The ROI of Exercise

[delayed]

Also, if you have health issues, you will not be playing tennis twice a week. Plus tennis is on the expensive to stay active in when you need a club membership and courts to play.

There are plenty of wealthy people who are unhealthy.

Wake up at 4:30am and go for a run. You’re already accomplishing more at that point in the day than most wealthy people who are comfortably laying in bed.

The hard thing is doing the thing. Just do, that’s it.

Very much this. While tennis has become more accessible and lower cost over time, it has always been an expensive sport.

If you're disciplined enough to put something in your calendar and do it over a period of months, without someone breathing down your neck to do so, whether you feel like doing it or not, then you are likely able to apply that effort in other areas of life.

So then it's a bidirectional correlation. You're more likely to be fit if you are wealthy and more likely to be wealthy if you are fit.

Essentially, what you're looking at is that people who engage in self improvement end up better off than those who don't.

It's a priori obvious but some people are uncomfortable with it for some reason - trauma response / coping mechanism, something like that.

Further, people don't know enough about the deadly effects of obesity, high blood pressure, and the big killer:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atherosclerosis

Exercise is vital!

"Atherosclerosis generally starts when a person is young and worsens with age. Almost all people are affected to some degree by the age of 65. It is the number one cause of death and disability in developed countries. Though it was first described in 1575, there is evidence suggesting that this disease state is genetically inherent in the broader human population, with its origins tracing back to CMAH genetic mutations that may have occurred more than two million years ago during the evolution of hominin ancestors of modern human beings."

I am embarrassed to admit I always thought people focused too much on protein and it was bro science but I also never managed to get stronger despite resistance training. Then in my forties I finally started eating 150-180 g of protein a day and doing resistance training to exhaustion a couple days a week and the difference has been huge. I wish I’d done this 20 years ago.

You may want to find some activities you enjoy while doing them.

I don't know what you tried, but sometimes a small variation is enough to make it fun and rewarding during the exercise. For example, I find slow road running pretty boring. The only value is doing exercise and relaxing my brain. I gave up many times. But replace the roads by challenging technical single tracks, and I'm very happy and havn't gave up in years.

That's certainly not the only (and I'd also not put it as primary) reason for extending the lifespan.

Still, breaking one's hip in advanced age is often a death sentence as many people never get out of bed again.

When an old person breaks their hip around here, people say something along the lines of "we'd better hurry up for visiting them one last time".

You aren’t wrong. Train your legs and walk. Don’t sit in the recliner when you retire. 7000-10000 steps a day helps

That's a perfectly valid comparison. A year's worth of hours is still a year's worth of hours, regardless of what time span I spread it over.

We use this sort of formulation everywhere. If I say I work 40 hours a week, no one is going to assume that I start work at 9am on Monday, work non-stop until 1am Wednesday, and then take the rest of the week off. If I say that people spend approximately a third of their lives sleeping, no one thinks I mean that they sleep continuously from birth until they're 30 years old, and then spend the next 60 years awake.

There's a difference between soreness and pain. My muscles get sore all the time from exercise, but it's not painful. That soreness just tells me I'm probably going to be a little bit stronger because of the exercise I just did. (Of course it's a continuum: certain higher levels of soreness mean I probably overdid it.)

Joint pain is a whole other thing, though. Usually joint pain means that you're doing some sort of exercise incorrectly, or that you're using too much weight or intensity for your current level of physical fitness. Or you have a previous injury that can't fully heal and there are some exercises that you just shouldn't be doing, but you do them anyway.

But I think the author is talking about less pain in a different way. For example, I threw out my lower back 25 years ago in college, and it's never been the same since. But doing core exercises and strengthening the muscles around that area means much less chance of pain doing regular day-to-day activities.

There's a big difference between recovery pain and chronic pain. Also, if someone has joint pain, they are doing the wrong exercises. For example, running trashes my knees, but biking does not. Also, picking up heavy shit (weights - squats and deadlifts) is the only thing that resolved lower back pain (from sitting all day).

Some ways to exercise avoid injury & get results, and some.. don’t.

I’m a triathlete of 4 years now - love to be sore but have never been injured & unable to train.

There are three things you must do:

1. good technique: lift with the right muscles, run at the right cadence & target heart rate.

2. listen to your body when it needs less or more load.

3. treat recovery as equally important as exercise itself. Exercise’s mirror.

That said, instead of actual complaints, your friends might be social signaling! Bringing it up to bond over the joy of exercise. Humans do that subconsciously, and there is a ton of joy to bond over!

From personal experience strength training has been key to recovering from injuries (caused by doing stupid things, not exercise itself). So maybe the correlation between exercise and pain is incorrect? The exercise is the cure to the pain...

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5753318/v1 (pre-print) seems to provide a strong argument for strength training being beneficial. My search was not thorough so likely more studies out there.

When you start working out, you will have soreness in your muscles from lactic acid because your body isn’t used to it.

Once you get in a routine of doing it at least twice a week you won’t get that soreness anymore. People who start working out, then miss a month, then start back experience it all the time. Consistency is key.

Every life long runner I know has had a serious knee problem or other injury.

But I think running is higher impact on the body that a lot of of other exercise. You're putting your full body weight on a small area several times a second for many minutes every day.

Anecdotally, weight training eliminated my chronic shoulder and hip pains from sitting at a desk. I’ve read several similar stories but I’d be interested to see studies on this.

For me personally: My fitness routines are regular but sloppy.

I’m often complaining about soreness here, a lightly pulled there, a big joint that needs to be left alone for a few days. It’s annoying but also even kinda satisfying, and I know how to avoid serious injury.

I’m not complaining about lower back pain because my fitness activity has rid me of it. That pain would have stopped me from being able to move easily, work on my cabin, play with children, and would have eventually made me overweight and chronically ill.

The tradeoff is really a no-brainer in my case, and I don’t think my case is so unique.

I usually lift rather than run, but I do the same thing, and it has changed my life. Up at 4 every day, and lift at 5. It makes everything else easier, I agree.

I do get in bed at 7:30p most nights and read, to ensure my body has the choice to get 8h of sleep.

Amen. What is the routine that works for you?

By 9pm? A lot of people will need to go to bed at 8pm to survive this schedule.

Stepmania [1] (open DDR clone) just requires a (decent) dance pad, no VR. That's as good a work you as you'll get from a game, I suspect.

[1] https://www.stepmania.com/download/

I'm curious about this so I hope you'll indulge a few questions:

1) What kind of free space do you need? 2) What would you recommend in terms of headset if one plans to be swinging around a lot?

Can you recommend any specific games that meet these requirements? I don't have VR, but I remember playing "Super hot VR" and getting a surprisingly good workout from that game.

Or you know just get audiobook on your phone and walk.