Basically any time we do a study which asks "Is doing a bit more exercise better for you?" the answer is yes. Like doing a single walk around the block every week is better than doing none. Even five minutes of exercise is better than zero. But obviously these have much less positive impact than several hours of moderate to intense exercise weekly. There are diminishing returns but they don't really kick in until you're already pretty fit, they are only really a concern that athletes need to think about.

So in terms of individual decision making things are really simple. Are you not fit? Do you feel bad? Are your basic markers for this looking bad (blood pressure, weight etc.)? Do more exercise. Do what you enjoy, do it safely, and do as much of it as you can as intensely as is reasonable, and the numbers will go in the right direction. This will put you way ahead of the average American in terms of fitness, it's not until a higher level that things really start to get technical.

Unfortunately, it's people at both ends of the fitness curve that have to be careful about increased exercise frequency/intensity. On the less-fit side, the primary concern is accumulating minor injuries that reduce capacity for exercise even further leading into a downward spiral.

Saying that more exercise is always better is a completely false statement. Do not care if it sounds good or is meant to "help" people or whatever, it's completely false and can harm uninformed people.

2012 TEDx Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6U728AZnV0

Would only change "This will put you way ahead of the average American in terms of fitness, it's not until a higher level that things really start to get technical." striking out "American", just because it works everywhere.

Huge guy. Former NFL tight-end. Still very fit.

I notice he only does 1 hour at the gym and then he leaves.

Granted, this is very low quality anecdata.

But seeing how brief his workout is opened my eyes to the benefit of consistency over volume.

If you bulk up and turn into Hercules over the course of a few years you can scale back your training volume dramatically and as long as you keep your diet right, you will continue to be a jacked and cut dude for many many years.

I'm sure this gets less true as you age but it seems to apply to me in my 40s.

Maintenance is just way easier than the initial buildup.

I discovered this pretty much on accident when I scaled back the volume and intensity of my own training and noticed... Huh would you look at that... Very little changed.

Like on some level, it would be harder to return to the state of roly poly schlub that I was once in, than to continue being the fairly fit person I am now. I just autopilot twice a week to the gym after work, zone out and listen to podcasts for an hour while doing some pretty moderate intensity lifts, and the body stays in pretty decent shape. I barely break a sweat now compared to the first year or two.

But after that? Yeah, no doubt that one can maintain most of that fitness with a small fraction of the time and effort.

As I said up-thread, I started running as an Army cadet, and I've continued to take annual fitness tests throughout my career. The fastest guys on those tests are guys who (unsurprisingly) were serious runners or soccer players in high school / college but who (surprisingly) did very little running after that. They could jump into the test cold and laugh their way to two miles in 12:00 (11:00 if they were really trying). I, on the other hand, basically didn't start running until I joined the Army, and I had to put in a lot of miles to break 13:00. For several years after that, though, I was able to reduce my mileage too and still run circles around a lot of people.

A person who takes steroids and doesn't work out will still gain more muscle than a non-steroid user working out for an hour every day.

Moreover, my experience in having formerly trained to compete at top international levels, studied exercise physiology and worked as a trainer, is very similar.

The really short oversimplified version is: more intensity, shorter training, and more rest — it is the balance of exercise and rest that is key. And world-class results are definitely possible with relatively brief workouts; in fact, it's the best way to do it.

The simplified concept is the muscles gain strength with stimulated rest. The training/exercise only provides the stimulus for the muscles to grow, the exercise does not actually grow the cells, it degrades or damages them. It is the repair process that strengthens the muscle. Too much exercise and too little rest (=repair+growth) just degrades the system; too much rest without exercise stimulus wastes potential growth time.

Some is good, but more is not necessarily better.

While there is no question that some exercise is almost always better than none, if you want peak results, intensity is the key. By intensity, we mean pushing the muscle to failure, so the end of each lifting set is not a predetermined number of reps, but the rep where you push as hard as possible and simply cannot complete the lift (after ~5-25 reps depending on focus on strength vs bulk, respectively). Do that one to three times for each muscle in the workout, then give it some days rest. A 45-min workout is sufficient to work the upper, mid, or lower body zone. Doing only one zone each day fits a max of six workouts per week, and monitoring vital signs (pulse/bp/temp) for overall stress will usually reduce that to around four weight workouts per week. This is what worked for me and the people I trained, and I'm not the least bit surprised to find it also worked for Dorian Yates (and no, I'm not selling anything related to exercise programs).

Edit: Also, I've been on a 4 day Bukgarian split before and had very good results. If you want proof there is a 30 minute routine that can kick your ass I recommend looking up Ryan Humiston's take on it.

When I stop compulsively eating and drinking, when I look for every opportunity to do something as an exercise, I snap out of my [self-diagnosed] depression and malaise in a few days, and feel great.

The doctors rarely tell you to eat your salads. "Here is a pill, thank you for your business".

When I went to a doctor complaining about low energy, literally the first question was about weight gain and exercising, so I'm not sure where your comment about the pills comes from.

Now, there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem here -am I sedentary because I'm depressed or am I depressed because I'm sedentary?

I would agree with the previous poster that exercise brings me out of depression, but I spend most of my depressive periods thinking I should be more active, right now I'm in one and I keep trying to get into some healthy habits but I keep giving up because I just don't have whatever it is that I need to keep it going. I even get nearly immediate results, just a few weeks of activity has me feeling better already. But then I find some reason to take a break and then the break drags on and I'm back to where I started.

So maybe it's the depression keeping me down or maybe it's my lack of discipline causing depression but either way I'd say physical activity is important for how you feel on a daily basis and I genuinely think just getting into a regular rhythm of exercise even just one day a week can have huge impacts on your life.

> The doctors rarely tell you to eat your salads. "Here is a pill, thank you for your business"

which makes it appear as even with your “self-diagnoses” you’re under the impression that doctors rarely ask about exercise and diet and then move forward from there. which is the exact opposite of what i’ve seen from a college roommate, a close friend, and an ex who saw multiple different doctors, and each of those doctors first insisted on:

a) find a hobby, dive into it. and,

b) exercise multiple times per week. and,

c) get a nutritionist. and

d) only after those things showed little results would they prescribe SSRIs or other long term drugs.

i promise this isn’t coming down on you, i promise, but, we seem to have a massive trend of confidently wrong people implying they’re smarter than actual doctors or (just about any other subject it seems), they just guess what doctors do and don’t do. and even far more concerning is how often these confidently wrong people issue blanket advice to randoms online as if they’re at all qualified and as if they know any of the important intricate details of the randoms they’re advising.

we desperately need to get back to a place where people can confidently say “i don’t know” again. we’re (including myself) too desperate to chime in even if we’re woefully ill equipped.

maybe every secondary-university semester everyone should get a refresher session on the most basic ass socrates/plato: the smartest person is the one who knows, understands, and admits about how much they are ignorant.

I'm guessing you are in the US? There is a lot of medical advice here (UK, and Europe more widely) which is essentially “eat better and move around more”. A great many don't listen to that, but it is definitely said.

> When I stop compulsively eating and drinking [and do some] exercise

This is a key issue: not what doctors are prescribing but what people do to self-medicate. The harmful side of self-care when “a bit of what you like does you good” becomes overconsumption and underactivity. It can be even worse for those of us with significant mental issues over the norm (bit of a bipolar pillock myself, got a piece of paper saying so & everything, and like you describe with depression I find the right exercise, while not at all a panacea, helps regulate my mind quite a lot as well as stopping my body falling apart).

part of the problem in the US is that at least some medical practices/hospitals measure patient satisfaction as a metric to evaluate performance, but what is good for the patient and what makes them happy is not necessarily correlated. it's a factor into how the opioid epidemic got as bad as it did in the US. and also i'd imagine if you kept telling people this for decades and they didn't listen people might just not bother.

The problem is that the doctor has very little to offer other than to tell people to do that, and the vast majority of people will nod and continue doing whatever they were doing.

Bear in mind that for many people therapies like SSRIs and weight loss medications (or even counselling/therapy) can get them into the right mental and physical place to start doing more exercise and eat better.

It's easy to advise people to eat well and exercise, but it can be a bit like telling a miserable person with a migraine to smile more. Improve the underlying issue artifically, then they can have a better chance of starting the natural things. Doctors do need to do both, though, merely handing out medications without encouraging the next step is irresponsible IMO.

The problem is that in the US no doctor is going to do that because no insurance company will pay for it. In the US even people who have serious injuries and need physical therapy to recover properly from them often can't get their insurance to pay for physical therapy or to pay for enough of it (for example insurance might only cover 3 sessions when they need 12)

Insurance companies would rather have doctors print out a a few sheets of paper that kind of explain several exercises (maybe with a couple black and white pictures if you're lucky) and then expect the patients to figure it all out on their own at home, in the exact same environment they have been in, surrounded by distractions, and with no one to help them which leads to poor compliance and zero data to give back to the doctor.

Insurance companies are criminally stupid in this sense. They'd rather not pay for things that would make people healthier like physical therapy, preventative medicine, medical tests, or even gym memberships, even when by not doing those things it will clearly end up costing them more down the road.

If someone's hit the point where they're thinking "I'd rather be dead than leave the house", improving their mental health by any means necessary should be the first step. But not everyone should be given pills as the first option and many doctors are guilty of such laziness (over prescription of opioids and antibiotics are other examples of this – some patients urgently need them, most don't).

That's because advice like this is useless. Everyone knows they should eat more vegetables, you need someone to guide you through habit formation, which is not what the doctors are for.

The paper suggest otherwise. Replacing ten minutes of your otherwise 11 hours of sedentary time with exercise will have less than twice the effect on blood pressure of replacing five minutes with exercise. That is diminishing returns.

[0] https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...

The growing research into how even a small amount of activity can confer significant benefits to the sedentary may be yet another mechanism entirely.

I agree shorter workouts are much easier to stick to though, especially since I'm easily bored.

[1] The results on my running performance, specifically over two miles, weren't clear, by the way. I wasn't running my best times when I started the experiment, nor at the end of it. But at least I didn't get worse despite averaging only six miles per week. I've done much better on 15-25 miles per week with a wider variety of speed work.

For disproportionate benefits, one needs to define which benefits exactly. A max effort will burn a lot of calories quite quickly and potentially increase V02 max (which is highly correlated to overall longevity). Zone 2 training has become popular and has other benefits, notably increases 'fat max' threshold - which gives different benefits (specifically the ability to work harder for longer while still using fat as an energy source for the exercise).

> I found that it's indeed difficult to strike a legitimate 100% effort, even when it's only for 20 seconds and only 5-10 times.

This is essentially the point. At the end of Tabata, the last interval should be the last bit of energy you have in the tank. It should be entirely draining. Doing this routine daily will not allow recovery to then properly do the training well.

FWIW, I heard it paraphrased as this: the body has essentially too modes, hard & easy. When going hard, it only matters how hard you go, not how long. When going easy, it only matters how long you go for, not how hard. At the same time, zone 2 training and HIIT/Tabata are not mutually exclusive in their benefits, but it's more which systems receive the most benefit while other systems in the body receive benefits but to a lesser degree.

Now that I'm quite a bit older, despite maintaining my body weight and two-mile running time since then, I'd probably get hurt if I repeated the experiment.

That is true of any exercise regime with much intensity. For muscular activity: pushing towards anything like your limits technically causes lots of minor damage, which the body repairs back better. If you don't give yourself sufficient recovery time within your weekly routine you miss out on a lot of that benefit because the body's repair/improve systems don't have time to properly do their thing. This is one of the reasons¹ why overtraining injuries are a thing. In terms of cardio this still applies, the heart is a set of muscles. Mentally I think there is a similar effect, but pinning down a cause for this is much more hand-wavy and subjective compared to the far better understood² mechanisms of how the body repairs, regulates, and improves, physical structures.

Some people seem to manage with minimal recovery time, but they are either lucky³, kidding themselves, or storing up issues ready for a big nasty surprise later.

----

[1] Other similar reasons include damage & fatigue in parts of the body other than muscles, and sometimes just being tired to the point of getting form wrong and hurting yourself through that.

[2] though still not entirely understood

[3] I'm counting being young as being lucky here. I'm trying to get back into running and other regular exercise (after a period of illness, looking after family with medical issues, and general burn-out) and the biggest thing getting in the way of improving from here is that I'm now in my mid/late 40s rather than early 30s like last time I was at this level of conditioning!

..In the states. Ask people from Amsterdam or Berlin about running out of breath from stairs.

I even remember seeing a study that claimed that people who lived in higher floors with no elevator had in average better cardiovascular health, an easy peasy way to nudge people into the right direction.

But I totally agree on the second point, starting in the the 4th floor was a bit hard in the beginning for me too

Walking is one of the best mild exercises, if you can do it in a safe place, where you can't trip or fall into a hole or be mugged (or some other risk), because you can think while walking. So you can use the time to think about your work (if applicable, like for software people, at least in some cases), or your life, or anything else. You can also not think deliberately (although thoughts may come anyway), and just enjoy the walk.

For example, I think about my side projects while walking, and have been surprised to find that I have sometime made good progress on some of them while doing so.

We go on about what's optimal from a raw time perspective, but time slows subjectively when you suffer. So people who don't conceptualize themselves as athletic, they may have insecurities if not outright skepticism, aren't going to last.

You can make a culty cultural glue to get habits to stick (because fitness is all about habits). You can do CrossFit, the social and positive aspects. That encouragement can bring habit and a change of self perception.

But if you're just a self-driven type, and you're dipping your toes in the water, my observations are that whatever is fun (an individual experience) is what you'll be creating a habit with, and time foes quickly. So explore a brunch of things until you encounter fun. Tennis, running club, weightlifting club. Etc.

So my point is that fitness is a problem around how people experience exercise and training, instead of what's optimal in a paper or in terms what's efficient in terms of time.

Was this prematurely dismissive? Maybe, I'm going by the comments.

I have always been thin and tried to start workouts on my own several times over many years, and never could do it, mostly because I didn't know what I was doing. Hiring a personal trainer, if you can afford it, is a great way to get over this hump. I quit after a couple of years and workout on my own now, but couldn't have done it without the trainer.

It's not at all obvious that their findings - which became part of Crossfit "religion" - generalize to both sexes, all fitness levels, and all ages.

I feel terrible with HIIT either way, which means it does work

And I mean, psychologically, the feeling of nearly dying would have been enough to scare me off any exercising had I started with that. Being able to push yourself physically, and enjoying it, is a skill that needs to be learned gradually for most people.

My mother did always describe to me the feeling of being exhausted after sport as a pleasant one, so I do perceive it as pleasant.

The reason why I hate it is because I could be doing something enjoyable. I tried looking for sports that I actually enjoy but I found only windsurf, which is highly impractical, expensive and very time consuming. I'd rather spend that time with my kids, my wife, playing board games and playing videogames.

Bike is getting dusty but pull up bar is great for “well I am passing by, let’s do 3 reps”.

Do people want to spend 60 minutes as some kind of gym time standard? Where does this number come from?

I have a getting out the door in the morning with my running shoes on habit.

Whatever happens after that is a bonus. The goal is to just step outside in the morning ready for a run.

I got myself injuries from overtraining for not listening to body already twice. And I was not fit or competitive, anything like that. Just physically average person being more ambitious then is reasonable.

I still hate it though, but it doesn't take as much effort

Same thing for food. Trying to switch to a healthier but difficult diet wholesale fails essentially always. But what's relatively easy is finding a healthier alternative to one single thing you eat regularly, that you like just as well. This takes some experimenting, but is usually doable. Then once you've gotten used to the healthier option it becomes automatic.

Then you can replace a single other food, and so on. I think that gradual and sustainable are the most important things to focus on for most people looking for general health improvement.

Now i do -- its a persons name