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The healthiest people in the world don’t go to the gym
- nils-m-holm 8y agoAnecdatum: my dad never did any sports and never did any physical work that was harder than carrying a shopping bag to the first floor. He lived up to 90, was never seriously ill, and never experienced any back pain in his entire life. He did enjoy hiking, though, and ran many errands on foot or on his bicycle.
- taneq 8y agoSo plenty of low-grade cardio and, reading between the lines, maintaining a healthy weight? Sounds like a recipe for decent health.
- quickthrower2 8y agoAlso, what's the p-value?
- bamboozled 8y agoGrandad was a semi-professional track and road cyclist trained hard, swam and ran his whole life. Drank a LOT of alcohol but was also in great health due to constantly working out. Lived till 90 also.
- keiferski 8y agoHealthiest != longest-living != “best.” Going to the gym, running marathons, and other strenuous activities are generally done for the challenge, difficulty, or achievement of completing them. Personally, I’d take 60 years of a challenging, but meaningful life over 90 years of relaxation and low stress. The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as soon as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon pass when you could be content to live concealed in the woods like timid deer. - Nietzsche
- simongray 8y ago> Personally, I’d take 60 years of a challenging, but meaningful life over 90 years of relaxation and low stress. This reads like satire.
- keiferski 8y agoDo you have a real criticism, or are you just being flippant with the middlebrow dismissal? Not everyone is trying to live the most comfortable, stress-free existence. Many philosophers, religious leaders, and thinkers throughout history have posited (correctly, in my opinion) that a challenge-free life is not a particularly meaningful one.
- dijit 8y agoI'm glad you find meaning in struggle. But you said it yourself "not everyone". And how do you define struggle? is it physical challenges or mental ones? There's a lot of grey area here too. Personally I would like to live happy, I would trade years of my life for happiness, but being in the gym does not make me happy by itself.
- simongray 8y agoThere's plenty of meaning to be found in all sorts of endeavours, including going to the gym. I just think you sound defensive when you imply there's no meaning in a life full of relaxation and no stress. I also find it a bit amusing that you bring up a Nietzsche quote in your edit. AFAIK Nietzsche didn't go to the gym or run any marathons. He did, however, go for a long walk every morning.
- FabHK 8y agoThe long walks were not very effective: "Nietzsche resigned in 1879 [at the age of ~34] due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889 at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward, a complete loss of his mental faculties." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
- lkuty 8y agoNo, the gym comes to them.
- choot 8y ago40% of my friends go to gym. Out of them: 90% of my male friends go to gym to build aesthetic bodies, it helps them attract females. Out of them: 97% of them take whey protein, fish oil, vitamin D, creatine, withania smonifera 70% of them take anabolic steroids. 30% still end up with escorts and hookers. That said these are my Dutch friends in Amsterdam. So i would say very few actually go to gym for longetivity. Particular my male friends, smoke and do drugs, they all say they wanna live a short but exciting life where they get everything they want, let it be money or girls.
- aikinai 8y agoYou hang out with a very particular crowd if 90% of your friends go to the gym, especially if 70% also take steroids.
- CalRobert 8y agoI think op said 40% of their friends go to the gym.
- aikinai 8y agoLooks like that was added later.
- black-tea 8y agoSteroids are way more common than you think. At they very least half of the men in any gym have taken steroids at some point.
- ci5er 8y agoUmmm, I don't want to say that reading is fundamental (even though it is), but, of the 36% of his acquaintances that go to the gym for that reason, about just over 25% (of his 'crowd' in aggregate, not of the 36%) take steroids. That's certainly a lot more than my friends ('crowd') do (as far as a know), but it's not as out of whack as you suggest.
- 8y ago
- mattlondon 8y ago"...the best work commute you can have is a 15-minute walk each way..." Interesting ... and sadly laughable considering modern cities. I wonder if my 15 minutes walk to the station each way counts!
- black-tea 8y ago> I wonder if my 15 minutes walk to the station each way counts! Why wouldn't it?
- joelthelion 8y ago> modern cities Modern US cities.
- vinay427 8y agoEh, I live in a relatively large European city and only around 5% of people that I know are within a 15 minute walk from their work or university. I was actually closer when I lived in SF, which seemed denser, but that's an exception among US cities.
- pokemongoaway 8y agoI had a 15m walk to the office when I lived in San Francisco... The culture is such that people are willing to sacrifice ridiculous things for merely being able to maintain a life style they do not like. Unfortunately, I now have 0 commute time :) But I go for walks at least twice per day. People work pretty hard in order to get themselves into very unhealthy living situations, and often seem to be unwilling to work for 5 minutes per day to get out of them. I'm not placing blame, just describing the situation. Beware of the ol' "I have a job so I can afford a car to go to work..." or "I'm working out so I can feel good about myself so I can feel worthy of women/love" or any self-unfulfilling prophecy. A comment above about the guy's friends working out in order to get chicks... It's another thing I find quite strange. Sure, there are like 2% of girls who are only attracted to very muscular men (and they're rarely the most attractive) - but 98% of girls want a "real man". What is a real man? Well, I'm not going to say because I don't want to get my comment killed again :D However, spending so much time and concern on how you physically look is feminine, not masculine. Just inquire with some girls sometime; they'll tell you they're sick of it! Unless you're trying to cultivate beyond the body & mind, then 15m of strenuous exercise 3 times per week is all you need. Spending hours curling in front of gym mirrors is a beauty contest in fetishized insecurity.
- fleshfly 8y agoand they're probably not software engineers either.
- miguel123456789 8y agook
- JCDenton2052 8y agoSurvivor-bias logical fallacy. Focusing on the outliers doesn't really prove a thing.
- coldtea 8y agoThey're not some outliers, they're whole societies of healthier people.
- kriffo 8y agoIn a world where everyone starts lifting weights, I find it hard to believe that we'd see an epidemic of "unnatural movement" that isn't easily fixable in the gym. I also think we'll have higher priorities than research into the health benefits of gardening and mowing the lawn.
- jernfrost 8y agoThis is not just about personal choices though but also about how society is structured. E.g. when I lived in the US I found it hard to be healthy other than going to the gym because there was little opportunity for natural exercise as all of society is built around car usage and consumption of fast-food. In contrast when I lived in the Netherlands I found it VERY easy to be healthy. Life is organized around biking there: it is safe, easy and convenient to do. I probably biked around 1 hour every day, just from doing errands, meeting friends, going to university etc. If I wanted to grab some food, there was usually a lot more healthy options available. E.g. even in tiny stores in the Netherlands they have great vegetarian options. A lot of this is not stuff as an individual you can decide on. It depends on zoning laws, building of bike lanes and a multitude of policies and traditions you cannon easily change without collective action.
- rv-de 8y agoI heard that in many places in the US walking somewhere - especially at night - is considered suspicious and one risks being approached by police.
- marsrover 8y agoIt’s suspicious because it’s generally dangerous to walk around alone at night in large cities. It also depends on the area, though. And I would also say just because you’re approached by the police doesn’t mean you’re being suspicious. I’ve been pulled over by police before just because they wanted to let me know it was a dangerous area (I wasn’t from the area). Edit: I really hope that downvote came from a European or non-American. /s As an American (and been here my entire life), what I posted above is very accurate to what I have observed. Maybe in other parts of the country it’s different but in the cities I’m most intimate with (Atlanta, Memphis, Jackson), this is definitely the case.
- ccozan 8y agoThis is very accurate. I've been approached by police twice in Miami, letting me know that I am entering a dangerous nieghbourhood - which I thought it was the city center. Another time they didn't let me drive further, when they saw that we were a bunch of clueless europeans.
- ayy_lmao 8y agoThe healthiest people are those who don't go to hospital. Hospitals are full of people with health problems.
- GatorD42 8y agoPointing out people in blue zones are consistently active even if they don't run marathons or go to the gym is a very weak argument against marathons and exercise. Instead of the tortured analogy the author could have tried looking at data directly related to the topic: https://www.outsideonline.com/2358586/dont-worry-about-exercising-too-much https://www.outsideonline.com/2358586/dont-worry-about-exerc...
- notacoward 8y agoWas it meant to be an argument against marathons and other deliberate and/or high intensity exercise? Saying that X achieves a particular goal better than Y doesn't mean that Y is bad.
- mothsonasloth 8y agoI prefer grappling it's a full workout and more stimulating than lifting iron or pounding the treadmill. Any BJJ people here?
- sxp62000 8y agoMaintaining a healthy lifestyle is easier when moving is built into your daily activities. You might go to the gym and run marathons in your 20s and 30s but it's nearly impossible to keep up with that routine for 30-40 years. The title of the article makes it sound like walking is better than gyming and is misleading, just like most Quartz articles these days. Sigh, I live in a world where Quartz is becoming Buzzfeed, and Buzzfeed is becoming Quartz.
- the_70x 8y agowalking to school and then walk to work only if you have the privilege to pay for a decent house or apartment, not an option for the people living far away from the downtown areas
- acconrad 8y agoThe people who are actually old in these blue zones were around literally before gyms or recreational running became a thing. I'd like to compare that against someone who has been going to the gym their entire life in those blue zones and see if they live even longer.
- tx21 8y agohealthy == longest lived ?
- dejaime 8y agoNo talk about averages and medians... that's weird... Oh, I see, it's just hasty generalization. Ohhhhh it's on Medium, should have guessed
- bigmit37 8y agoSo is walking frequently throughout the day better than lifting weights and HIIT (for a long healthy life)?
- looper-life 8y agoThere certainly are other ways to stay healthy, walking or cycling are two I prefer. Fresh air is always better than gyms. I know, that in some parts of the world in winter this can get tricky, due to heavy snow or ice cold temperatures, but still, maybe then we can reduce the time spent out, 10 minutes of fresh snowy air is still awesome. So what I do every day is walk to the bus station, take the public transport and walk from the station to the office, I also stand up every hour or two hours, walk around the office for minute or two, it really helps my spine and well being.