How does this compare with what can be considered a 'gym' addiction. Is it ok when it is exercise? What is too much? What about work, startups? I rock climb at least 6 hours a week, it's not bizarre to hear someone dying from rock climbing though.
Someone recently tried to convince me, a frequent climber, that the health effects of getting exercise from climbing were outweighed by the risks involved. I did a bunch of research on the subject, and it is very clear that the benefits of exercise massively outweigh the risks of even a dangerous activity like climbing.
It's hard to find statistics for indoor climbing, but for outdoor climbing there is a death for every 320,000 outings. If you go on two outings a week, your chance of dying is around 0.03% per year [1].
Getting the proper amount of exercise (compared to being sedentary), though, can decrease the total risk of year-over-year mortality by a factor of up to 4.5 times [2]. The overall risk of death for e.g. a middle-aged man is something like 0.2% [3], so any significant reduction to this factor compares very favorably with the risk of death from climbing.
So, basically, if your options are either a) be sedentary or b) get adequate exercise by rock climbing, it is better for your health to choose b. This comparison looks even better if you're doing only gym climbing (which is much safer than outdoor climbing).
It's worth noting that those deaths aren't simply evenly distributed either. Of the friends I've known that have had potentially life threatening climbing injuries (fortunately nobody's died yet), they were either doing "expedition" level stuff or were simply stupid (free soloing). There are of course exceptions. Pay attention to what you're doing and don't be an idiot and 95% of climbing injuries will pass you by.
You shouldn't compare the benefits of getting exercise from rock climbing to the chances of dying from it. The choice isn't rock climb or be totally sedentary. You can get exercise in ways where you can't fall and die. What you should compare is the marginal benefit of the additional exercise you end up doing because you enjoy rock climbing more than the next best activity. And, then compare that to the death rate.
So, if you look at the numbers, the risk of death from climbing is very, very low. Really, it's extremely low. You'd have to go on two outings a week for 3,200 years for the probability of your death to have an expected value of 1.0. Or, if you stick to top ropes, a lot longer than that.
Compared to how much you can benefit from the exercise, the risk of falling and dying is really insignificant, to the point that I don't think it's worth debating between climbing and any other common form of exercise.
[EDIT]: Fix an incorrectly worded statement about expected value.
That's still wrong. If you have x chance of surviving each day of rock climbing then you have an x^n chance of surviving n days of rock climbing, not a 0 chance of surviving.
> So, basically, if your options are either a) be sedentary or b) get adequate exercise by rock climbing, it is better for your health to choose b.
humbledrone, I doubt that's the choice most climbers are making. I'm also a frequent climber (mostly outdoors). If I could not climb, I would not be sedentary - I'd do something(s) else (I already do other activities, too). If I couldn't do anything other than take a stroll every day, I would do that, because I feel better when I move around. Most of the climbers I know are clearly this way - people who can't stand not to be active.
I am pretty convinced, myself, that I'd be better off walking for an hour on safe sidewalks every day instead of rock climbing. I think rock climbing, and other activities in which I partake, put me at higher risk for serious injury or death than a nice healthy walk. How much higher, I'm not sure.
But it's a free society (I live in the USA) and we can do what we want, so I climb, because I'm kind of addicted.
Given the direction that health insurance is taking, I do wonder if people who admit to participating in higher-risk sports will some day be penalized by higher premiums, as smokers are.
When I look at my more active friends, dying is the least of problems really. I had four friends who had their legs broken in terrible ways from skating or horse riding, while I haven't even had to go to the hospital since childhood.
Things like that could easily make you more sedentary for the rest of your life.
I'm not sure about climbing, I just don't think the math is as easy as that :)
The quality of life improvement from the added flexibility and strength must be taken into account also. To be a bit vulgar, would you rather engage in overnight activities with rock climber or with a couch surfer? Which one is able to run for the bus? Play with their kids?
(a related issue that really annoys me is when they compare the dangers of ectasy and heroin using the death rate, when the quality of life destruction caused by ectasy is 1% compared to the horror that happens to a junkie)
The thing with rock climbing is that it is not just "excercise". It's a hobby, it's fun for those of us that do it. (And if it isn't fun, why are you doing it?). I don't climb to stay fit, I climb because I enjoy it, because it is a challenge. I have a fear of heights, so I get a huge adrenaline rush when climbing. There is nothing like abusing your fears to produce thrill ;)
When people die from rock climbing, it's because they were careless or because they were pushing the envelope in some way. Rock climbing gyms are very safe - you're unlikely to die there.
Anyway, 6 hours a week at the climbing wall is hardly an addiction. That's more like a hobby.
Just out of curiosity, what about 6 hours playing video games? 10 hours? 20? (20 can easily be 2 a night during the week (chill out after work) and then 5 at night on weekends -- time that could just as easily be spent doing other sedentary things on weekends)
Video games are a leisure activity. They might not be quite as mentally engaging as commenting on HN or programming, but they provide the same functionality.
Making a distinction between time spent playing video games and time spent doing other leisure activities is fairly pointless. Managed properly, there's no real physical difference between playing a video game for 20 hours a week and reading a novel, watching TV, commenting on HN, programming or any other fairly motionless activity. I know that I (as a relatively fit 21 year old) spend quite a lot of time sat in front of a computer. Physically the activity is fairly irrelevant.
Perhaps the only thing that video games have that the other activities I mentioned don't is that they have a fairly high potential to be addictive. I'd imagine most people who've played video games at any point know what it's like to play for 10 hours straight for an entire weekend. You don't have to do that, but people do.
Regardless, a sedentary lifestyle with no regular exercise will lead to health problems which increase the likelihood of death. That's something we've known for decades. Don't count "time spent playing video games", count "time spent sitting down".
Psychological addiction is never healthy for the mind, no matter what the stimulus is.
That being said, spending an exorbitant amount of time devoted to exercise is generally better than spending an exorbitant amount of time devoted to passivity.
That's a very life stylist point of view. Who's to say that exercising, producing useful things to society, or social interaction is in ANY way "better" than spending your days playing video games?
I for one am an avid gamer and I would rather game than quite a large number of other activities that people find rewarding or fulfilling, but I don't go write on some blog saying that they're wasting their life away jogging down the street or writing Dragonlance novels.
Everyone should keep their negative opinions about gaming to themselves, much less people die playing video games than pretty much every other activity on the planet.
As a gamer myself, please understand that I don't have anything against gaming in general. However, I can think of an objective way in which producing "useful things to society" is better than gaming, which is that if everyone chose to spend all their time gaming, we would die from lack of basic necessities such as food, water, sanitation, etc. This would, of course, cut short the amount of gaming we could all do.
So, obviously, we have no choice but for some people contribute to society. Is there a fair way to decide who has to contribute, and who is allowed to opt out and play video games all day?
On an entirely different note, gaming probably causes a very significant number of deaths, due to its sedentary nature. Being sedentary is perhaps more dangerous than smoking: http://www.naturalnews.com/001547.html .
So, obviously, we have no choice but for some people contribute to society. Is there a fair way to decide who has to contribute, and who is allowed to opt out and play video games all day?
Not really, but we have a way anyway, and it's called money. It's the same way we use to determine who is allowed to opt out and read all day, who is allowed to opt out and go on lots of vacations, and who is allowed to opt out and study something abstruse in college for four years.
> who is allowed to opt out and study something abstruse in college for four years.
College is one of the last bastions of learning for the sake of learning. As programmers who often exalt creation for the sake of curation -- and discovery for the sake of discovery -- I think its better we commend that, rather than condemn it.
I am empathetically not condemning it. I'm pointing out that if we're measuring things by "how useful are they to society at large", it's not obvious that the time spent by a lot of people in college is ahead of four years spent becoming a World of Warcraft expert. But I don't think that's a measuring stick to which we should hold up everyone's lives, which is why I have a problem with neither college graduates nor MMO players.
mquander's response took the words out of my mouth. Video games, or anything else mentioned as an alternative to video games in this article, are things you do after you take care of the other necessities of life.
It was clear from the article that spawned this discussion that he was employed and simply took some time off like I did to play D3.
Firstly, I should have been more specific. I meant better physically -- physical activity, even overactivity, is better under the vast majority of circumstances to video gaming.
Secondly, I don't have negative opinions about gaming -- I play a lot of video games myself, in addition to other hobbies. I have negative opinions about obsessions, whether its an obsession with gaming or an obsession with work. (By negative opinion, I don't mean that I judge those with such obsessions poorly; merely that I consider them unhealthy.)
A 'gym' addiction is less likely to destroy your life. It's rare for people to go on 36 hour gym binges.
I'm sure a few people die rock climbing, but it's mostly going to be people who get confident, and put themselves in positions where a mistake (or even bad luck) is fatal.
Over-exercising addiction actually has serious consequences on people's health, as it causes stress fractures that are often exacerbated by them trying to "power through it". That being said, few people actually have this sort of problem, and one shouldn't avoid the gym simply out of fear of becoming addicted.
