7 ms·

More exercise better in long run

62 points by kqr2 17y ago

keeptrying 17y ago
I think present research shows that 10 hours per week is the minimum required to achieve a body transformation in 3-4 months. Some recommendations: 1. "Body For Life" if you want a simple way to lose weight and gain strength. 2. "Maximum Strength" if you'r already been lifting for a while and want to get stronger. This is system also has you challenging your own limits so that you feel certain sense of achievement instead of just "wow I look thinner" ... 3. "P90X" if you like intense workouts with results. I've personally done all 3 in the above order to pretty good results. After achieving the results , you really need to maintain a minimum level to keep it.
- akadien 17y ago
  I wholeheartedly vouch for P90X. After getting over the commercials, my wife and I bought the DVDs. We got results within four weeks. The challenge with that system is maintaining a high level of commitment to something that kicks your butt over the long term.
  - keeptrying 17y ago
    Yeah its true for all systems. Its hard to keep the results if your a sedentary worker like a soft-engineer :) ... Thats why I've always wanted to be a kitesurfing/adventure sports trainer or something of that sort.
sown 17y ago
The last paragraph about marathons reminded me of a PBS Nova documentary about a dozen people who just picked up running to compete in the Boston Marathon starting off from basically couch potato status. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/marathon/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/marathon/ I won't spoil it for you but it does not end like you expect. I personally found that doing away with car and biking two hours a day has done me well. By combining exercise and commuting times I save a great deal of time.
- drenei 17y ago
  Biking to work is great. For me the hour spent commuting guarantees some sort of exercise 5 days/week and I can add to that with something else during the week or on the weekends. Its also a great way to wake up, and to get my mind in the right space before a day (or after). My only complaint - it can be hard to do in the -10c winter months up here in Canada.
  - RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    I actually prefer cycling in the winter (I live in southern Ontario). When it gets colder you can always add layers; unlike summer heat waves when you're limited in how much you can strip off.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    I worked with a guy that did that. We have no showers at my office (like most offices), he quite after a couple of weeks when people started to complain that they didn't like the sweaty B.O. mess coming in with them in the mornings.
    - drenei 17y ago
      Its unfortunate there wasn't a better solution for your colleague. The half hour ride in the morning isn't at a hard enough pace to make me a sweaty mess, though if it did, luckily, we have showers (along with a gym) at the office.
prakash 17y ago
Running marathons is horrible advice. Here's 10 reasons why you shouldn't be running marathons - http://web.archive.org/web/20080702233135/http://www.arthurdevany.com/2005/08/top_ten_reasons.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080702233135/http://www.arthurd...
- karzeem 17y ago
  By listing only negative effects, you can make anything sound bad (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax). It doesn't seem crazy to think that there's such a thing as too much exercise, but there are a couple problems with this top ten list you cite. First, maybe there are right and wrong ways to run a marathon and the people doing it the wrong way have skewed the results of these studies. Second, if running a marathon is bad, then surely running half a marathon is still not good, right? What about a quarter-marathon? One mile? Etc. I think everyone agrees that there is some amount of running that does more good than harm. But it's not that helpful to simply say that marathons cause harm without looking at the good (if any) they do and then trying to find the distance that properly balances good and harm.
  - thras 17y ago
    And by listing negative effects, you can also make bad things sound bad. Lots of people kill themselves with marathons. Maybe there's a right way to do it, but obviously it's easy to do it the wrong way. Which makes marathons dangerous until someone figures out your right way. "if running a marathon is bad, then surely running half a marathon is still not good, right?" No. Does not follow. As you say, there are probably distances where the good far outweighs the bad. 26 miles is not that distance.
    - dgordon 17y ago
      No, "lots of people" don't kill themselves with marathons. A few people who try to go from couch potato to marathon in 12 weeks or who chug ridiculous amounts of water over the course of a 5-hour walk-jog kill themselves with marathons. (It's possible to drink to the point of excessive dilution of the sodium in your bloodstream, which can kill you just like dehydration can, but this is basically impossible to induce below an Ironman triathlon distance if you're reasonable about water intake.) That's not "lots." Distance running is what humans evolved to do, according to a good deal of evidence. Admittedly, running on asphalt and concrete with awful form created by a lifetime walking and running in awkwardly built shoes and sitting in chairs all day is not what humans evolved to do.
sethg 17y ago
I am reminded of a piece of alleged research I read a few years back: Scientists have determined that regular jogging extends your life span. The amount by which it extends your life span is precisely equal to the amount of time you spend jogging.
- icey 17y ago
  That seems like a net win to me; you get a lot of time to think when you're out running (which is to say it's not wasted time).
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
    Plus you feel better the rest of time.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
tungstenfurnace 17y ago
Unfortunately there's no explanation which means there's no science here. (The world seems to be full of studies which measure things that are easy to measure and say things that people want to hear.) Here's an explanation as to why exercise might be good for you: exercise transfers attention away from repetitive thoughts and into one's body and one's surroundings. It thus confers benefits similar to those of meditation. This theory may well be totally false. But, hey, at least it offers an explanation. There's something there to be false. The next step would be to criticise the theory and then, if it stands up, to test it against current theories. Any testing though, would be highly unlikely to resemble the observations referred to in the linked article. It would instead depend on the relevant details of the rival theories.
- xiaoma 17y ago
  >"Unfortunately there's no explanation which means there's no science here." Experimental science has a long and colorful history of answering the what before the how or why. Consider the question of black body radiation. Without the experimental research results and Plank's desperate attempts to fit them to a mathematical model, Einstein wouldn't have had a reason to think of light existing as discrete particles and theoretical quantum mechanics would not have possible. Creating frameworks for why things work is satisfying, but gathering data is just as vital to science.
  - tungstenfurnace 17y ago
    Yeah, sometimes novel phenomena are stumbled upon. Where they are deliberately stumbled upon I would call it exploration rather than science. I don't think that exercise falls into that category. There is nothing surprising about exercise per se. Popper once challenged an audience to go out and 'observe'; I think the point of his joke was that without knowing what you're trying to observe and why then the instruction is absurd. In order to claim that 'more exercise is good' you need to start by guessing why some exercise might be good, whilst being open to the possibility that it may not be, and then start testing the best guesses. Otherwise you literally won't be able to interpret your 'more exercise' data, even if it is relevant.
greenlblue 17y ago
I don't think a blanket exercise regimen of more is the way to go. I feel miserable when I exercise more than 5 times a week because it takes me at least one day to recover so piling on more exercise just keeps me in a constant state of recovery which is quite counterproductive. That being said I wonder what kind of diet those 100 mile a week runners are on to have such stamina.
- fr0sty 17y ago
  If you require more than a day to recover you should either be doing less strenuous exercise or you should be lowering your number of workouts per week. I used to sit next to a 100+ mile/wk runner and he ate nothing out of the ordinary, just more of it (100miles of running is a 10-14k net calorie increase, depending on who you believe).
kingkongreveng_ 17y ago
"He started by buying the Runner's World subscription list, which yielded about 55,000 runners to study." People are taking this garbage seriously? Some guy surveys a bunch of hardcore yuppie runners (the kind who subscribe to runner's world) and finds the ones who continue to run a lot more haven't had heart attacks. Ya don't say. Where are the folks who usually reflexively scream about correlation/causation? The gold standard for research into this kind of thing is the controlled intervention. You can't simply survey runners. You have to pick people and make them run. I don't think especially encouraging results have come out of this. Everything else I've ever read says exercise is dwarfed by diet when it comes to health, and the health benefits are pretty minimal to fitness beyond a pretty low threshold. Pro athletes are not long lived.
- DaniFong 17y ago
  Almost every interesting and serious study regarding lifestyles is ethically and practically unable to be instantiated as a controlled experiment over the long term. Like many things, from studies of the economy, to social structures, to the climate. You can try to do a multivariate analysis, but ultimately you're not going to have much to go on. You have to take everything with a grain of salt, but it doesn't mean there isn't some valuable data in there. In addition, long term results are probably more interesting and important than short-term results; so much so that I would argue longitudinal studies are probably more useful than controlled studies, so long as one is careful and rigorous and vigorous with multivariate analysis after the fact.
  - kingkongreveng_ 17y ago
    There are many controlled intervention studies into diet and exercise. It is done. They provide the only results worth any consideration. More often than not regression analyses and "risk-adjustment" models are invalidated.
    - DaniFong 17y ago
      Controlled intervention over the long term, though?

62 points by kqr2 17y ago

I think present research shows that 10 hours per week is the minimum required to achieve a body transformation in 3-4 months. Some recommendations: 1. "Body For Life" if you want a simple way to lose weight and gain strength. 2. "Maximum Strength" if you'r already been lifting for a while and want to get stronger. This is system also has you challenging your own limits so that you feel certain sense of achievement instead of just "wow I look thinner" ... 3. "P90X" if you like intense workouts with results. I've personally done all 3 in the above order to pretty good results. After achieving the results , you really need to maintain a minimum level to keep it.

akadien 17y ago
I wholeheartedly vouch for P90X. After getting over the commercials, my wife and I bought the DVDs. We got results within four weeks. The challenge with that system is maintaining a high level of commitment to something that kicks your butt over the long term.
- keeptrying 17y ago
  Yeah its true for all systems. Its hard to keep the results if your a sedentary worker like a soft-engineer :) ... Thats why I've always wanted to be a kitesurfing/adventure sports trainer or something of that sort.

sown 17y ago

The last paragraph about marathons reminded me of a PBS Nova documentary about a dozen people who just picked up running to compete in the Boston Marathon starting off from basically couch potato status. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/marathon/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/marathon/ I won't spoil it for you but it does not end like you expect. I personally found that doing away with car and biking two hours a day has done me well. By combining exercise and commuting times I save a great deal of time.

drenei 17y ago
Biking to work is great. For me the hour spent commuting guarantees some sort of exercise 5 days/week and I can add to that with something else during the week or on the weekends. Its also a great way to wake up, and to get my mind in the right space before a day (or after). My only complaint - it can be hard to do in the -10c winter months up here in Canada.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  I actually prefer cycling in the winter (I live in southern Ontario). When it gets colder you can always add layers; unlike summer heat waves when you're limited in how much you can strip off.
- elblanco 17y ago
  I worked with a guy that did that. We have no showers at my office (like most offices), he quite after a couple of weeks when people started to complain that they didn't like the sweaty B.O. mess coming in with them in the mornings.
  - drenei 17y ago
    Its unfortunate there wasn't a better solution for your colleague. The half hour ride in the morning isn't at a hard enough pace to make me a sweaty mess, though if it did, luckily, we have showers (along with a gym) at the office.

prakash 17y ago

Running marathons is horrible advice. Here's 10 reasons why you shouldn't be running marathons - http://web.archive.org/web/20080702233135/http://www.arthurdevany.com/2005/08/top_ten_reasons.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080702233135/http://www.arthurd...

karzeem 17y ago
By listing only negative effects, you can make anything sound bad (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax). It doesn't seem crazy to think that there's such a thing as too much exercise, but there are a couple problems with this top ten list you cite. First, maybe there are right and wrong ways to run a marathon and the people doing it the wrong way have skewed the results of these studies. Second, if running a marathon is bad, then surely running half a marathon is still not good, right? What about a quarter-marathon? One mile? Etc. I think everyone agrees that there is some amount of running that does more good than harm. But it's not that helpful to simply say that marathons cause harm without looking at the good (if any) they do and then trying to find the distance that properly balances good and harm.
- thras 17y ago
  And by listing negative effects, you can also make bad things sound bad. Lots of people kill themselves with marathons. Maybe there's a right way to do it, but obviously it's easy to do it the wrong way. Which makes marathons dangerous until someone figures out your right way. "if running a marathon is bad, then surely running half a marathon is still not good, right?" No. Does not follow. As you say, there are probably distances where the good far outweighs the bad. 26 miles is not that distance.
  - dgordon 17y ago
    No, "lots of people" don't kill themselves with marathons. A few people who try to go from couch potato to marathon in 12 weeks or who chug ridiculous amounts of water over the course of a 5-hour walk-jog kill themselves with marathons. (It's possible to drink to the point of excessive dilution of the sodium in your bloodstream, which can kill you just like dehydration can, but this is basically impossible to induce below an Ironman triathlon distance if you're reasonable about water intake.) That's not "lots." Distance running is what humans evolved to do, according to a good deal of evidence. Admittedly, running on asphalt and concrete with awful form created by a lifetime walking and running in awkwardly built shoes and sitting in chairs all day is not what humans evolved to do.

sethg 17y ago

I am reminded of a piece of alleged research I read a few years back: Scientists have determined that regular jogging extends your life span. The amount by which it extends your life span is precisely equal to the amount of time you spend jogging.

icey 17y ago
That seems like a net win to me; you get a lot of time to think when you're out running (which is to say it's not wasted time).
- jamesbritt 17y ago
  Plus you feel better the rest of time.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

tungstenfurnace 17y ago

Unfortunately there's no explanation which means there's no science here. (The world seems to be full of studies which measure things that are easy to measure and say things that people want to hear.) Here's an explanation as to why exercise might be good for you: exercise transfers attention away from repetitive thoughts and into one's body and one's surroundings. It thus confers benefits similar to those of meditation. This theory may well be totally false. But, hey, at least it offers an explanation. There's something there to be false. The next step would be to criticise the theory and then, if it stands up, to test it against current theories. Any testing though, would be highly unlikely to resemble the observations referred to in the linked article. It would instead depend on the relevant details of the rival theories.

xiaoma 17y ago
>"Unfortunately there's no explanation which means there's no science here." Experimental science has a long and colorful history of answering the what before the how or why. Consider the question of black body radiation. Without the experimental research results and Plank's desperate attempts to fit them to a mathematical model, Einstein wouldn't have had a reason to think of light existing as discrete particles and theoretical quantum mechanics would not have possible. Creating frameworks for why things work is satisfying, but gathering data is just as vital to science.
- tungstenfurnace 17y ago
  Yeah, sometimes novel phenomena are stumbled upon. Where they are deliberately stumbled upon I would call it exploration rather than science. I don't think that exercise falls into that category. There is nothing surprising about exercise per se. Popper once challenged an audience to go out and 'observe'; I think the point of his joke was that without knowing what you're trying to observe and why then the instruction is absurd. In order to claim that 'more exercise is good' you need to start by guessing why some exercise might be good, whilst being open to the possibility that it may not be, and then start testing the best guesses. Otherwise you literally won't be able to interpret your 'more exercise' data, even if it is relevant.

greenlblue 17y ago

I don't think a blanket exercise regimen of more is the way to go. I feel miserable when I exercise more than 5 times a week because it takes me at least one day to recover so piling on more exercise just keeps me in a constant state of recovery which is quite counterproductive. That being said I wonder what kind of diet those 100 mile a week runners are on to have such stamina.

fr0sty 17y ago
If you require more than a day to recover you should either be doing less strenuous exercise or you should be lowering your number of workouts per week. I used to sit next to a 100+ mile/wk runner and he ate nothing out of the ordinary, just more of it (100miles of running is a 10-14k net calorie increase, depending on who you believe).

kingkongreveng_ 17y ago

"He started by buying the Runner's World subscription list, which yielded about 55,000 runners to study." People are taking this garbage seriously? Some guy surveys a bunch of hardcore yuppie runners (the kind who subscribe to runner's world) and finds the ones who continue to run a lot more haven't had heart attacks. Ya don't say. Where are the folks who usually reflexively scream about correlation/causation? The gold standard for research into this kind of thing is the controlled intervention. You can't simply survey runners. You have to pick people and make them run. I don't think especially encouraging results have come out of this. Everything else I've ever read says exercise is dwarfed by diet when it comes to health, and the health benefits are pretty minimal to fitness beyond a pretty low threshold. Pro athletes are not long lived.

DaniFong 17y ago
Almost every interesting and serious study regarding lifestyles is ethically and practically unable to be instantiated as a controlled experiment over the long term. Like many things, from studies of the economy, to social structures, to the climate. You can try to do a multivariate analysis, but ultimately you're not going to have much to go on. You have to take everything with a grain of salt, but it doesn't mean there isn't some valuable data in there. In addition, long term results are probably more interesting and important than short-term results; so much so that I would argue longitudinal studies are probably more useful than controlled studies, so long as one is careful and rigorous and vigorous with multivariate analysis after the fact.
- kingkongreveng_ 17y ago
  There are many controlled intervention studies into diet and exercise. It is done. They provide the only results worth any consideration. More often than not regression analyses and "risk-adjustment" models are invalidated.
  - DaniFong 17y ago
    Controlled intervention over the long term, though?