4 ms·

Longevity studies in humans are pretty hard. You have to wait until the person dies. So instead signals are used, like "had non fatal heart attacks", if you're

Longevity studies in humans are pretty hard. You have to wait until the person dies. So instead signals are used, like "had non fatal heart attacks", if you're lucky. Most signals are going to instead be closer to "lowered or raised some metric that, from other research, we believe will lead to longevity". I don't know how many papers there are on negative vs positive effects of exercise, but HIIT has had plenty of research done explicitly to determine safety, or to see if there are more effective exercises with lower rates of injury. No question that there are very, very few studies that are directly "X leads to longer or better life", it's just "X leads to Y, we separately think Y leads to a longer or better life". Of course that's not as good... but it's a symptom of those studies being expensive and difficult.

auganov 6y ago
They are hard, but we do have some. And even the most naive physical activity level vs all-cause-mortality studies show a mild effect at best. No controls. Common sense would tell you that physical activity has to spuriously correlate with healthiness. Many conditions will simply render you unable (or less able) to exercise. So what are the odds a properly designed longitudinal study would actually yield a bigger life expectancy increase? Seems very unlikely to me. The ones that we do have set an upper bound as far as I'm concerned. Almost certainly has to be lower. I understand that you're talking about a specific kind of exercise and most of what's out there doesn't speak to that. But nonetheless I'd be very skeptical given how little effect has been shown for general physical activity. And we do have plenty of similar studies showing random benefits of various exercises in a clinical setting.