5 ms·

Right, and presumably are useless once people try to game them. 'Useless' might be too strong a term, but you can't e.g. decrease your mortality by training you

by Afton 7y ago

Right, and presumably are useless once people try to game them. 'Useless' might be too strong a term, but you can't e.g. decrease your mortality by training your grip strength.

ryacko 7y ago
How can you game exercise training in way that would degrade your health? Steroids and a diet high in sodium?
- Afton 7y ago
  It's not that it would degrade your health, it's that it wouldn't significantly impact it. Doing dedicated grip training, for example, will radically increase your grip strength (and I found it super fun to do/have), but it is very doubtful that it will increase your longevity. These correlations/proxies are based on aggregates of untrained people. Once you train it, it is no longer a good metric. For things like walking speed, it's a little harder to game it without actually increasing your cardiovascular health. But without knowing why something is a proxy, it might be useless/less-useful. For example, if fast walking speed is due to a healthy cardiovascular system, and you notice that your walking speed is low, you might train your walking speed. With effort you might get your walking speed up to 'very fast for non-athletes'. But if you had poor CV health for some underlying reason, you wouldn't have addressed that reason, you would just have masked the proxy. Of course, training walking speed is likely to have positive effects on your CV health, so I'm not saying "don't bother walking faster", I'm just saying that it may cause it to be a much more flawed indicator.
epmaybe 7y ago
So build a battery of tests and aggregate them into a 'score' of health. You can't optimize each aspect to get the best score without actually improving your overall health.
- Afton 7y ago
  But the point isn't that e.g. walking fast is bad for your health, it's that when it isn't being explicitly trained for, it is a marker of health. Once you explicitly train it, then it stops being that marker, even though it may still have positive effects on your health. What we need, in order to understand these proxies, is an understanding of the mechanism by which they work. Take this example: Suppose I am a smoker. I notice that I walk very slowly because I have bad cardio vascular health. I hear in the paper that walking slowing is a marker for death. So I train walking fast. I get up to 'elite non-athlete'. Even though I'm still smoking. In this case, even though I've successfully improved my health, as an indicator, my walking speed will over-predict my health. For grip strength it's even easier, since it seems very unlikely that actually have a strong grip is realistically correlated with anything health related. Rather, have significant untrained strength is probably very well correlated with a host of genetic, enviromental, and hormonal factors that would likely be strong predictors of health.
woodandsteel 7y ago
The question here is whether or not doing the exercise needed to get a stronger grip causes mortality to go down. I don't think that as been empirically determined.

by Afton 7y ago

Right, and presumably are useless once people try to game them. 'Useless' might be too strong a term, but you can't e.g. decrease your mortality by training your grip strength.

ryacko 7y ago

How can you game exercise training in way that would degrade your health? Steroids and a diet high in sodium?

Afton 7y ago
It's not that it would degrade your health, it's that it wouldn't significantly impact it. Doing dedicated grip training, for example, will radically increase your grip strength (and I found it super fun to do/have), but it is very doubtful that it will increase your longevity. These correlations/proxies are based on aggregates of untrained people. Once you train it, it is no longer a good metric. For things like walking speed, it's a little harder to game it without actually increasing your cardiovascular health. But without knowing why something is a proxy, it might be useless/less-useful. For example, if fast walking speed is due to a healthy cardiovascular system, and you notice that your walking speed is low, you might train your walking speed. With effort you might get your walking speed up to 'very fast for non-athletes'. But if you had poor CV health for some underlying reason, you wouldn't have addressed that reason, you would just have masked the proxy. Of course, training walking speed is likely to have positive effects on your CV health, so I'm not saying "don't bother walking faster", I'm just saying that it may cause it to be a much more flawed indicator.

epmaybe 7y ago

So build a battery of tests and aggregate them into a 'score' of health. You can't optimize each aspect to get the best score without actually improving your overall health.

Afton 7y ago
But the point isn't that e.g. walking fast is bad for your health, it's that when it isn't being explicitly trained for, it is a marker of health. Once you explicitly train it, then it stops being that marker, even though it may still have positive effects on your health. What we need, in order to understand these proxies, is an understanding of the mechanism by which they work. Take this example: Suppose I am a smoker. I notice that I walk very slowly because I have bad cardio vascular health. I hear in the paper that walking slowing is a marker for death. So I train walking fast. I get up to 'elite non-athlete'. Even though I'm still smoking. In this case, even though I've successfully improved my health, as an indicator, my walking speed will over-predict my health. For grip strength it's even easier, since it seems very unlikely that actually have a strong grip is realistically correlated with anything health related. Rather, have significant untrained strength is probably very well correlated with a host of genetic, enviromental, and hormonal factors that would likely be strong predictors of health.

woodandsteel 7y ago

The question here is whether or not doing the exercise needed to get a stronger grip causes mortality to go down. I don't think that as been empirically determined.