Comment by gruez
1 day ago
>he has to find some way to twist it so it can't be good [...]
>"Tennis is great for you" "there's probably a correlation with being rich" "Also unhealthy people don't regularly play tennis so there's survivors bias".
But these seem like pretty reasonable objections? At the very least you should retort with a study that at least tried to control for confounders.
>"Wake up at 4:30am and go for a run" "Bro if youre waking up at 4:30 when are you going to bed" etc
I can't tell which side you're trying to strawman here. What's wrong with running at a normal time?
Its mentality. When told "Tennis is likely to have amazing health benefits", you could respond by saying "Sick, I'll integrate more tennis or sports like it into my life". In fact, one might not respond at all, and just do it. But instead, some people have this bug in their programming where they feel compelled to respond with a variant of "well, ahktually, tennis is popular among rich people so there's confounding factors at play which means you can't actually claim...."
The source of this bug is the same reason why when someone says "I wake up at 4:30am to go on a run", you'll 100% always get someone to respond "adequate sleep also matters, what time are you going to bed, you're missing out on important life events that happen after 8pm" etc. The cardinal sin is jealousy; getting up at 4:30am is hard, playing tennis multiple times a week is hard, the opposing side feels jealousy because they aren't doing something that's hard, so they need to find any way to minimize that hard thing they're doing to feel like equals.
Even you're doing this, and you don't realize it: "What's wrong with running at a normal time?". Nothing at all. Literally, seriously, no one even remotely implied there was anything wrong with running at a normal time. Someone choosing to run at 4:30am does not mean not running at 4:30am is bad; but you think it is. Why? Because it is true that running at 4:30am is harder. Harder doesn't always even mean better, especially when it comes to getting up at 4:30am, but it does definitely mean Harder. So: You minimized their strain by asserting that running at 4:30am is "not normal".
This isn't a university, and you're not a test subject. You're a human, who needs to take care of their body. Arguing about the minutia of the results of some research paper is Mindset; its forest for the trees. Literally, no one who adequately exercises would care that much about studies on tennis which adequately control for confounding factors, because they're too busy actually playing tennis, and they've seen and felt the positive effect it has had on their body and don't need a research paper to tell them its healthy.
(I'm just using tennis as an example here; there's plenty of other sports that follow this vein)
But tennis probably does not have amazing health benefits. You are criticizing comments here for perversely rejecting the amazing health benefits where I see them more as pointing out that it is irrational to conclude that just because there is a correlation between playing tennis at least twice a week and living longer that making yourself play tennis twice a week will cause you to live longer. Correlation does not imply causation.
What is true is that if you are the kind of person who can learn to play tennis well enough that it becomes fun, then you are likely to live a lot longer than if you are the kind of person who cannot do that because either your eyes, brain, your muscles or your cardiovascular system do not function well enough. For example, tennis sucks if your eyes and your brain does not work well enough for you to be able to learn to reliably hit a ball going very fast with the center of the racket, which a lot of people (and even a lot of people in the prime of their life) cannot ever learn to do.
> But these seem like pretty reasonable arguments? At the very least you should retort with a study that at least tried to control for confounders.
I disagree. The fundamental premise here is that regular exercise has profound health benefits. Tennis is simply one example.
The rebuttals to tennis here ignore the obvious truth -- there are limitless ways to get regular exercise; you just have to have some time and be willing to put some effort in. With very few exceptions there is nobody in the world for whom it's not a realistic goal.
People who simply do not want to can come up with endless excuses to rationalize it.
One can find a reasonable rebuttal for anything. The point is that pattern only emerges over time—this guy hates exercise and has a knee jerk rationalization to suggest any exercise is bad.