How about you instead of trying to “get away with” as little exercise as possible you found a way to move your body that you genuinely enjoy? One should not optimise away sleep, nutrition and exercise. Yes we live in a ridiculous fitness and gym boom, but weight training might not actually be a good fit to most people. I love having to psych myself to lift big amounts of steel, I’m ok with bit of pain etc. - mostly people are not. There’s thousands of sports and ways to move out there. You don’t like running, well don’t. Go dancing, hiking, play a team sport, do tai-chi, yoga, goddammit change a hobby every two months, it doesn’t matter. Just do it and do it consistently every week.
And what best helps you in that is enjoying what you do, as well as doing it with a friend.
This might be good advice for people who haven't already had the rest of the living optimized out of their lives. But not everyone is so lucky...
Also, the article kind of agrees with what you're saying, even if you don't realize it. Any exercise, even if it's not organized like a weight lifting regimen might be, might be enough to keep you healthy. I think leaning into that could make exercise more genuinely enjoyable for many more people, instead of just an exercise in optimization.
For those people, any kind of a generalized take on "how much you can get away with in terms of fitness" wouldn't be helpful either. They will need a way more specific advice tailored to their individual needs and physical limitations.
It is pretty obvious the grandparent comment was just attempting to give a generalized advice, without claiming that it would comprehensively apply to every single niche condition out there (and it would be rather silly to expect it to).
If you are in this situation, you should see a physical therapist.
Exercise is even more important if you have a disability, because your muscles will atrophy from disuse and cause even greater disability.
E.g. if you stop moving your leg because you have a bad knee, you will now have a bad knee and a weak leg. If you go to PT and do exercises to strengthen the muscles around the knee, it can take load off the joint and improve function.
And those limitations don't mean people can't exercise as a whole. As the list they provided explains, the goal is to find something you can do relatively consistently that gets you active. Walking even 5 minutes more than normal is an improvement for many, and you can even reach the level of sports like wheelchair rugby.
I do not understand this type of objection. What is the point of shooting down a reasonable recommendation (in this case exercise and having fun doing so) with a handwavy moral plight such as yours?
I've read before that tall people get more cancer than short people, if it's relative to how many cells you have then an extra 30 kilograms of muscle might make a difference too!
Median age of 61… 4.4 minutes of “vigorous” activity. Hard to interpret this as anything else that if you remain being able to be somehow active in your later years you will be better off.
I find all of the studies of “how little exercise” is needed sad. Instead we should be focusing on how to restructure modern lifestyle to allow everybody to achieve the minimum of cardiovascular and strength exercises.
I'm confused. You're saddened by people researching the minimum exercise needed, but want society to aim to give people that minimum? How would society know what the minimum is?
Agreed. I've figured it out during the drier months in the NW of the States. Plenty of work in the woods, workshop, maintenance, and helping neighbors with the same. But winter and the rains I would inevitably put on 10 pounds and lose my super old guy muscles. My mildly successful campaign against the trend is long rain walks and Convict Conditioning workouts.
I think what the poster was getting at is that finding a minimum is a negative way to view human health (what is the minimum amount of food a human needs to survive, what is the minimum I need to brush my teeth so they don't fall out of my head, etc.).
Restructuring society in healthy ways (shorter work weeks, bike lanes, green cities, etc.) will allow us to achieve whatever that minimum would have been (had we measured!) and more!
At least I think that's the distinction.
The only time I prefer to sit is after I have done a good deal of exercise. I don't mean that as a jab of any sort, just a differing perspective from someone who gets much more than a minimum of required exercise.
1. Ban overworking. Make it a federal offense. Actually jail CEOs if their employees work >50 hours a week
2. These exercise tracking apps should pay people for the exercise they do. The money will come from health insurance. They pay $1 per mile you run or hike, they save $10 on your future hospitalization.
3. City sponsored exercise events and sports competitions open to everyone, not just athletes. Give tax deductions to those who participate and demonstrate attendance.
The solution is right here, above. Whether the politicians choose to listen, is not something I can influence. But I have given the solution.
It may sound crazy, but a properly installed pull up bar on your room doorway is a fun way to apply Pavel Tsatsouline ‘grease the groove’ principle. And it’s both easy and fun. You can do pull ups, and train your abdomen several times a day without getting psychological resistance (from google overview: "Grease the Groove" (GtG) is a strength training method popularized by fitness expert Pavel Tsatsouline. It involves performing a specific exercise frequently throughout the day using only 40–60% of your maximum reps. By avoiding muscle failure and staying fresh, your nervous system efficiently adapts to the movement.")
A few friends and I did this during Covid. We'd do 10 pushups at the top of the hour all day long. Each effort was pretty easy, but overall we'd end up doing 100ish pushups a day. After a while we'd increase the number per set a bit.
It was a fun way to bond and share in exercise therapy.
I'm moving to a new place and my office will have an exposed I-beam and I'm stoked. The healthiest points of my life seem to correlate with industrial architecture that I can hang on directly or with rings!
Less than 5% of the population can do a pull-up. I can after having climbed for a bit and worked towards doing it, but you might be surprised to learn how few this would actually benefit.
This is where calisthenics comes into play. You can quite easily increase and decrease the leverage on the muscle to workup to the 'main exercise' and even past it. IE, for pull ups, you can hang under a table and do a 'horizontal' pull, you can 'cheat' up the movement (jumping), you can use resistance bands, etc. This is the same for almost every muscle group.
Way back, working for the 2010 Census, I had an ex-Navy coworker who did something like that: whenever he was bored in the office, he would do a couple of push-ups before looking for new work to do.
I love to run, and even in winter, in the dark, in the rain, I will get home from work at 6pm, eat a small dinner, and head out for a 40-60 minute jog or interval session a few days a week. I do a aerial circus class once a week, too.
I am single and have no children or care giving obligations yet. I bet that when I (hopefully) have small children one day, it will be much harder for me to fit in 3-4 hours a week of running, especially when sleeping enough to feel rested. It would be nice to know what I can do to keep up my health during that phase of life.
Find something you enjoy doing, then "hack" it to make you participate more.
For example, I play a lot of ultimate in the summer. I play with a lunchtime pickup group, so there is a forcing function to play. I like to bike, and helping coach my daughter's high school mountain bike team ensures I get a lot more miles than I would otherwise. In the winter, I have friends that I ski with. I also enjoy exercising on my own, but some activities are better as a group.
When I worked in an office, I played a lot of ultimate (lunchtime pickup), but also would do walks with colleagues. Great way to combine debugging, learning, and exercise.
I live on 3rd floor with no elevator so I usually have to walk up these twice a day, this along with walking and hanging from a door frame is just enough to keep alive.
At least 30 minutes in a day, probably 3 days a week at minumum as the body requires it to maintain itself that is though if you want to live a happy and good life, but then over doing its isnt good as well, theres need to be a balance in everything
The level which means you keep doing it is the right level.
For me that's 20 minutes a day on a rowing machine plus some body weight strength exercises.
Which is about a YouTube video long and as a result I basically only watch YouTube content when I'm doing it (hey I'd like to watch this -> I should go start rowing) is a surprisingly good motivator.
Overdoing it is a real risk, I learned recently. If you work out too hard, you actually produce free radicals. The tricky thing is that some people can get used to higher heart rate so it doesn’t matter if they are working out hard consistently because they are used to it.
That's not how any of this works. Exercise causes some oxidative stress but this isn't a problem in practice. There is only a tiny fraction of committed athletes who over train to the point where it becomes detrimental; most people simply don't have the time or discipline to get anywhere close to that point.
As for heart rate, going above threshold is never comfortable. But it's a good pain and you can get used to tolerating it for occasional high-intensity interval workouts. Over time this will decrease your resting heart rate and reduce the risk of a major adverse cardiovascular event (MACE).
You need to ramp up, of course. Given you're training at an appropriate rate, and you're doing sensible things - you should be fine. By sensible things I mean: short and intense weight training, intense cardio sessions, and not-too-long endurance sessions (eg: < 5h). More endurance is fine, but it can be very fatiguing, especially for the older athlete. If you ramp up to those over time, you needn't worry about "free radicals" (that's an oversimplification).
Recent research highlights a number of things, but what sticks out is that it's important to maintaining muscle mass because we lose a bunch as we get older, and loss of muscle is a leading morbidity factor.
What a weird question.
The amount depends on what you hope to accomplish.
Want to be able to get on the floor and play with your grandkids? That's going to require a certain amount of mobility work.
Want to be able to hike up Mount Whitney? You'll need regular cardio.
I also hate the phrasing that exercise is something to "get away with". Most people who exercise regularly enjoy it. Moving your body is fun, especially once you get fit enough to do it without pain or immediate exhaustion.
And because the most people don't exercise, it's easy to conclude, that the most people don't enjoy it.
One can even conclude reverse, that only people who enjoy exercising, are doing it.
People have all kinds of self-defeating behavior, and those behaviors seem to be on the rise since smartphones became popular. It's likely that people enjoy it and won't do it anyway.
Gotta fuckin love hn. Can't say the simplest thing without getting thrown into a well, actually.
I wasn't claiming to have run a damned study. Just making an observation. The thing is, people who don't enjoy exercising but start exercising anyway tend to find they enjoy it after a while. Saying people enjoy exercise is like saying "ice cream tastes good". There's a bit of activation energy required, but it's not a huge stretch to notice that something that is good for our bodies gives us pleasure.
Lift weights. Do it multiple times a day and chase that pump. Do it for stress relief. Do it to help you fall asleep. Do it to wake up.
It's not all about cardio. Your muscles are such a significant part of your metabolism and far too many people avoid strength training. A ton of problems that arise while aging are ultimately hormonal. Even your skin improves. Cardiovascular health begins here. People are literally running before they can walk.
That's the realistic answer for most people under 65 trying to make it to at least 80 with a decent quality of life.
One thing people out here periodically is how causation is hard to find. Someone who is dying may be not inclined to do anything 'cause they feel lousy all the time.
Folks should be getting out for a brisk >20 minute/1mile/2km early/late walk everyday when its cool outside, and if you have a dog it is 2 to 3 times a day with shorter <10min sessions if you value the carpets.
Many that complain about neck or back problems are almost always suffering from stress/burnout, RSI, and or a sedentary lifestyle. Take it slow at first to avoid injuring yourself, and head home if you feel out of breath each journey. And remember to stay hydrated with normal clean water.
Getting outside regularly will help most folks live better longer lives. Have a wonderful day. =3
How about you instead of trying to “get away with” as little exercise as possible you found a way to move your body that you genuinely enjoy? One should not optimise away sleep, nutrition and exercise. Yes we live in a ridiculous fitness and gym boom, but weight training might not actually be a good fit to most people. I love having to psych myself to lift big amounts of steel, I’m ok with bit of pain etc. - mostly people are not. There’s thousands of sports and ways to move out there. You don’t like running, well don’t. Go dancing, hiking, play a team sport, do tai-chi, yoga, goddammit change a hobby every two months, it doesn’t matter. Just do it and do it consistently every week.
And what best helps you in that is enjoying what you do, as well as doing it with a friend.
This might be good advice for people who haven't already had the rest of the living optimized out of their lives. But not everyone is so lucky...
Also, the article kind of agrees with what you're saying, even if you don't realize it. Any exercise, even if it's not organized like a weight lifting regimen might be, might be enough to keep you healthy. I think leaning into that could make exercise more genuinely enjoyable for many more people, instead of just an exercise in optimization.
walking, walking, walking, walking
having a well-rounded diet and getting an hour of walking in daily is like 90% of the way there for good health.
(actually, proper sleep is the #1 most important thing)
And exercise helps sleep! It's an unbelievable virtuous cycle.
Some people have disabilities or physical limitations.
For those people, any kind of a generalized take on "how much you can get away with in terms of fitness" wouldn't be helpful either. They will need a way more specific advice tailored to their individual needs and physical limitations.
It is pretty obvious the grandparent comment was just attempting to give a generalized advice, without claiming that it would comprehensively apply to every single niche condition out there (and it would be rather silly to expect it to).
If you are in this situation, you should see a physical therapist.
Exercise is even more important if you have a disability, because your muscles will atrophy from disuse and cause even greater disability.
E.g. if you stop moving your leg because you have a bad knee, you will now have a bad knee and a weak leg. If you go to PT and do exercises to strengthen the muscles around the knee, it can take load off the joint and improve function.
And those limitations don't mean people can't exercise as a whole. As the list they provided explains, the goal is to find something you can do relatively consistently that gets you active. Walking even 5 minutes more than normal is an improvement for many, and you can even reach the level of sports like wheelchair rugby.
All the more reason to be more active. Everyone struggles.
There’s even Paralympics in this world. People with disabilities do sports, although obviously it complicates things.
Do these people you mention read a comment on the internet saying people should exercise more and think that comment is referring to them?
I do not understand this type of objection. What is the point of shooting down a reasonable recommendation (in this case exercise and having fun doing so) with a handwavy moral plight such as yours?
It truly is a bizarre spin on whataboutism.
"but weight training might not actually be a good fit to most people. I"
People will eventually realize it causes cancer. Weight training literally generates inflation.
> People will eventually realize it causes cancer. Weight training literally generates inflation.
Inflation? I don't think this comment could have better intentionally illustrated how ill-informed it is if you tried.
Can you provide studies/sources for your claims?
I've read before that tall people get more cancer than short people, if it's relative to how many cells you have then an extra 30 kilograms of muscle might make a difference too!
Virtually no one puts on 30 kg of muscle by weight training without steroids.
The studies I've seen point to a reduce risk & mortality of diseases inclusive of cancer, not sure what you've been reading from.
just raise interest rates to counteract, then
perhaps you meant inflammation
resistance training doesn't cause cancer though
I suppose that if your muscles grow rapidly, you could call that inflation of some kind? Connection to cancer still unclear though.
Median age of 61… 4.4 minutes of “vigorous” activity. Hard to interpret this as anything else that if you remain being able to be somehow active in your later years you will be better off.
I find all of the studies of “how little exercise” is needed sad. Instead we should be focusing on how to restructure modern lifestyle to allow everybody to achieve the minimum of cardiovascular and strength exercises.
I'm confused. You're saddened by people researching the minimum exercise needed, but want society to aim to give people that minimum? How would society know what the minimum is?
Presumably it’s a known amount approximately matching what they do.
Agreed. I've figured it out during the drier months in the NW of the States. Plenty of work in the woods, workshop, maintenance, and helping neighbors with the same. But winter and the rains I would inevitably put on 10 pounds and lose my super old guy muscles. My mildly successful campaign against the trend is long rain walks and Convict Conditioning workouts.
Completely restructuring society seems so simple to some people.
What needs to be done is relatively simple. Convincing society to fix what's broken is the hard part.
We need to restructure cities away from being driving focused.
Restructuring the modern lifestyle, allowing people more free time to focus on their health, is unprofitable.
Whereas minimizing the amount of free time people spend on their health, allowing people more time to labor or consume, is profitable.
100% agree. The real battle isn't the actual exercise. It's initiating it in the face of endless distractions.
> allow everybody to achieve the minimum of cardiovascular and strength exercises
Aren't you just asking the same question?
I certainly prefer sitting then doing exercise, I just also don't like the consequences of doing none.
I think what the poster was getting at is that finding a minimum is a negative way to view human health (what is the minimum amount of food a human needs to survive, what is the minimum I need to brush my teeth so they don't fall out of my head, etc.).
Restructuring society in healthy ways (shorter work weeks, bike lanes, green cities, etc.) will allow us to achieve whatever that minimum would have been (had we measured!) and more!
At least I think that's the distinction.
The only time I prefer to sit is after I have done a good deal of exercise. I don't mean that as a jab of any sort, just a differing perspective from someone who gets much more than a minimum of required exercise.
It's not hard to restructure it at all.
1. Ban overworking. Make it a federal offense. Actually jail CEOs if their employees work >50 hours a week
2. These exercise tracking apps should pay people for the exercise they do. The money will come from health insurance. They pay $1 per mile you run or hike, they save $10 on your future hospitalization.
3. City sponsored exercise events and sports competitions open to everyone, not just athletes. Give tax deductions to those who participate and demonstrate attendance.
The solution is right here, above. Whether the politicians choose to listen, is not something I can influence. But I have given the solution.
It may sound crazy, but a properly installed pull up bar on your room doorway is a fun way to apply Pavel Tsatsouline ‘grease the groove’ principle. And it’s both easy and fun. You can do pull ups, and train your abdomen several times a day without getting psychological resistance (from google overview: "Grease the Groove" (GtG) is a strength training method popularized by fitness expert Pavel Tsatsouline. It involves performing a specific exercise frequently throughout the day using only 40–60% of your maximum reps. By avoiding muscle failure and staying fresh, your nervous system efficiently adapts to the movement.")
A few friends and I did this during Covid. We'd do 10 pushups at the top of the hour all day long. Each effort was pretty easy, but overall we'd end up doing 100ish pushups a day. After a while we'd increase the number per set a bit.
It was a fun way to bond and share in exercise therapy.
I'm moving to a new place and my office will have an exposed I-beam and I'm stoked. The healthiest points of my life seem to correlate with industrial architecture that I can hang on directly or with rings!
Less than 5% of the population can do a pull-up. I can after having climbed for a bit and worked towards doing it, but you might be surprised to learn how few this would actually benefit.
This is where calisthenics comes into play. You can quite easily increase and decrease the leverage on the muscle to workup to the 'main exercise' and even past it. IE, for pull ups, you can hang under a table and do a 'horizontal' pull, you can 'cheat' up the movement (jumping), you can use resistance bands, etc. This is the same for almost every muscle group.
if it's sturdy/you're light then doing eccentrics (jump up, come down unassisted) is a good way of working up to full pull ups.
Way back, working for the 2010 Census, I had an ex-Navy coworker who did something like that: whenever he was bored in the office, he would do a couple of push-ups before looking for new work to do.
My dentist told me I don't have to floss all of my teeth, just the ones I want to keep. You don't have to exercise all of your muscles either.
https://archive.is/mai5w
I love to run, and even in winter, in the dark, in the rain, I will get home from work at 6pm, eat a small dinner, and head out for a 40-60 minute jog or interval session a few days a week. I do a aerial circus class once a week, too.
I am single and have no children or care giving obligations yet. I bet that when I (hopefully) have small children one day, it will be much harder for me to fit in 3-4 hours a week of running, especially when sleeping enough to feel rested. It would be nice to know what I can do to keep up my health during that phase of life.
Find something you enjoy doing, then "hack" it to make you participate more.
For example, I play a lot of ultimate in the summer. I play with a lunchtime pickup group, so there is a forcing function to play. I like to bike, and helping coach my daughter's high school mountain bike team ensures I get a lot more miles than I would otherwise. In the winter, I have friends that I ski with. I also enjoy exercising on my own, but some activities are better as a group.
When I worked in an office, I played a lot of ultimate (lunchtime pickup), but also would do walks with colleagues. Great way to combine debugging, learning, and exercise.
I live on 3rd floor with no elevator so I usually have to walk up these twice a day, this along with walking and hanging from a door frame is just enough to keep alive.
At least 30 minutes in a day, probably 3 days a week at minumum as the body requires it to maintain itself that is though if you want to live a happy and good life, but then over doing its isnt good as well, theres need to be a balance in everything
The level which means you keep doing it is the right level.
For me that's 20 minutes a day on a rowing machine plus some body weight strength exercises.
Which is about a YouTube video long and as a result I basically only watch YouTube content when I'm doing it (hey I'd like to watch this -> I should go start rowing) is a surprisingly good motivator.
Overdoing it is a real risk, I learned recently. If you work out too hard, you actually produce free radicals. The tricky thing is that some people can get used to higher heart rate so it doesn’t matter if they are working out hard consistently because they are used to it.
That's not how any of this works. Exercise causes some oxidative stress but this isn't a problem in practice. There is only a tiny fraction of committed athletes who over train to the point where it becomes detrimental; most people simply don't have the time or discipline to get anywhere close to that point.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jshs.2020.04.001
As for heart rate, going above threshold is never comfortable. But it's a good pain and you can get used to tolerating it for occasional high-intensity interval workouts. Over time this will decrease your resting heart rate and reduce the risk of a major adverse cardiovascular event (MACE).
You need to ramp up, of course. Given you're training at an appropriate rate, and you're doing sensible things - you should be fine. By sensible things I mean: short and intense weight training, intense cardio sessions, and not-too-long endurance sessions (eg: < 5h). More endurance is fine, but it can be very fatiguing, especially for the older athlete. If you ramp up to those over time, you needn't worry about "free radicals" (that's an oversimplification).
Recent research highlights a number of things, but what sticks out is that it's important to maintaining muscle mass because we lose a bunch as we get older, and loss of muscle is a leading morbidity factor.
What a weird question. The amount depends on what you hope to accomplish.
Want to be able to get on the floor and play with your grandkids? That's going to require a certain amount of mobility work.
Want to be able to hike up Mount Whitney? You'll need regular cardio.
I also hate the phrasing that exercise is something to "get away with". Most people who exercise regularly enjoy it. Moving your body is fun, especially once you get fit enough to do it without pain or immediate exhaustion.
> Most people who exercise regularly enjoy it.
And because the most people don't exercise, it's easy to conclude, that the most people don't enjoy it. One can even conclude reverse, that only people who enjoy exercising, are doing it.
I doubt it.
People have all kinds of self-defeating behavior, and those behaviors seem to be on the rise since smartphones became popular. It's likely that people enjoy it and won't do it anyway.
Most people who exercise regularly enjoy it.
There's a huge selection effect here.
Gotta fuckin love hn. Can't say the simplest thing without getting thrown into a well, actually.
I wasn't claiming to have run a damned study. Just making an observation. The thing is, people who don't enjoy exercising but start exercising anyway tend to find they enjoy it after a while. Saying people enjoy exercise is like saying "ice cream tastes good". There's a bit of activation energy required, but it's not a huge stretch to notice that something that is good for our bodies gives us pleasure.
Lift weights. Do it multiple times a day and chase that pump. Do it for stress relief. Do it to help you fall asleep. Do it to wake up.
It's not all about cardio. Your muscles are such a significant part of your metabolism and far too many people avoid strength training. A ton of problems that arise while aging are ultimately hormonal. Even your skin improves. Cardiovascular health begins here. People are literally running before they can walk.
That's the realistic answer for most people under 65 trying to make it to at least 80 with a decent quality of life.
Lift weights, but like 30-60 minutes 3x a week is plenty. You definitely don't have to do it multiple times a day if that would be inconvenient.
One thing people out here periodically is how causation is hard to find. Someone who is dying may be not inclined to do anything 'cause they feel lousy all the time.
Folks should be getting out for a brisk >20 minute/1mile/2km early/late walk everyday when its cool outside, and if you have a dog it is 2 to 3 times a day with shorter <10min sessions if you value the carpets.
Many that complain about neck or back problems are almost always suffering from stress/burnout, RSI, and or a sedentary lifestyle. Take it slow at first to avoid injuring yourself, and head home if you feel out of breath each journey. And remember to stay hydrated with normal clean water.
Getting outside regularly will help most folks live better longer lives. Have a wonderful day. =3
zero, duh.