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Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout
- soared 8mo agoHoly 3-6mg of caffeine per kg is a shit ton. That’s 2-4 cups of coffee for me!
- samplatt 8mo agoSeven for my ~140kg arse. Not sure how healthily this scales.
- lostlogin 8mo agoThat sounds like some weak coffee. Espresso is about 150mg for a double shot I thought?
- instagib 8mo agohttps://vo2maxpro.com/blog/does-caffeine-improve-vo2-max https://vo2maxpro.com/blog/does-caffeine-improve-vo2-max They list a study and more info on that page. Probably why almost all pre-workouts include caffeine. Some push for 300mg per serving. Yohimbe gives some weird heart effects also.
- lostlogin 8mo agoThat doesn’t seem a lot to me at all, and coffee seems to have health benefits up to doses exceeding that. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12348139/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12348139/
- yourusername 8mo ago4 cups of coffee is considered a lot?
- rXwubXUGAm 8mo agoyeah that's a ridiculous amount. I'd be so jittery there's no way I'd be able to workout after taking that much. If I have more than one cup of coffee in a single sitting I get so anxious I can't even take proper deep breaths.
- joduplessis 8mo agoQuadruple espresso + some good deathcore solves this pretty nicely for me.
- darthbanane 8mo agoWas expecting the article to mention creatine which interacts with ATP. It's a supplement that's so well studied that almost everyone should take it, even if you don't workout at all. In my experience it has helped tremendously with mental endurance (n=1 but there are some studies that support it, especially in older people with cognitive decline).
- nfg 8mo agoHow much are you taking?
- girvo 8mo ago5 grams a day, personally, based on a large body of evidence that it is a good amount.
- nandomrumber 8mo ago> personally You’re not having someone else take it for you?
- derektank 8mo agoSecond anecdote, I take between 10 and 15 grams. I don’t experience cognitive effects at lower doses (though my weightlifting endurance is still higher on lower doses). I also don’t eat meat so don’t have any incidental consumption
- ifh-hn 8mo agoI train in the morning so it looks like I avoid this completely. Also the calculator at the end... Just assume an Apple watch.
- gloxkiqcza 8mo agoYeah, this seems like an obvious solution. If possible, move your workout to before work.
- baron816 8mo agoIs anyone here able to offer an explanation for why our brains are able to do really complex tasks without using much energy, at least compared to AI systems?
- alex43578 8mo agoCompletely different architectures and mechanisms. Machine learning draws inspiration from some biology concepts, but implements it in different way.
- suzzer99 8mo agoIf I'm not in flow state focusing on some programming problem, my brain is still going a million miles a minute pontificating about 10 different threads of nonsense at once. So I could see where focusing on one task doesn't actually burn any more energy, it just pulls in all those other workers and puts them to work on one thing.
- bob1029 8mo agoThe brain relies on discrete, sparse events in space and time to handle computation. Most of the computation and learning that occurs is attributable to the relative timing of spiking events. A lot of information can be encoded in the delay between 2 spikes. The advantage of biology is that there is no explicit quantization of the time domain that must occur. Biology gets to do a lot of things "for free". Simulating causality in a computer in a similar way requires a priority queue and runs like ass by comparison.
- kergonath 8mo agoWhy would they not be? A brain and a computer are completely different things. They don’t do the same thing and they don’t work the same way at all. "Artificial neuron" was a useful metaphor at the beginning, but they really are a very simplified model based on what some people understood of neurology back then. They are not that useful to get insights into how actual neurons work.
- johnfn 8mo agoThis is explained in the article.
- sdfhbdf 8mo agoI've also been interested for some time in how metabolism works and wanted to debunk the popular myth for my friends that exercise burns a lot of calories, since I was under the impression that around 80% of energy we burn is just by "living" - breathing and thinking. Reading this article I'm a little confused by the author's conflation of brain energy and the energy expenditure of the body as a whole. In the beginning they mention: > "Your brain consumes roughly 20 to 25% of your body's total energy at rest" while later they say: > "Even chess grandmasters, who sit for hours in states of intense concentration, burn only about 1.67 calories per minute while playing, compared to 1.53 calories per minute at rest" That second figure seems to refer to whole-body expenditure, not just the brain. And intense cognitive work doesn't happen in a metabolic vacuum - there's increased cerebral blood flow, elevated sympathetic nervous system activity, changes in heart rate variability, hormonal shifts (cortisol, adrenaline). These all have systemic metabolic costs that go beyond the glucose the neurons themselves consume. So the "it's just a banana and a half" framing might be undercounting by quietly switching between brain-only and whole-body measurements. Also somewhat related - the link to businessinsider about chess grandmasters is broken, but another very interesting rabbit hole here is how energy expenditure is actually measured. A lot of what consumer devices and even many studies report is based on proxy biomarkers like heart rate, HRV, weight, age, and sex, run through linear regression models. True calorimetry (indirect via gas exchange, or direct in a metabolic chamber) is expensive and impractical outside lab settings. That means the precise calorie figures cited with such confidence - the "100 to 200 extra calories" from a day of thinking, or the per-minute burn rates of chess grandmasters - likely carry wider error bars than the article suggests. We don't really have a great way to measure real-world energy expenditure accurately at the individual level, which makes me a bit cautious about the neat narrative of "thinking is calorically cheap, full stop." That said, the core point about adenosine accumulation and perceived exertion affecting training quality is fascinating and well-supported — that part of the article is genuinely useful regardless of the calorie accounting.
- jahnu 8mo ago> debunk the popular myth for my friends that exercise burns a lot of calories Can you expand on that please? Because I can tell you as a matter of fact that when I go for a run for an hour I burn well over 800 calories.
- sdfhbdf 8mo agoThe product that this article is advertising seems to be pretty inaccurate and their marketing seems to be burying that information. The big copy on the front page says: > Your Apple Watch *tracks* VO2 Max—one... While you have to read through FAQ where you see: > The watch *estimates* your cardio fitness during outdoor activities and stores it in Apple Health, which our app reads automatically. All emphasis are mine. I think it's a little disingenuous to sell this as "Your VO2 Max, finally visible" when it's actually just an estimate from a watch, based on biomarkers. When the real VO2 is measured in a lab with a more involved equipment. A 2025 validation study involving 30 participants found that Apple Watch underestimated VO2 max by a mean of 6.07 mL/kg/min (95% CI 3.77–8.38) when compared to indirect calorimetry, the gold standard method. The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) was 13.31%, and the limits of agreement showed considerable variability ranging from -6.11 to 18.26 mL/kg/min [1]. Another 2024 study found similar results, with the Apple Watch Series 7 showing a MAPE of 15.79% and poor reliability (ICC = 0.47) [2]. [1]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0323741 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn... [2]: https://biomedeng.jmir.org/2024/1/e59459 https://biomedeng.jmir.org/2024/1/e59459
- Madmallard 8mo agoyeah there's no reliable way to measure VO2 max without breathing into tubes.
- ajb 8mo agoThere's (vo2master) device that can apparently measure it in one breath; there was a video on some swimmer using it on turnaround without much interference with their exercise. $7k though.
- 21asdffdsa12 8mo agoShouldn't the chemistry hide the usage of calories by the brain? It gets basically a supply run at night - when its washed with lymph, sugar supplied and then subsists on that for new memory formation and computation with small scale supplies delivered during the day via the blood stream? So a hard thinking experience should show up downstream as calorie usage during the following sleep?
- podgorniy 8mo agoI also think that glucose is a bad proxy for claiming "no thinking overhead"
- aaronbrethorst 8mo agoI found the AI writing of this post to really detract from its message. Give your agent meaningful writing samples of your own work and use those as a ‘style transfer’ basis for blog posts to get something far more true to your own voice.
- dgxyz 8mo agoOr just fucking write it yourself!
- andai 8mo agoI wanted to test my theory that "don't use cliche'd language" helps with that, but incredibly the essays ChatGPT is giving me today don't have any of the tells. How do I get it to give me slop? I asked "Can you give me a short essay on the history of fire." Maybe the type of writing requested has a massive effect on the language used?
- thinkingemote 8mo agoPossibly. As for this blog post and for most slop the prompt itself will contain the material. The material will be very short. "Here is one paragraph of an idea, an abstract of a report. Write a blog post." Whereas a "history of fire" contains no article in the prompt and so might have more material from its own auto complete database to draw from.
- nothrabannosir 8mo agoOr please just put the prompt in a blog post instead.
- yorwba 8mo agoWho would read a blog post that just says "Think of a topic that users of an app for monitoring blood oxygen might be interested in, do a web search for related articles and synthesize them into a blog post. Make sure to draw on your own personal experience to make it more engaging"? I'm sure the actual ad at the bottom had more human effort put into it than this article. The website owner didn't even bother to check for hallucinated links, though https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysiol.91324.2008 https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysio... does exist and somewhat backs up the clickbait headline, so it would be satisfying comeuppance if the mods could just replace the submission accordingly.
- misja111 8mo agoI have noticed that the reverse is also true: a heavy workout makes it more difficult to think hard afterwards.
- coolThingsFirst 8mo agoYes, this is what I have noticed as well. Willpower is limited. Hard workout means intense cognitive effort is much harder to pull off.
- piskov 8mo agoCreatine really helps with “energy”. Found myself practically stop longing for sweets during programming; have more energy during workouts (135 KG bench press and all the other stuff). 5 g daily is what considered to saturate your muscles. Some report that any additional helps cognitive tasks (but I haven’t seen definitive studies besides the sleep deprivation). I take 7.5 g
- xnx 8mo agoContent marketing slop
- user____name 8mo agoWas reminded of this study which pointed to glutamate buildup leading to a similar effect. https://www.science.org/content/article/mentally-exhausted-study-blames-buildup-key-chemical-brain https://www.science.org/content/article/mentally-exhausted-s...
- koliber 8mo agoThis kind of correlates with a wisdom I've heard before: You don't suffer from a lack of time, but rather a lack of energy. And actually, you don't suffer from a lack of energy, but a lack of activation energy. We colloquially refer to activation energy as motivation. But maybe that's not the whole story. Some of it is willpower and personality, but maybe some of it is a buildup of adenosine. This squares with my personal experience. It's harder to start things after day's worth of intense mental effort.
- evanjrowley 8mo agoBalancing health while being productive as an average adult seems like an impossible equation today. Many people tell me I need to lift weights to lose weight. On mornings when I actually put in real effort, I pay for it with a significant cognitive performance penalty for the remainder of the day. I want to do nothing more than sleep an hour after a workout, which is bad timing, because that's when I need to clock into work. I stay hydrated, get enough sleep, etc. People tell me that I'm over training, which is ridiculous, because anything less would be easy and contravene the purpose of the workout. This is why I prefer to exercise in the evening, but there are known negative effects [0] of physical exertion on sleep quality. If I actually did all the exercise I needed to do at the gym in the morning, then I'd probably have to sleep at 9:00 PM and wake up at 4:00 AM. There's no room to live in that schedule. [0] https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58271-x https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58271-x
- xiphias2 8mo ago,,Many people tell me I need to lift weights to lose weight.'' This is stupid. All you need to do is to get used to being hungry to the point of losing 0.1kg/day and measure yourself a lot (I'm doing the same). Actually for me working out increases my appetite, and I feel like I have to eat so thar the gym session doesn't go wasted.
- ChoGGi 8mo ago> Regardless of strain, exercise bouts ending ≥4 hours before sleep onset are not associated with changes in sleep. Exercise a little earlier in the evening?
- soared 8mo agoHate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are likely over training. Check out heart rate zones, optimal workouts for weight loss/muscle gain. IE for endurance sports most of your training time should be zone 2, which if casually “a level of breathing where you could have a conversation”. So not breathing hard. It’s counterintuitive, but you should do workouts pretty close to easy.
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- MagicMoonlight 8mo agoI’ve noticed this. Both physically tiring and mentally tiring activity seem to deplete the same pool.
- tsoukase 8mo ago"Healthy mind in a healthy body", the ancient Greek tradition suggested. For me as N=1, training after thinking is easier than the reverse.
- niemandhier 8mo agoCreatine helps. It gets stored in the brain as phosphocreatine, which can be used via creatinease to build ATP faster from ADP. It takes at least a week until it gets stored in the brain if you start taking it.