Comment by sidewndr46
5 days ago
I've seen studies like this before. They'll suggest that as little as 15 minutes of exercise significantly improves health in some group they studied. My initial assumption was they added 15 minutes of additional exercise. No, they studied people who did literally nothing. Then had them exercise 15 minutes a day.
As you might guess, their outcomes improved greatly.
This is sadly not a rare type of person. I'm worried my parents fit this description, they drive everywhere and work an office job. I'd guess on average they get 0 minutes of exercise a day.
I think people get this image in their head that someone who doesn't exercise ever is this comically fat unemployed person when in reality it's the average office worker who isn't fitness minded. A good chunk of HN users wouldn't be getting 15 minutes of exercise a day.
Looking at a few friend's health app on their iPhone it's amazing to me to see people who walk less than 2,000 steps a day and don't go to the gym. It's shockingly normal in some places though.
The amount of time in the exercise advice keep getting shorter and shorter. The common advice when I was younger, in the USA, was an hour of exercise. Couldn't get enough people to do it. Then it was 30 minutes. Still couldn't get people to do it. Now the advice has been 15 minutes a day for a while, and we'll still not be able to get people to do it.
The environment and culture needs to be structured such that people get the exercise they need "naturally". The vast majority aren't going to go out of their way for it.
That's a big part of why zoning is so dangerous. In most of the western world (Europe too on average), we pushed down population density so much that your typical destinations are much less likely to be within walking distance, so you don't walk.
Indeed. In NYC I do 98% of my shopping by walking. I can reach my doctor by walking. My daughter used to walk to school because it was a 10 minutes walk (and an excellent school).
That would be impossible in a suburban setting; at best, one of these destinations would be within the theoretical waking distance, but without the walkways.
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Yeah pretty much the only way to scale exercise to entire populations and over entire lifetimes is to design it directly into the cities.
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HN is always so sarcastic on this point, but a large part of the population is not getting 15-30 minutes of actual exercise a day.
15 mins of walking or exercise. I did 2 hours of walking 15k steps and it's barely moved my required cardio load to 10 and I need over 200 weekly.