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Professional athletes don't train for cardiometabolic health. They train to perform at competitions. The study is perfectly fine for the people it is intended t

Professional athletes don't train for cardiometabolic health. They train to perform at competitions. The study is perfectly fine for the people it is intended to serve in the context of their lives. Normal people neither want nor need to train like athletes. They certainly don't need to follow a training program to compete at the Olympics. But they would still be well served to train in some form because of their increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Optimizing that form for efficiency is a key to population health. This paper is just the latest in a stream of evidence that suggests shorter but higher intensity bursts of exercise might be the more efficient way of training if you want to min-max your workout time and health as a normal person who has a real job and possibly a family and other hobbies.

david-gpu 2mo ago
I do recommend learning what Steve Magness says about the subject. He covers that as well. Even as a complete amateur you still would not structure your training as they did in that paper, because it makes zero sense.
- aqme28 2mo ago
  > you still would not structure your training as they did in that paper, because it makes zero sense. That isn't relevant. The paper is not setting out to find the optimal way for people to train.
  - david-gpu 2mo ago
    With this I am not trying to invalidate the research. What I am doing is warning laypeople from drawing overly simplistic conclusions from studies like these, such as concluding that "Exercising hard is good".
    - hobojojo 2mo ago
      There are a lot of studies on one side showing that high intensity training is probably better than developibg skill and efficiency for very moderate health goals and how an Olympic coach thinks lay people should train on the other. How much experience does an Olympic coach have with someone who wants to do less than 2000 calories of exercise a week for the rest of their life?
- sigmoid10 2mo ago
  [dead]
discreteevent 2mo ago
In fact professional endurance athletes have to train at low intensity because they put out so many watts at higher intensities that they can't get enough fuel in to sustain it for the number of hours they train. If they do then they end up with chronic fatigue etc. Once an amatuer is under a certain number of hours a week (10?) and relatively low wattage it doesn't make sense for them to train at low intensity. (You could be a really fast amateur and still be putting out relatively low watts compared to a pro).
- yeoyeo42 2mo ago
  misinfo. that has nothing to do with why athletes train the way they do. getting more calories in is not a limiting factor. anaerobic lactic and alactic regime training just has a hard metabolic and fatigue thresholds where you won't see any improvements if you add volume. aerobic regime training (which is by its nature low intensity) does, from what we know, not really have the same limitations. on the contrary a lot of its most important adaptions keep increasing with absdurd training volumes and only show up after accumulated years and decades of training (long distance endurance athletes can often peak or maintain near peak shape into their 40s or 50s because of this). all of this necessitates large volumes of low intensity training.
  - wjnc 2mo ago
    Why is the pointing to Relative Energy Deficiency “misinfo”? It is my understanding that that is one of the factors that are used in explaining the overtraining in say ultrarunners. Eating 5k+ calories a day is near threshold for the hours in a waking day.
    - lkirkwood 2mo ago
      2 large pizzas is near the threshold for the hours in a day?
      - wjnc 1mo ago
        Sorry, bit late to the party. Eat a pizza and the energy will only come into your body in (as far as I've learned) a few hours. Eating a pizza is hard on your digestion. That why we usually go to sleep a few hours after are largest meal. We give our body the time to digest the energy and wake up fresh. (from AI overview) "The human body can absorb and process about 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrates (roughly 240 to 360 calories) per hour during exercise when using a single or mixed source of sugars" And that's for your 14? waking hours. With another conundrum looking around the corner - work out or basicly: burn more calories, and you need more sleep. Your body is constantly calomaxxing. Eat two pizzas (hey, once in my 20s I could as well!) and your digestion is working for the next 10-15 hours.
francisofascii 2mo ago
It is only efficient because of the short duration of 8 week study. It's like, pounding Leetcode is the most efficient/effective way to prep for an upcoming interview. But for the long term, it is better to mix up the type of work you do.
cameldrv 2mo ago
This is my frustration with AI coaches, specifically Garmin. They want me to have a 10k time goal or something when I don’t ever run competitive races and don’t directly care about times. I just want to get healthy.
ranger_danger 2mo ago
Well said. If it's true that this can be interpreted as an average (let's say normally-sedentary) person getting more benefit from shorter, higher-intensity exercise as opposed to longer, low-intensity exercise... I think that is helpful information and could actually motive some people to get better exercise in. If I could simply choose between 3 minutes of running fast versus 90 minutes of walking, of course I would always choose the shorter one and get it over with, and may not have even chosen the walking at all due to the time involved.

david-gpu 2mo ago

I do recommend learning what Steve Magness says about the subject. He covers that as well. Even as a complete amateur you still would not structure your training as they did in that paper, because it makes zero sense.

aqme28 2mo ago
> you still would not structure your training as they did in that paper, because it makes zero sense. That isn't relevant. The paper is not setting out to find the optimal way for people to train.
- david-gpu 2mo ago
  With this I am not trying to invalidate the research. What I am doing is warning laypeople from drawing overly simplistic conclusions from studies like these, such as concluding that "Exercising hard is good".
  - hobojojo 2mo ago
    There are a lot of studies on one side showing that high intensity training is probably better than developibg skill and efficiency for very moderate health goals and how an Olympic coach thinks lay people should train on the other. How much experience does an Olympic coach have with someone who wants to do less than 2000 calories of exercise a week for the rest of their life?
sigmoid10 2mo ago
[dead]

discreteevent 2mo ago

In fact professional endurance athletes have to train at low intensity because they put out so many watts at higher intensities that they can't get enough fuel in to sustain it for the number of hours they train. If they do then they end up with chronic fatigue etc. Once an amatuer is under a certain number of hours a week (10?) and relatively low wattage it doesn't make sense for them to train at low intensity. (You could be a really fast amateur and still be putting out relatively low watts compared to a pro).

yeoyeo42 2mo ago
misinfo. that has nothing to do with why athletes train the way they do. getting more calories in is not a limiting factor. anaerobic lactic and alactic regime training just has a hard metabolic and fatigue thresholds where you won't see any improvements if you add volume. aerobic regime training (which is by its nature low intensity) does, from what we know, not really have the same limitations. on the contrary a lot of its most important adaptions keep increasing with absdurd training volumes and only show up after accumulated years and decades of training (long distance endurance athletes can often peak or maintain near peak shape into their 40s or 50s because of this). all of this necessitates large volumes of low intensity training.
- wjnc 2mo ago
  Why is the pointing to Relative Energy Deficiency “misinfo”? It is my understanding that that is one of the factors that are used in explaining the overtraining in say ultrarunners. Eating 5k+ calories a day is near threshold for the hours in a waking day.
  - lkirkwood 2mo ago
    2 large pizzas is near the threshold for the hours in a day?
    - wjnc 1mo ago
      Sorry, bit late to the party. Eat a pizza and the energy will only come into your body in (as far as I've learned) a few hours. Eating a pizza is hard on your digestion. That why we usually go to sleep a few hours after are largest meal. We give our body the time to digest the energy and wake up fresh. (from AI overview) "The human body can absorb and process about 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrates (roughly 240 to 360 calories) per hour during exercise when using a single or mixed source of sugars" And that's for your 14? waking hours. With another conundrum looking around the corner - work out or basicly: burn more calories, and you need more sleep. Your body is constantly calomaxxing. Eat two pizzas (hey, once in my 20s I could as well!) and your digestion is working for the next 10-15 hours.

francisofascii 2mo ago

It is only efficient because of the short duration of 8 week study. It's like, pounding Leetcode is the most efficient/effective way to prep for an upcoming interview. But for the long term, it is better to mix up the type of work you do.

cameldrv 2mo ago

This is my frustration with AI coaches, specifically Garmin. They want me to have a 10k time goal or something when I don’t ever run competitive races and don’t directly care about times. I just want to get healthy.

ranger_danger 2mo ago

Well said. If it's true that this can be interpreted as an average (let's say normally-sedentary) person getting more benefit from shorter, higher-intensity exercise as opposed to longer, low-intensity exercise... I think that is helpful information and could actually motive some people to get better exercise in. If I could simply choose between 3 minutes of running fast versus 90 minutes of walking, of course I would always choose the shorter one and get it over with, and may not have even chosen the walking at all due to the time involved.