People need to stop expecting their employer to solve this problem, because they won't. They're not responsible for making you exercise.
The most efficient way to incorporate exercise into your day is to make it part of your commute. Walking, biking, taking the train etc. - different modes are viable for different locations.
If you choose a job where this is not possible, you're just going to have to make it up some other way - two hours per week in a gym goes farther than most people think if you spend that time well.
In many cases at least one of these options is available to people but instead of taking it they whine that the job itself is too sedentary. I don't have a lot of sympathy, there are far worse jobs for the body than sitting in a chair (or standing stationary, your choice!) all day.
If truly none of these options are available to you in your current job - find a new one if you value your health. So many people have chosen a job for the money or prestige and just ignored this element completely. Those are unhappy people on account of their own choice.
This is not about exercise. Extended periods of inactivity are bad for your health, even if you are physically active. If the nature of your job is sedentary, you should interrupt the inactivity often enough. This is something all employers should accommodate. Either voluntarily, due to market pressure, or by regulation if more reasonable approaches fail.
Every employer I've ever had, even doing factory and warehouse work, has split the day into circa-2-hour blocks, with a morning break, a lunch break and an afternoon break.
When folks are working a production line the bosses have to coordinate it - but in an office there's more flexibility. And if someone in an office wants to skip their breaks to leave early, or have a larger number of shorter breaks, they generally have that freedom.
Atomic solutions to systemic problems obfuscate the core issue. Butt in seats in the US means you sit for about an hour to go to work then eight to nine at the office and another hour back home.
Most people can't change their commute. Pedestrian infrastructure is simply not there. Public transit doesn't exist in most places. Your option is to drive or drive or drive.
Get a new job that will require you to be in your chair in an office just like the last one.
The map of Guyana at the top of this article listed a location called Kamuda Village, and I thought that sounded interesting, so I checked it out on Google Search and Google Maps.
There's basically nothing about it on the English Internet. A point exists on Google Maps and some auto-generated SEO spam pages exist probably for that reason. There are no photos of the location, the terrain view just shows trees. No roads nearby. It's a few hundred meters from the marginally better documented Kukui River. The Internet has a video of some kids at another part of this river who take a raft across it every day to get to school.
It looks like there are lots of places in Guyana like this. Inhabited but undocumented, at least on the public Internet. It's fascinating to me that in an era where you just assume everything is online, there's so much of the world that still isn't.
Maybe not when you put it that way, but small businesses used to be a larger share of the economy and a more viable "rags to riches" path than they are today. The system is undoubtedly rigged to favor large businesses - most people understand that intuitively but the anti-trust cases the government is currently prosecuting and in many cases winning are hard evidence of how the US really punted on protecting the small businesses from the big ones over the last few decades. You aren't going to find many people in the working class who disagree with the idea that big corporations should be cut down to size and we should have an economic system that's friendlier to people who want to be their own boss.
Small businesses are no less viable than ever. Read some historical BLS and SBA stats, SUSB at Census.gov, or pretty much any proper place that tracks historical businesses data.
There’s literally tens of millions of small businesses, over 10% of the US working population is first gen millionaires.
Just because not everyone is Warren Buffet or the tech echo chamber here only looks at app style businesses doesn’t mean millions of people are not succeeding.
Maybe they want that, maybe they don't. Retail drug stores in the US are an oligopoly, that industry may not be a monopoly (yet) but they don't function under perfect competition. Maybe if you're the management or the shareholders of a retail drug chain you're just kind of shrugging your shoulders and working on the next merger at this point since the fewer competitors you have, the less hard you have to work for the customer's dollar.
I think for the average person, looking too carefully at individual studies is failing to see the forest for the trees.
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.
> 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.
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.
Too much exercise is a problem that can happen to literally anyone. Not just due to injuries. Fatigue management is one main component.
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.
Not only what you say is objectively truth, it's motivating! Just start moving your ass!
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.
While it's true that doing any amount more exercise is beneficial to the average person, they may not necessarily know/feel it. As we so often see super fit people in the media, it's easy to think we need to do hours of exercise daily for any benefit. Easy to then think "what's the point? I'll never be super fit" and do nothing. Recinforcing the narrative (including publication of studies) that no, even a small amount of execise is quite beneficial, is encouraging for the average person.
I wish someone had told me this: once you put muscle on your frame it tends to stick around.
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.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that Shannon Sharpe was doing a lot more than one hour per day of training when he was playing competitively. It's my observation that two workouts or practices per day is typical for collegiate athletics, even in the sports and at the schools that don't bring in money.
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.
When you're on steroids your body is basically a muscle making factory. You mainly need to consume enough protein and calories and your body will essentially do the work for you.
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.
Um, not really any reason to doubt as there's nothing wrong with selling what you find works
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).
Eh... I disagree. I've not bought his training but I have been actively fit since I was in highschool and have bought training before. There is value is getting regimens and techniques from really experienced athletes.
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.
He is also 56 years old and has the muscle definition of a man in his 20s, when biology shows building and retaining that kind of quality muscle at that age is very difficult even with a history of physical fitness. I'll just say it, he's probably on TRT or some other gear..
I do wonder how many people do not take care of the basics and instead go for anti-depressants and Ozempic. I get it if you tried everything, but how many do?
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".
This really downplays the impact of clinical depression. It's often not solved by exercising alone, and if you talk to a psychologist about this, the first thing they do is recommend exercising or at least goeing for walks as an immediate measure before potentially therapy or medication starts.
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.
Most people don't know what depression is. I'd say I've been depressed most of my life but the best periods have been the ones where I was physically active.
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.
> The doctors rarely tell you to eat your salads. "Here is a pill, thank you for your business".
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).
even in the US a lot of doctors say this because it is usually less of a pain in the ass than filling out referral paperwork to specialists that cost more for the patient anyways.
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.
? Doctors tell people to diet and exercise all the time.
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.
I do wonder how many people do not take care of the basics and instead go for anti-depressants and Ozempic.
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.
I've never suffered from a mental illness, so I'm genuinely curious; is exercise not ever used as a prescription for depression? Physical therapy is a thing, so it can be a prescription in some cases, no?
I think it'd be a great idea to perscribe physical therapy for people who need to exercise. Especially for the highly inactive who may not know how to start, and haven't made it a routine. That would send patients to a therapist who would help make sure they aren't doing more than they should and that they're working out correctly, and also provide the doctor with feedback/monitoring of their progress.
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.
Oh, it absolutely is, and from what I've read, it can work really well! It's just not necessarily a 'one size fits all' which is what makes medicine complicated and good doctors valuable.
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).
Compliance matters. Once a day pill is much easier to do than rework routine especially when patient has the "can't anymore" disease. Read Darkness Visible if you want to hear all about what that looks like.
> The doctors rarely tell you to eat your salads. "Here is a pill, thank you for your business".
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.
I think is exactly what the comment addresses (at least how I understood it). Just do whatever makes you happy, but move! Is not about being a model, it is about being heathier than moving less.
> 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.
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.
While one is certainly entitled to disagree with Meta's moderation policies, I feel like this muddies the issue.
Specifically what happened in Canada is:
* A national security review found Tiktok's operations in Canada to be a risk to national security
* Tiktok's operations in Canada are being closed down but Canadians are still able to use and post on Tiktok
* This type of review is pretty opaque by nature so more details are probably unavailable at this stage
If Canadians are still able to use and post on Tiktok I'm not sure there is a speech/censorship issue here. Maybe Tiktok Canada was harboring spies or something, or maybe this is a roundabout way to push Tiktok out of the country later, but I don't think we have any solid public info.
> If Canadians are still able to use and post on Tiktok I'm not sure there is a speech/censorship issue here. Maybe Tiktok Canada was harboring spies or something,
If tiktok is allowed to do business in the country, then they can buy allegiance via the creator fund which makes it harder to get citizens to realize (and leave it) once they start deploying active measures.
I think that really depends on the type of game. If you've been playing World of Warcraft, odds are good you've been playing it for a decade and have invested thousands of hours in it. There are probably a million other players like you. And while they didn't 20 years ago when the game launched, the designers very clearly have that type of player, the permanent subscriber, in mind these days.
Battlezone is an online PvP game so the intended experience may be similar, I imagine it's intended to be an infinite time sink.
No I think this perspective is a product of your own biases. There are plenty of people out there who care and as the article notes, there's lots of charity in the world. But it doesn't solve the problem.
The issue is that people are independent agents, so the effect of whatever we do for them is going to be dwarfed by what they do for themselves. When we examine the roots of poverty and homelessness, we find that in most cases people in those situations keep on making choices that perpetuate their circumstances. This isn't meant to suggest that we should reduce charity efforts or that these people who are suffering "deserve" it, it's just an observation that there is no solution without correcting the actions being taken on the individual level.
Unfortunately trying to solve a condition as broad as homelessness is like trying to cure cancer. Why do people repeatedly take the wrong actions? There are a thousand causes. But if you want some broad groupings, you can start with unresolved trauma and a lack of information/education. So if we want to achieve fundamental improvement we need to work on those. By the time we get to the homeless I think trauma is the most common factor that prevents them from pulling themselves out. Trauma from serving in the Vietnam War for example probably created around 75,000 homeless men.
I come from poverty and escaped it, and in hindsight I'm able to see that my family and the other people around me were making bad choices repeatedly for years. That is why most of them remained in poverty and some of them died an early death. I'm also able to recognize the bad choices I make today which limit my contemporary success, and I'm not always able to change those habits due to my own issues. Everyone is a WIP. Compassion is worthwhile but alone it is insufficient. People must somehow be compelled to change.
> No I think this perspective is a product of your own biases. There are plenty of people out there who care and as the article notes, there's lots of charity in the world. But it doesn't solve the problem.
Plenty of people care most don’t care.
Your perspective is unique. I’m talking from a perspective of someone who looks at poverty like a foreign country. Most people have never experienced it.
* The article is making claims about a 100 year timespan and I doubt we have comparable data on nutrient deficiencies which is that old
* Daily calorie intake has probably doubled in that time period, so in theory you'd hope daily intake of all essential nutrients would double as well, but here we are with almost half of women and children having iron deficiency, with widespread deficiency in vitamins D and B12, half of the population not getting the recommended calcium intake etc.
So I think as an example to start throwing some numbers out there. About 40% of Americans don't get the recommended amount of calcium. First chart in the article shows calcium in vegetables at retail declining by 90% in the last century.
I think we have evidence establishing that nutrient deficiency leads to cravings - maybe declining nutrient density is a factor encouraging overeating and obesity?
If we're being candid I feel like brutalism for websites is more of a meme than a design theory. It's almost an anti-design theory ("hey all our modern design theories have just made websites crap, so why don't we throw those theories out").
brutalistwebsites.com seems to interpret brutalism as "I use monospace, maybe I'm monochrome and I don't need to put much on this page."
My own idea for what brutalist web design should be: "I have one good CSS file which I include in my project. It looks fine and now I'm done worrying about the design."
Brutalist architecture is about showing the bare structural elements without any decoration, so I think there's an argument for any CSS being UNBRUTAL. Which covers some recurring themes in brutalistwebsites dot com but sure doesn't cover all the "I liked the way Raygun looked but I didn't like all those itchy decayed fonts, gimme a nice clean Helvetica-wannabe please" screenshots I see in there. Just the people who said "web design went precipitously downhill the moment someone tried using a table full of images to control the page design".
The most efficient way to incorporate exercise into your day is to make it part of your commute. Walking, biking, taking the train etc. - different modes are viable for different locations.
If you choose a job where this is not possible, you're just going to have to make it up some other way - two hours per week in a gym goes farther than most people think if you spend that time well.
In many cases at least one of these options is available to people but instead of taking it they whine that the job itself is too sedentary. I don't have a lot of sympathy, there are far worse jobs for the body than sitting in a chair (or standing stationary, your choice!) all day.
If truly none of these options are available to you in your current job - find a new one if you value your health. So many people have chosen a job for the money or prestige and just ignored this element completely. Those are unhappy people on account of their own choice.
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