The writer didn't actually say they feel "guilty" about it, nor that they should feel "guilty" about it.
But that term triggers libertarian sociopaths. Any idea of care for others as a priority threatens their desire to be allowed to take whatever they can.
The USA being the richest country is also somewhat debatable, especially when you consider the access to health services for the average citizen.
If we're talking about good fortune, you'd probably be better off being born in Norway or something like that.
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