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I know this website generally likes to have discussions on things like this for intellectual stimulation, but is it really necessary to micro optimize exercise

I know this website generally likes to have discussions on things like this for intellectual stimulation, but is it really necessary to micro optimize exercise to this extent? I don't think there needs to be some sort of mathematical proof or nobel prize winning study to tell you to exercise and eat well if you want to lose fat or become fit (for average individuals looking to improve their health). Go outside, work hard and sweat for an hour, eat a nutritious meal and get a good amount of sleep. It's not really rocket science. Don't pre-emptively optimize all your workouts based on some cutting edge science before even brute forcing it, building work ethic is far more important. As its commonly said in CS, premature optmiziation is the root of all evil. If doing the basics doesn't work, then sure consider delving deeper into more complex routines.

hgomersall 4y ago
It depends why you're doing it. It's plausible that different exercise has different physiological effects, in which case blithely calling them all the same thing may miss many potential benefits exercise can offer.
WA 4y ago
This. As an untrained person, you can go for a walk with a 90 bpm heart rate and lose a lot of weight and gain strength and endurance. The psychology is way more important for the average person than an optimal training: do something you enjoy doing several times a week.
- maccard 4y ago
  > you can go for a walk with a 90 bpm heart rate and lose a lot of weight A 1 hour brisk walk is roughly 400 calories, which is roughly the same as a 5k run, not eating a Starbucks muffin, or not eating half a small pizza. Exercise, even light walking is incredibly beneficial, but you won't lose any weight doing so. Weight is lost in the kitchen.
  - orwin 4y ago
    But the muscle mass will rise your metabolic consumption. You can loose all your extra weight in the kitchen. Nevertheless, doing a sport help, a lot. I lost 15kg just by changing my eating habits (over 3 years). But the last mile is really hard to get to without exercises. I'm a sailor, but i only get to windsurf/kayak/so catamaran during summer, where i loose ~5kg i immediatly gain over the autumn-winter period. Doing a new, indoor sport did help a lot. This year, even though i only started in February, i already have my weight of October (when i usually stop enjoying myself on the water)
    - maccard 4y ago
      > But the muscle mass will rise your metabolic consumption. Losing weight doesn't have to increase muscle, you might be trying to just actually lose weight. Also, the actual difference unless you replace an enormous amount of your mass with muscle (which unless you're doing an incredible amount of lifting you won't be doing), ends up being in the region of 1-200 calories per day, which is the difference between having a chocolate bar with your tea in the morning. > But the last mile is really hard to get to without exercises The last mile is the same as the previous mile. The difference is that many people realise that losing weight isn't the entire story, and the last mile is no longer about losing weight it's about gaining muscle, and _that_ requires exercise. As I said, exercise is incredibly important, you'll look better you'll feel better, you'll sleep better, but you won't lose weight unless you're running 10k every day _and_ not eating any more to compensate for it.
      - Someone 4y ago
        > Also, the actual difference unless you replace an enormous amount of your mass with muscle […] ends up being in the region of 1-200 calories per day, which is the difference between having a chocolate bar with your tea in the morning. If you’re middle-aged (-ish) and healthy, overweight, but not obese, what made you overweight likely is a gain of, ballpark, 3 grams a day (that’s about a kg a year, or 10kg/decade, 30kg between the age of 20 and 50) There’s about 7,700 kilocalories in a kg of body fat, so preventing that slow but steady weight increase only takes eating about 25kCal less per day or burning 25kCal more. It doesn’t take much exercise to get there.
1123581321 4y ago
Deeper understanding of the physiology and psychology involved in exercise allows for better recommendations in cases where the general advice can’t or won’t be successfully followed.
ramraj07 4y ago
I’m gonna assume you find it fairly easy, and also very pleasurable, to get some exercise. Many people find anything physical as fun and rewarding. Perhaps they don’t need to worry about optimizing their workouts to the core. But then there are others, me included, who have a lifelong love hate (mostly hate) relationship with exercise. I’ve exercised moderately at least every alternate days for most of my adult years (for a few, I worked out quite religiously every day even), but not a single day did I find it rewarding. If science can help me find the most effective way I could utilize the few times (and the short periods) I do muster the motivation to work out, I’m happy for it. So in your analogy, it’s not premature optimization for many, especially the ones that need the most.
- deleted 4y ago
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- neuroma 4y ago
  Respectfully, to say you did something for at least half of your adult days, but that it wasn't rewarding, is perhaps a misuse of the term reward. I'd suggest that whilst you may have suffered in doing the exercise for whatever reason, there was also a parallel and strong reward process embedding and sustaining that behaviour in you.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    I think that's an overbroad notion of "reward". You have a certain point, but it may be seen as kind of a behaviorist way of looking at things, and the behaviorist approach fails to provide the same insight into mind that other approaches have.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  You are completely missing OP's point - you are not the case of stepping into the realm of exercising for the first time and already trying some hyper-optimized-latest-fad routines. He even covers your case, if you cared to read till last sentence. By far the hardest part of working out regularly is to have good mental setup, which just doesn't spawn on itself but one has to work through some mental resistance. Getting into the state of enjoying the suck, for all the benefits, for the feeling afterwards, whatever makes you tick and come back. I can't agree more.
NoPicklez 4y ago
Couldn't agree more. There doesn't need to some mathematical proof or nobel prize winning study, because... well, the proof is in the pudding if you look at athletes. Most people are not doing the basics, but by doing some form of exercise often and consistently. Eat a nutritious meal, don't binge on junk food and sleep well. People love to complicate and over engineer the situation by diving into everything 100% when they have a 'I'm going to lose weight' mindset. Weight loss takes a while and you might need to be a little hungry at times to lose weight. Just don't expect exercise to be the one reason you will lose weight, the largest reason will be your diet. As the old saying goes, you can't outrun a poor diet.
- salty_biscuits 4y ago
  Athletes aren't a great example. A quick look at the literature and you will quickly find heaps of studies on eating disorders in athletes. There are obvious and not so obvious motivations (i.e. a boxer making a weight division vs body image concerns). The big confounding factor in athletes is that they usually have extremely high discipline/self control.
  - NoPicklez 4y ago
    Athletes are a great example of what proper exercise and nutrition does for the body. They are living proof, otherwise if it didn't work they'd be all overweight. Now we don't necessarily expect ourselves to be at that level but clearly doing the basics will work wonders or move you in the right direction. I don't think we can nullify the impacts of lots of exercise and world class nutrition because of some eating disorders. I'd say obesity is the greater eating disorder, not athletes being at the top of the game working themselves into the ground. But a good thing you point out there, is that it is easy to say exercise consistently and eat a good diet. But the trouble is the discipline/self control to do so. Many of us lead stressful busy lives which don't always leave us the room to be the healthy people we want to be. You just need to make time for it in a way that you can and enjoy, if you truly do want to prioritise it.
    - arvinsim 4y ago
mtrycz2 4y ago
I think author's point is that 1. All workout types leads to being more in shape 2. HIITs lead to weight loss faster than other types of training. It is valuable information, if it is confirmed to be true.
- NoPicklez 4y ago
  Not to discredit one of the authors points, but I don't see why its at all surprising that HIIT increased their maximum heart rate. Your maximum heart rate isn't likely to increase unless you train and push the upper end of your HR. Sprint cyclists don't train to be fast by riding slowly, they do high intensity sprint efforts. Your body adapts to the stimulus you provide it, if you want to increase your maximum HR you need to train at your near it.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    agree it's unsurprising. hitting your max heart rate often, decreases your resting heart rate would be a more interesting finding (which research supports happens to be true)
- irjustin 4y ago
  > if it is confirmed to be true. Is the problem. So many studies lead no where because the body is insanely complex, so what works for this person should not be generalized.
chrismartin 4y ago
Optimization might not be worth the trouble at the individual level, even if that's half the fun for this crowd. But optimization is 100% worth the trouble to make the guidance as effective as possible at the population level. Even slightly better advice can make life slightly better for a zillion people -- think of that in cumulative QALYs or whatever. If it turns out that a certain kind of exercise makes it a little easier for people to reach their health/fitness goals, and it isn't commensurately more likely to injure them, then let us leave no gains on the table.
Bancakes 4y ago
>Go outside, work hard and sweat for an hour, eat a nutritious meal and get a good amount of sleep. You didn't give definitions for any of those terms, nor good values they take from their domains. There has to be one and only one definition of each. We have to know exactly what macro and micro nutrients the human body needs, and how many calories per person, per lifestyle. Science has no answers to this, bar the consumerist publications of the cancer-curing properties of grilled avocados or somerhing. What I understood from your post is I can sleep for 6 hours, briskly walk to the supermarket, and cook 3 XL eggs with a handful of bacon, as a pre-lunch.
primordialsoup 4y ago
HIIT vs. regular cardio is not micro optimization (in your words). Trying to figure out the exact heart rates might count as one. An analogy to what you are saying would be this: Studying in MIT vs. any random university should be the same. "Go to college, study hard and you will be fine. It's not rocket really science." Your other points are valid.
- jacobmischka 4y ago
  Your analogy is true though?
- bawolff 4y ago
  > "Go to college, study hard and you will be fine. It's not rocket really science." Is that wrong?
  - dwaltrip 4y ago
    If one gets a degree in some esoteric, non-practical area of study, then yeah it is wrong. Or at least very much incomplete advice.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      Does there exist any advice where its impossible to do it wrong? E.g. On this account, "stay hydrated" is bad advice, since if you drink 60L of water in a day you will die
      - dwaltrip 4y ago
        Sure, of course not. But some advice is more clear than others…
acchow 4y ago
But large swaths of the population struggle with maintaining a healthy weight, even with regular exercise. Regular exercise AND healthy eating AND good sleep? Too much of the population struggles with way too many things to be able to get all 3.
kaskakokos 4y ago
It's not about optimizing (although I understand that someone might think so, given the forum), it's more about pushing the right buttons that our nature has. I'll give you an example that has happened to me several times, I have friends who work out 3 times a week and don't understand why they don't lose their pear shape. The answer is: Do HIT and weights too! Each type of exercise develops one of the various perspectives our physical nature has in the same way that each type of mental exercise develops one of the various mental capacities we have. You can't be in good mental shape if, for example, you only do chess. Of course it is a great and beautiful exercise, but someone should remind you that your brain has other needs that must be satisfied.
domepro 4y ago
Yeah and the guy literally says nothing about his diet. I've been going to the gym for 2 years now with a personal trainer - mostly a wholesome approach and even when doing HIIT intervals, I'm not getting even close to my max of 194 I've seen before starting going to the gym when I tried to climb the tiny hill close to my house on my bike. His experience seems anecdotal at best and an extreme case of cherry picking alongside that. I do feel some nausea after a decent workout usually and it does suppress my appetite for a few hours, but I know of people that are just ravenous after working out.
- oriolid 4y ago
  > I'm not getting even close to my max of 194 I've seen before starting going to the gym when I tried to climb the tiny hill close to my house on my bike. Are you sure that you are climbing fast enough? Gym training isn't necessarily the best way to prepare for cycling.
  - domepro 4y ago
    Gym for sure is not the best way, but I'm not really lifting heavy weights, it's more of a work on calisthenics, some cardio (usually rowing) and some mobility exercises with the occasional compound lift here and there, cycling is just my preferred cardio for multiple reasons - I can actually travel moderate distances as opposed to running, it's lower impact and I find it much more relaxing than running for instance. Also, I'm not sure if you understood correctly - I've hit my 194 when I was out of shape and stepped on my bike and tried to climb the tiny hill (after doing about 20km or so). After about 200m of distance with about a 6% gradient, my HR was 194 and I had to step off the bike, my lungs felt like they were extending from my groin all the way to my upper arms on boths sides :D. After going to the gym for two years I've never seen more than 187 during the HIIT sessions that we had (usually it's something along the lines 20 calories max effort rowing with 15-30 seconds rest, anywhere from 6-10 series) so my experience directly contradicts what has happened to him.
    - oriolid 4y ago
      Yes, sounds like the 194 could have some extra from stress or something interfering with the measurement and 187 would be the usual maximum.
NicoJuicy 4y ago
I'm not sure to call it "micro optimize" A different change in routine can make a big difference. Also, people have a different body composition which is important to know. Based on your reaction, i guess you're not a Endomorph :)
deleted 4y ago
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dan-robertson 4y ago
What does ‘micro optimize exercise to this extent’ mean? In the first part they mention studies showing that mere (low intensity) exercise is not sufficient to get the desired result. So if you just mean ‘do high intensity exercise’ then the article’s claim would be that it may be necessary to do it to have the desired effect. And the second half is about the author training for cycling up mountains and it basically looks like a reasonably normal thing that someone serious at training for something might write. The point of tracking the numbers is to notice trends which someone who is serious about training would likely care about.
nvilcins 4y ago
FWIW, for me HIIT was the catalyst to exercising. As someone who wanted but struggled to motivate myself to take up regular physical activities, the short duration of HIIT was what sold it to me. Sure it's "intense", but I found it way easier to just push myself for ~10min (20min door-to-door) rather than finding time for a 1-2h regular exercise - which I personally don't enjoy much more anyway. Weight loss has never been my consideration. However, what I've found over the years (and is also supported by research afaik) is that a practice of regular short HIITs greatly contributes to endurance too. Anecdotally, by doing HIITs almost exclusively I am able to keep up pretty well with my triathlon friend during longer runs.
yakubin 4y ago
Also, there is a group of people who decide to get fit by going crazy with exercise, but continuing to eat junk food. Diet is several orders of magnitude more important than any exercise, yet some people go to the gym everyday, followed by eating two burgers, followed by a pizza the next day etc. etc. And then they look in the mirror surprised they're not getting better.
- Fricken 4y ago
  Michael Phelps is the all-time most decorated Olympian and, when training, he consumes plenty of burgers and pizza. Absurd quantities, in fact. Exercise is far more critical to fitness than nuances of diet. Of course, for many "fit" simply means "not fat". https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/this-is-what-michael-phelps-olympic-diet-was-actually-like https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/this-is-what-michael-p...
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    No it's less diet and more calories. Cyclists are usually rake thin from being in calorie deficit due to the workload they put in. Phelps would be the same. Swimming is hard work. It's generally easier to try and force the equation in favor of doing exercise rather than eating well. Generally I try and do this, I just do my baseline steps + cycling and try not to miss days and I can pretty much eat what I like. But when I'm loosing weight, I usually wake up really hungry and that's when I can tell the scale has tipped the other way into a calorie deficit.
    - yakubin 4y ago
      > It's generally easier to try and force the equation in favor of doing exercise rather than eating well. That's the first I'm hearing this opinion. I'd expect the opposite. It's definitely the opposite for me, because eating healthy is pleasurable, tasty. I'm a hedonist, so I love eating healthy. I do exercise everyday, with an odd missed day here and there, but much of the exercise is a battle of my will to keep pushing, soaked in sweat. Additionally, for exercise you need to find extra time in a day, whereas with food one way or another you're going to need to do that anyway.
Fricken 4y ago
Different types of exercise have different effects on our metabolism. It's an exaggeration to call it "micro-optimization", HIIT does not need to be complicated, just go do some sprints! Me personal experience checks out with the author's anectdata. Following a broken leg I gained about 20 pounds over 2 years, and burned it off quickly (5 weeks) once I started with HIIT. People are going to keep telling me that "calories in = calories out", or that "weight loss happens in the kitchen", and I'll keep not believing them. HIIT is the most effective level I have for raising my metabolism without a corresponding increase to my appetite.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  For yourself and the author of the article, check the amount of fingernail growth during a week containing sprints versus a week or two without. Warm up in a sustainable way then limited sprints at an unsustainable speed.
- DiabloD3 4y ago
  It's largely because people don't understand that the body will do everything possible to not lose fat due to insulin mismanagement. The only way to legitimately say "weight loss happens in the kitchen" if the discussion is over what, and how often... any discussion that is about CICO throws something like 20 years of science under the bus. HIIT helps override early metabolic syndrome symptoms, but so does eating a diet devoid of refined sugars, refined grains, and seed oils; combining this with a high fat diet (to purposefully keep insulin levels low) multiplies the effect of both HIIT and diets that follow the Paleo way of thinking; then, on top of those, One Meal A Day (OMAD) further multiplies the effect. If you eat your TDEE in calories every day (ergo, neither excess nor deficit of calories), you will lose weight with HIIT, but also lose weight with Paleo, more weight adding Keto to Paleo, and then even more weight with Ketoized Paleo OMAD, and all four together would still be a weight loss powerhouse even with eating TDEE.
raverbashing 4y ago
> work hard and sweat for an hour, eat a nutritious meal This means absolutely nothing This is the kind of empty advice that gets in the way more than helps, and I can't even start saying how "sweat for an hour" is just checkout-lane fitness magazine non-advice In fact I'd say that that most people fail at fitness because they try to go for meaningless advice like "sweating for an hour" HIIT is great and it is the way to optimize time and progression
kamaal 4y ago
>>is it really necessary to micro optimize exercise to this extent? Not sure much for a beginner, but even for advanced beginners yes. The heart is very hard to optimize machine. More it gets efficient, the harder it is to make it more efficient. Hence every last bit of detail counts. You will be surprised how hard it is to proceed to make the heart efficient by a linear scale.
belorn 4y ago
If we assume that people who need to loose weight are in otherwise perfect health then it is indeed no rocket science to do so. Be outside, exercise, eat a balanced meal, get in bed and when there sleep the number of hours that good health require. For the average individual who are looking to improve their health, it mostly likely false, because the average individual is not in perfect health, especially once they pass the age of 20. A good demonstration of this can be found in older medical science, much which was done on military recruits. More often then not they do not represent the average individual in modern society in term of health. If we look at the average person, we found things like metabolic disorder. It obviously effects how food metabolize, but it also effects how easy it is to exercise, and it effects sleep in terms of falling asleep, staying asleep, and how long people need to sleep. It is estimated that about 1/3 of the US population suffer from a metabolic disorder, and is only one category of many different diseases that might effects people in a negative way.
synu 4y ago
A lot of hobbies have gone away from doing it for the pleasure or intrinsic reward of it, but to do it to become the best in the world or professional at it. It can sometimes be fun to gamify self-improvement but there’s also something to be said just for having fun or to take care of yourself. Chess is an example where it seems like people are either actively training and studying to get a title or not playing at all, and it’s a shame. All that said it’s great that different options are out there for people who are motivated in different ways.
dustinmoris 4y ago
jasode 4y ago
>, but is it really necessary to micro optimize exercise to this extent? I don't think there needs to be some sort of mathematical proof or nobel prize winning study to tell you to exercise [...] Don't pre-emptively optimize all your workouts based on some cutting edge science before even brute forcing it, I know you're trying to help HN readers but your comments I extracted above give the wrong impression of the article's actual text. He's not micro-optimizing and he didn't pre-emptively optimize. Summary bullet points: - He wrote that he was already doing high-intensity bike riding in the mountains for the past 12 years. - Each of the previous seasons, he noticed he always lost the weight he gained during the winter. This was his baseline. - But COVID disrupted his normal bike training and when he restarted the high-intensity exercise, he noticed he wasn't losing the weight like before. To fix this, he made sure he got his max heart rate back up to 180. This seems to match some of the recent research out there. The above timeline over a decade is the opposite of premature optimization. It's taking 12 years of baseline data and noticing something about his body changed in the 13th year and then taking steps to isolate and fix it. Unfortunately, his wall of text about his personal anecdote makes it hard for readers to skim for his main ideas: (1) many science articles say exercise doesn't help you lose weight but his personal experience contradicts this. He believes the explanation is low-intensity exercise vs high-intensity. (2) even high-intensity exercise will not stop weight gain unless you actually hit max heart rate. Almost reaching max heart rate (e.g. 172 bpm) was not enough; he has to reach 180 bpm.
- bitL 4y ago
  My own experience tells me I was only able to lose weight under either of these two conditions: 1) daily HIIT, preferably multiple times 2) not eating for 7-35 days at all (just water/electrolytes/vitamins/potassium) Eating just a little while doing just a bit of sport just made me tired, and didn't lead to any weight loss.
  - JonChesterfield 4y ago
    Energy is conserved. A couple of hours of cardio a day plus eating well under maintenance causes weight loss pretty much linear in the deficit. Gradient is about 8k calories per kg adipose tissue.
matwood 4y ago
> building work ethic is far more important Consistency is #1 for exercise. I do agree that many people seem to overthink it too early on. But, some people draw motivation from the overthinking as long as they don't consider the thinking part a silver bullet or mistake it for actually doing the exercise.
stefs 4y ago
this is an important point for structured training, i.e. for people who already have a work ethic. nobody is going to force high intensity interval training on recreational cyclists and runners, but it is important for people looking to improve their performance. if i spend hours on the bike to get better at biking, yes, thank you, this is actually valuable and important information! no, it's not going to change how i ride on relaxing group rides with my friends or my feel-good rides for getting my head aired out; i do those too, but they're a completely different thing. HEY LINUX KERNEL PROGRAMMERS! why do you always care about buffer overflows so much? just write some fun code! get a few features done! stop worrying about security holes all the time. accumulating LoC is far more important.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
This comment seems aimed a High Intensity Interval Training, while the article goes in another direction. Notably, he's arguing against the apparent evidence supported consensus that excercise doesn't help you lose weight, so you possibly could get a nobel if you proved it did.
toss1 4y ago
The level of intensity of a workout IS one of the basics. Sure, while doing something is better than doing nothing, whether you push the muscles to exhaustion or not, or whether you push the cardio to max throughput or not makes a vastly outsized difference vs mere total time or effort expended. The details of how &how much you get to that intensity are admittedly details ,but to dismiss the whole concept as unnecessary is, well, unnecessary ignorance. Source: fmr international level amateur &pro competitor & trainer. Happy to provide more details of training if interested .
blastro 4y ago
modern sports forces athletes to push themselves as far as possible, including minutiae like this.
- asdff 4y ago
  This was true with sports 100 years ago too, just we didn't know the most optimal techniques by then.

hgomersall 4y ago

It depends why you're doing it. It's plausible that different exercise has different physiological effects, in which case blithely calling them all the same thing may miss many potential benefits exercise can offer.

WA 4y ago

This. As an untrained person, you can go for a walk with a 90 bpm heart rate and lose a lot of weight and gain strength and endurance. The psychology is way more important for the average person than an optimal training: do something you enjoy doing several times a week.

maccard 4y ago
> you can go for a walk with a 90 bpm heart rate and lose a lot of weight A 1 hour brisk walk is roughly 400 calories, which is roughly the same as a 5k run, not eating a Starbucks muffin, or not eating half a small pizza. Exercise, even light walking is incredibly beneficial, but you won't lose any weight doing so. Weight is lost in the kitchen.
- orwin 4y ago
  But the muscle mass will rise your metabolic consumption. You can loose all your extra weight in the kitchen. Nevertheless, doing a sport help, a lot. I lost 15kg just by changing my eating habits (over 3 years). But the last mile is really hard to get to without exercises. I'm a sailor, but i only get to windsurf/kayak/so catamaran during summer, where i loose ~5kg i immediatly gain over the autumn-winter period. Doing a new, indoor sport did help a lot. This year, even though i only started in February, i already have my weight of October (when i usually stop enjoying myself on the water)
  - maccard 4y ago
    > But the muscle mass will rise your metabolic consumption. Losing weight doesn't have to increase muscle, you might be trying to just actually lose weight. Also, the actual difference unless you replace an enormous amount of your mass with muscle (which unless you're doing an incredible amount of lifting you won't be doing), ends up being in the region of 1-200 calories per day, which is the difference between having a chocolate bar with your tea in the morning. > But the last mile is really hard to get to without exercises The last mile is the same as the previous mile. The difference is that many people realise that losing weight isn't the entire story, and the last mile is no longer about losing weight it's about gaining muscle, and _that_ requires exercise. As I said, exercise is incredibly important, you'll look better you'll feel better, you'll sleep better, but you won't lose weight unless you're running 10k every day _and_ not eating any more to compensate for it.
    - Someone 4y ago
      > Also, the actual difference unless you replace an enormous amount of your mass with muscle […] ends up being in the region of 1-200 calories per day, which is the difference between having a chocolate bar with your tea in the morning. If you’re middle-aged (-ish) and healthy, overweight, but not obese, what made you overweight likely is a gain of, ballpark, 3 grams a day (that’s about a kg a year, or 10kg/decade, 30kg between the age of 20 and 50) There’s about 7,700 kilocalories in a kg of body fat, so preventing that slow but steady weight increase only takes eating about 25kCal less per day or burning 25kCal more. It doesn’t take much exercise to get there.

1123581321 4y ago

Deeper understanding of the physiology and psychology involved in exercise allows for better recommendations in cases where the general advice can’t or won’t be successfully followed.

ramraj07 4y ago

I’m gonna assume you find it fairly easy, and also very pleasurable, to get some exercise. Many people find anything physical as fun and rewarding. Perhaps they don’t need to worry about optimizing their workouts to the core. But then there are others, me included, who have a lifelong love hate (mostly hate) relationship with exercise. I’ve exercised moderately at least every alternate days for most of my adult years (for a few, I worked out quite religiously every day even), but not a single day did I find it rewarding. If science can help me find the most effective way I could utilize the few times (and the short periods) I do muster the motivation to work out, I’m happy for it. So in your analogy, it’s not premature optimization for many, especially the ones that need the most.

deleted 4y ago
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neuroma 4y ago
Respectfully, to say you did something for at least half of your adult days, but that it wasn't rewarding, is perhaps a misuse of the term reward. I'd suggest that whilst you may have suffered in doing the exercise for whatever reason, there was also a parallel and strong reward process embedding and sustaining that behaviour in you.
- klodolph 4y ago
  I think that's an overbroad notion of "reward". You have a certain point, but it may be seen as kind of a behaviorist way of looking at things, and the behaviorist approach fails to provide the same insight into mind that other approaches have.
saiya-jin 4y ago
You are completely missing OP's point - you are not the case of stepping into the realm of exercising for the first time and already trying some hyper-optimized-latest-fad routines. He even covers your case, if you cared to read till last sentence. By far the hardest part of working out regularly is to have good mental setup, which just doesn't spawn on itself but one has to work through some mental resistance. Getting into the state of enjoying the suck, for all the benefits, for the feeling afterwards, whatever makes you tick and come back. I can't agree more.

NoPicklez 4y ago

Couldn't agree more. There doesn't need to some mathematical proof or nobel prize winning study, because... well, the proof is in the pudding if you look at athletes. Most people are not doing the basics, but by doing some form of exercise often and consistently. Eat a nutritious meal, don't binge on junk food and sleep well. People love to complicate and over engineer the situation by diving into everything 100% when they have a 'I'm going to lose weight' mindset. Weight loss takes a while and you might need to be a little hungry at times to lose weight. Just don't expect exercise to be the one reason you will lose weight, the largest reason will be your diet. As the old saying goes, you can't outrun a poor diet.

salty_biscuits 4y ago
Athletes aren't a great example. A quick look at the literature and you will quickly find heaps of studies on eating disorders in athletes. There are obvious and not so obvious motivations (i.e. a boxer making a weight division vs body image concerns). The big confounding factor in athletes is that they usually have extremely high discipline/self control.
- NoPicklez 4y ago
  Athletes are a great example of what proper exercise and nutrition does for the body. They are living proof, otherwise if it didn't work they'd be all overweight. Now we don't necessarily expect ourselves to be at that level but clearly doing the basics will work wonders or move you in the right direction. I don't think we can nullify the impacts of lots of exercise and world class nutrition because of some eating disorders. I'd say obesity is the greater eating disorder, not athletes being at the top of the game working themselves into the ground. But a good thing you point out there, is that it is easy to say exercise consistently and eat a good diet. But the trouble is the discipline/self control to do so. Many of us lead stressful busy lives which don't always leave us the room to be the healthy people we want to be. You just need to make time for it in a way that you can and enjoy, if you truly do want to prioritise it.
  - arvinsim 4y ago

mtrycz2 4y ago

I think author's point is that 1. All workout types leads to being more in shape 2. HIITs lead to weight loss faster than other types of training. It is valuable information, if it is confirmed to be true.

NoPicklez 4y ago
Not to discredit one of the authors points, but I don't see why its at all surprising that HIIT increased their maximum heart rate. Your maximum heart rate isn't likely to increase unless you train and push the upper end of your HR. Sprint cyclists don't train to be fast by riding slowly, they do high intensity sprint efforts. Your body adapts to the stimulus you provide it, if you want to increase your maximum HR you need to train at your near it.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  agree it's unsurprising. hitting your max heart rate often, decreases your resting heart rate would be a more interesting finding (which research supports happens to be true)
irjustin 4y ago
> if it is confirmed to be true. Is the problem. So many studies lead no where because the body is insanely complex, so what works for this person should not be generalized.

chrismartin 4y ago

Optimization might not be worth the trouble at the individual level, even if that's half the fun for this crowd. But optimization is 100% worth the trouble to make the guidance as effective as possible at the population level. Even slightly better advice can make life slightly better for a zillion people -- think of that in cumulative QALYs or whatever. If it turns out that a certain kind of exercise makes it a little easier for people to reach their health/fitness goals, and it isn't commensurately more likely to injure them, then let us leave no gains on the table.

Bancakes 4y ago

>Go outside, work hard and sweat for an hour, eat a nutritious meal and get a good amount of sleep. You didn't give definitions for any of those terms, nor good values they take from their domains. There has to be one and only one definition of each. We have to know exactly what macro and micro nutrients the human body needs, and how many calories per person, per lifestyle. Science has no answers to this, bar the consumerist publications of the cancer-curing properties of grilled avocados or somerhing. What I understood from your post is I can sleep for 6 hours, briskly walk to the supermarket, and cook 3 XL eggs with a handful of bacon, as a pre-lunch.

primordialsoup 4y ago

HIIT vs. regular cardio is not micro optimization (in your words). Trying to figure out the exact heart rates might count as one. An analogy to what you are saying would be this: Studying in MIT vs. any random university should be the same. "Go to college, study hard and you will be fine. It's not rocket really science." Your other points are valid.

jacobmischka 4y ago
Your analogy is true though?
bawolff 4y ago
> "Go to college, study hard and you will be fine. It's not rocket really science." Is that wrong?
- dwaltrip 4y ago
  If one gets a degree in some esoteric, non-practical area of study, then yeah it is wrong. Or at least very much incomplete advice.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    Does there exist any advice where its impossible to do it wrong? E.g. On this account, "stay hydrated" is bad advice, since if you drink 60L of water in a day you will die
    - dwaltrip 4y ago
      Sure, of course not. But some advice is more clear than others…

acchow 4y ago

But large swaths of the population struggle with maintaining a healthy weight, even with regular exercise. Regular exercise AND healthy eating AND good sleep? Too much of the population struggles with way too many things to be able to get all 3.

kaskakokos 4y ago

It's not about optimizing (although I understand that someone might think so, given the forum), it's more about pushing the right buttons that our nature has. I'll give you an example that has happened to me several times, I have friends who work out 3 times a week and don't understand why they don't lose their pear shape. The answer is: Do HIT and weights too! Each type of exercise develops one of the various perspectives our physical nature has in the same way that each type of mental exercise develops one of the various mental capacities we have. You can't be in good mental shape if, for example, you only do chess. Of course it is a great and beautiful exercise, but someone should remind you that your brain has other needs that must be satisfied.

domepro 4y ago

Yeah and the guy literally says nothing about his diet. I've been going to the gym for 2 years now with a personal trainer - mostly a wholesome approach and even when doing HIIT intervals, I'm not getting even close to my max of 194 I've seen before starting going to the gym when I tried to climb the tiny hill close to my house on my bike. His experience seems anecdotal at best and an extreme case of cherry picking alongside that. I do feel some nausea after a decent workout usually and it does suppress my appetite for a few hours, but I know of people that are just ravenous after working out.

oriolid 4y ago
> I'm not getting even close to my max of 194 I've seen before starting going to the gym when I tried to climb the tiny hill close to my house on my bike. Are you sure that you are climbing fast enough? Gym training isn't necessarily the best way to prepare for cycling.
- domepro 4y ago
  Gym for sure is not the best way, but I'm not really lifting heavy weights, it's more of a work on calisthenics, some cardio (usually rowing) and some mobility exercises with the occasional compound lift here and there, cycling is just my preferred cardio for multiple reasons - I can actually travel moderate distances as opposed to running, it's lower impact and I find it much more relaxing than running for instance. Also, I'm not sure if you understood correctly - I've hit my 194 when I was out of shape and stepped on my bike and tried to climb the tiny hill (after doing about 20km or so). After about 200m of distance with about a 6% gradient, my HR was 194 and I had to step off the bike, my lungs felt like they were extending from my groin all the way to my upper arms on boths sides :D. After going to the gym for two years I've never seen more than 187 during the HIIT sessions that we had (usually it's something along the lines 20 calories max effort rowing with 15-30 seconds rest, anywhere from 6-10 series) so my experience directly contradicts what has happened to him.
  - oriolid 4y ago
    Yes, sounds like the 194 could have some extra from stress or something interfering with the measurement and 187 would be the usual maximum.

NicoJuicy 4y ago

I'm not sure to call it "micro optimize" A different change in routine can make a big difference. Also, people have a different body composition which is important to know. Based on your reaction, i guess you're not a Endomorph :)

deleted 4y ago

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dan-robertson 4y ago

What does ‘micro optimize exercise to this extent’ mean? In the first part they mention studies showing that mere (low intensity) exercise is not sufficient to get the desired result. So if you just mean ‘do high intensity exercise’ then the article’s claim would be that it may be necessary to do it to have the desired effect. And the second half is about the author training for cycling up mountains and it basically looks like a reasonably normal thing that someone serious at training for something might write. The point of tracking the numbers is to notice trends which someone who is serious about training would likely care about.

nvilcins 4y ago

FWIW, for me HIIT was the catalyst to exercising. As someone who wanted but struggled to motivate myself to take up regular physical activities, the short duration of HIIT was what sold it to me. Sure it's "intense", but I found it way easier to just push myself for ~10min (20min door-to-door) rather than finding time for a 1-2h regular exercise - which I personally don't enjoy much more anyway. Weight loss has never been my consideration. However, what I've found over the years (and is also supported by research afaik) is that a practice of regular short HIITs greatly contributes to endurance too. Anecdotally, by doing HIITs almost exclusively I am able to keep up pretty well with my triathlon friend during longer runs.

yakubin 4y ago

Also, there is a group of people who decide to get fit by going crazy with exercise, but continuing to eat junk food. Diet is several orders of magnitude more important than any exercise, yet some people go to the gym everyday, followed by eating two burgers, followed by a pizza the next day etc. etc. And then they look in the mirror surprised they're not getting better.

Fricken 4y ago
Michael Phelps is the all-time most decorated Olympian and, when training, he consumes plenty of burgers and pizza. Absurd quantities, in fact. Exercise is far more critical to fitness than nuances of diet. Of course, for many "fit" simply means "not fat". https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/this-is-what-michael-phelps-olympic-diet-was-actually-like https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/this-is-what-michael-p...
- gonzo41 4y ago
  No it's less diet and more calories. Cyclists are usually rake thin from being in calorie deficit due to the workload they put in. Phelps would be the same. Swimming is hard work. It's generally easier to try and force the equation in favor of doing exercise rather than eating well. Generally I try and do this, I just do my baseline steps + cycling and try not to miss days and I can pretty much eat what I like. But when I'm loosing weight, I usually wake up really hungry and that's when I can tell the scale has tipped the other way into a calorie deficit.
  - yakubin 4y ago
    > It's generally easier to try and force the equation in favor of doing exercise rather than eating well. That's the first I'm hearing this opinion. I'd expect the opposite. It's definitely the opposite for me, because eating healthy is pleasurable, tasty. I'm a hedonist, so I love eating healthy. I do exercise everyday, with an odd missed day here and there, but much of the exercise is a battle of my will to keep pushing, soaked in sweat. Additionally, for exercise you need to find extra time in a day, whereas with food one way or another you're going to need to do that anyway.

Fricken 4y ago

Different types of exercise have different effects on our metabolism. It's an exaggeration to call it "micro-optimization", HIIT does not need to be complicated, just go do some sprints! Me personal experience checks out with the author's anectdata. Following a broken leg I gained about 20 pounds over 2 years, and burned it off quickly (5 weeks) once I started with HIIT. People are going to keep telling me that "calories in = calories out", or that "weight loss happens in the kitchen", and I'll keep not believing them. HIIT is the most effective level I have for raising my metabolism without a corresponding increase to my appetite.

fuzzfactor 4y ago
For yourself and the author of the article, check the amount of fingernail growth during a week containing sprints versus a week or two without. Warm up in a sustainable way then limited sprints at an unsustainable speed.
DiabloD3 4y ago
It's largely because people don't understand that the body will do everything possible to not lose fat due to insulin mismanagement. The only way to legitimately say "weight loss happens in the kitchen" if the discussion is over what, and how often... any discussion that is about CICO throws something like 20 years of science under the bus. HIIT helps override early metabolic syndrome symptoms, but so does eating a diet devoid of refined sugars, refined grains, and seed oils; combining this with a high fat diet (to purposefully keep insulin levels low) multiplies the effect of both HIIT and diets that follow the Paleo way of thinking; then, on top of those, One Meal A Day (OMAD) further multiplies the effect. If you eat your TDEE in calories every day (ergo, neither excess nor deficit of calories), you will lose weight with HIIT, but also lose weight with Paleo, more weight adding Keto to Paleo, and then even more weight with Ketoized Paleo OMAD, and all four together would still be a weight loss powerhouse even with eating TDEE.

raverbashing 4y ago

> work hard and sweat for an hour, eat a nutritious meal This means absolutely nothing This is the kind of empty advice that gets in the way more than helps, and I can't even start saying how "sweat for an hour" is just checkout-lane fitness magazine non-advice In fact I'd say that that most people fail at fitness because they try to go for meaningless advice like "sweating for an hour" HIIT is great and it is the way to optimize time and progression

kamaal 4y ago

>>is it really necessary to micro optimize exercise to this extent? Not sure much for a beginner, but even for advanced beginners yes. The heart is very hard to optimize machine. More it gets efficient, the harder it is to make it more efficient. Hence every last bit of detail counts. You will be surprised how hard it is to proceed to make the heart efficient by a linear scale.

belorn 4y ago

If we assume that people who need to loose weight are in otherwise perfect health then it is indeed no rocket science to do so. Be outside, exercise, eat a balanced meal, get in bed and when there sleep the number of hours that good health require. For the average individual who are looking to improve their health, it mostly likely false, because the average individual is not in perfect health, especially once they pass the age of 20. A good demonstration of this can be found in older medical science, much which was done on military recruits. More often then not they do not represent the average individual in modern society in term of health. If we look at the average person, we found things like metabolic disorder. It obviously effects how food metabolize, but it also effects how easy it is to exercise, and it effects sleep in terms of falling asleep, staying asleep, and how long people need to sleep. It is estimated that about 1/3 of the US population suffer from a metabolic disorder, and is only one category of many different diseases that might effects people in a negative way.

synu 4y ago

A lot of hobbies have gone away from doing it for the pleasure or intrinsic reward of it, but to do it to become the best in the world or professional at it. It can sometimes be fun to gamify self-improvement but there’s also something to be said just for having fun or to take care of yourself. Chess is an example where it seems like people are either actively training and studying to get a title or not playing at all, and it’s a shame. All that said it’s great that different options are out there for people who are motivated in different ways.

dustinmoris 4y ago

jasode 4y ago

>, but is it really necessary to micro optimize exercise to this extent? I don't think there needs to be some sort of mathematical proof or nobel prize winning study to tell you to exercise [...] Don't pre-emptively optimize all your workouts based on some cutting edge science before even brute forcing it, I know you're trying to help HN readers but your comments I extracted above give the wrong impression of the article's actual text. He's not micro-optimizing and he didn't pre-emptively optimize. Summary bullet points: - He wrote that he was already doing high-intensity bike riding in the mountains for the past 12 years. - Each of the previous seasons, he noticed he always lost the weight he gained during the winter. This was his baseline. - But COVID disrupted his normal bike training and when he restarted the high-intensity exercise, he noticed he wasn't losing the weight like before. To fix this, he made sure he got his max heart rate back up to 180. This seems to match some of the recent research out there. The above timeline over a decade is the opposite of premature optimization. It's taking 12 years of baseline data and noticing something about his body changed in the 13th year and then taking steps to isolate and fix it. Unfortunately, his wall of text about his personal anecdote makes it hard for readers to skim for his main ideas: (1) many science articles say exercise doesn't help you lose weight but his personal experience contradicts this. He believes the explanation is low-intensity exercise vs high-intensity. (2) even high-intensity exercise will not stop weight gain unless you actually hit max heart rate. Almost reaching max heart rate (e.g. 172 bpm) was not enough; he has to reach 180 bpm.

bitL 4y ago
My own experience tells me I was only able to lose weight under either of these two conditions: 1) daily HIIT, preferably multiple times 2) not eating for 7-35 days at all (just water/electrolytes/vitamins/potassium) Eating just a little while doing just a bit of sport just made me tired, and didn't lead to any weight loss.
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  Energy is conserved. A couple of hours of cardio a day plus eating well under maintenance causes weight loss pretty much linear in the deficit. Gradient is about 8k calories per kg adipose tissue.

matwood 4y ago

> building work ethic is far more important Consistency is #1 for exercise. I do agree that many people seem to overthink it too early on. But, some people draw motivation from the overthinking as long as they don't consider the thinking part a silver bullet or mistake it for actually doing the exercise.

stefs 4y ago

this is an important point for structured training, i.e. for people who already have a work ethic. nobody is going to force high intensity interval training on recreational cyclists and runners, but it is important for people looking to improve their performance. if i spend hours on the bike to get better at biking, yes, thank you, this is actually valuable and important information! no, it's not going to change how i ride on relaxing group rides with my friends or my feel-good rides for getting my head aired out; i do those too, but they're a completely different thing. HEY LINUX KERNEL PROGRAMMERS! why do you always care about buffer overflows so much? just write some fun code! get a few features done! stop worrying about security holes all the time. accumulating LoC is far more important.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

This comment seems aimed a High Intensity Interval Training, while the article goes in another direction. Notably, he's arguing against the apparent evidence supported consensus that excercise doesn't help you lose weight, so you possibly could get a nobel if you proved it did.

toss1 4y ago

The level of intensity of a workout IS one of the basics. Sure, while doing something is better than doing nothing, whether you push the muscles to exhaustion or not, or whether you push the cardio to max throughput or not makes a vastly outsized difference vs mere total time or effort expended. The details of how &how much you get to that intensity are admittedly details ,but to dismiss the whole concept as unnecessary is, well, unnecessary ignorance. Source: fmr international level amateur &pro competitor & trainer. Happy to provide more details of training if interested .

blastro 4y ago

modern sports forces athletes to push themselves as far as possible, including minutiae like this.

asdff 4y ago
This was true with sports 100 years ago too, just we didn't know the most optimal techniques by then.