▲ 152 points
back
102 comments
19 subjects, assigned sedentary or active based on habitual physical activity levels. Subjects were screened on basic health measures.
The problem with this is that people are sedentary or active for a variety of health-related reasons that are not captured in any screen (esp. the crude one used in this study). As a predictive study, this is fine, sedentarism predicts a lot of bad things. But it doesn't, on its own, suggest that becoming active is helpful. See also grip strength and mortality.
The principle of what you're stating is true, it could be correlational.
But there's an enormous volume of evidence that exercise, especially intense exercise, is better for health than any other intervention, including more sleep, quality of diet, pills+supplements (except those that treat an active illness/disease of course).
There's even compelling data showing that moderate drinkers who exercise live longer than non-drinkers who don't exercise. Even given that Alcohol is a powerful carcinogen.
The only thing proven more effective than exercise is weight loss really, if starting from high bodyfat levels.
(Anything above ~15% bodyfat in men seems to have negative implications for lifespan, and ~30% for women)
> specially intense exercise
That sounds like a study that is pretty tough to control for, especially long term and at scale.
You'd need to find subjects that are provably capable of sustaining intense exercise as a habit if they wanted to but never did, and won't either for the years you'll be following them.
That won't work in the reverse, as people can be consciously or not self adjusting based on the health conditions you're trying to check.
PS: I'm remembering a friend who never liked running, but tried pretty hard after being pestered by their doctor and family, to discover that their knees are just not good and their whole lineage hated running for a reason. Intense exercise can be anything else, but people won't know their real health limitations until they actually do it for a while.
A large volume of studies already exist.
That intense exercise is good, and even very good for you, is proven as far as reasonably possible given that we can't run deterministically controlled experiments.
More evidence may come out that adds nuance, but the effect size is so large that it becomes obvious in the data just from observation.
You can cycle or stationary bike if you have bad knees. There are plenty of exercises that are intense but easy on the joints.
> You'd need to find subjects that are provably capable of sustaining intense exercise as a habit if they wanted to but never did, and won't either for the years you'll be following them.
With modern 24/7 health tracking we’ll have tons of data in the next 50-100 years. Problem is we need that much time to see the net effect and will probably be too late for most of you reading this.
I wouldn’t wait for the results though. Best to start moving now assuming it’s probably good for you.
>(Anything above ~15% bodyfat in men has negative implications for lifespan, and ~30% for women; when reviewed at scale)
Can you link evidence for this? I stay at 12% year around as male (confirmed via DEXA)
I'd love to find out if electrical muscle stimulation while sleeping could effectively provide exercise without causing excessive sleep disruption. Could be a zero-effort supplemental form of exercise for sedentary people.
> mitochondria, which process energy within cells, showed a significantly decreased capacity to burn both sugar and fat in healthy individuals who get less than the recommended 150 minutes of exercise a week.
150 minutes a week is about than 22 minutes a day. Like 11 minutes twice a day. This looks like a really low effort to rid oneself of the risk of early decline.
I've seen studies like this before. They'll suggest that as little as 15 minutes of exercise significantly improves health in some group they studied. My initial assumption was they added 15 minutes of additional exercise. No, they studied people who did literally nothing. Then had them exercise 15 minutes a day.
As you might guess, their outcomes improved greatly.
This is sadly not a rare type of person. I'm worried my parents fit this description, they drive everywhere and work an office job. I'd guess on average they get 0 minutes of exercise a day.
I think people get this image in their head that someone who doesn't exercise ever is this comically fat unemployed person when in reality it's the average office worker who isn't fitness minded. A good chunk of HN users wouldn't be getting 15 minutes of exercise a day.
Looking at a few friend's health app on their iPhone it's amazing to me to see people who walk less than 2,000 steps a day and don't go to the gym. It's shockingly normal in some places though.
The amount of time in the exercise advice keep getting shorter and shorter. The common advice when I was younger, in the USA, was an hour of exercise. Couldn't get enough people to do it. Then it was 30 minutes. Still couldn't get people to do it. Now the advice has been 15 minutes a day for a while, and we'll still not be able to get people to do it.
The environment and culture needs to be structured such that people get the exercise they need "naturally". The vast majority aren't going to go out of their way for it.
That's a big part of why zoning is so dangerous. In most of the western world (Europe too on average), we pushed down population density so much that your typical destinations are much less likely to be within walking distance, so you don't walk.
HN is always so sarcastic on this point, but a large part of the population is not getting 15-30 minutes of actual exercise a day.
15 mins of walking or exercise. I did 2 hours of walking 15k steps and it's barely moved my required cardio load to 10 and I need over 200 weekly.
A lot of people who use a car to get around will spend most days doing literally no actual exercise. For someone who lives in a more walkable area, 22 minutes of exercise is just living live normally without actively "exercising".
I walk to the office during warm days, it’s about 30 minutes to get there. I get essentially an hour of walking just by commuting.
If I drive, it takes me 15 minutes (Toronto traffic is horrible). So doesn’t even gain me much in terms of time.
Just sad that temperatures here drop so low I don’t want to walk for half the year lol.
A studied showed that elderly asians have better health outcomes that their western counterparts in part due to their practice of sitting on the floor. The added exertion of standing up from the floor rather than a chair makes a material difference in their health.
Some of the health tests in Japan that elderly people take include a "standing to sitting on the floor and getting back up all unsupported" test. Scores are based on time, effort, emitted sounds (like grunts), hands-on-ground and whatnot. I don't know the specifics, but it is used as a "health measure."
I remember reading somewhere that one of many long life markers is if you can go from sitting on your butt straight into standing without your hands or knees touching the floor.
At least in China they also have a lot of public parks where they all gather for group exercise with all the other elderly people.
And the Bay Area as well :)
I abhor exercise for the sake of it. Instead, I refuse to use a car to do anything but bring my family members to distant medical appointments, and the rare carpool'd vacation. Anything within ~ten miles of home I do with human power, sometimes augmented by stored electrical energy (cargo ebike; I contribute ~1/3 the Wattage). Thus, I get plenty of exercise throughout the day.
We used to meet our needs by moving our bodies. Understandably, there are perceived benefits to outsourcing transportation, and very real consequences.
Exception is a morning plank to wake up my core, and sometimes forward bends with a weight. I don't like to do it, but I do feel better afterwards (like with cold showers), so I do it. Harder to do with longer exercise routines, which is why I addressed the cause of my unease rather than slapped on plasters.
I'm confused. The study doesn't mention "Zone 2" even once ...
I was busy building a sensorless maintenance calorie tracker.
Sometime back i posted this on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48614890
It also has "sedentary" detection which i find pretty useful for the phases when my activity level drops, reduced activity directly reflects in your maintenance calories which maybe useful to some.
Of If I walk 10 km a day on average and do strength trainings 2-3x a week but sit for 10 hours a day - am I sedentary or not?
What do you think?
I have no idea what 'sedentary' even means. I work on a desk mostly but I also walk 15 - 20 k steps per day because that's just my life and I accomplish most daily tasks (shopping, going to park, coffee, etc walking). Is that sedentary?
According to the study:
Sedentary (SED, n = 9): No regular exercise or elevated heart rate beyond daily tasks. Active (AC, n = 10): ≥150 min/week aerobic exercise for ≥6 months.
Oh sure I run about 10 miles / week, but that's only like 2 hours max running. I still sit most of the day and have tons of 'sitting' problems. I don't know what everyone else's experience with tech work is, but sports is max 4-5 hours / week, and about 20 hours is spent mostly sitting even with a standing desk. Still have the lower back issues that most sitters have.
Not sure how one can be healthy and sedentary.
19 subjects? I'll disregard the results. That's not a big enough sample size to be meaningful.
Exercise is the key to a long healthspan.
Our mitochondria process the total of our energy needs every day, while exercise adds, percentagewise, only fractional additional energy need.
do you think mitochondria notice the difference? I don't.
If I cut my caloric intake, I drop weight like nobody's business, and that's all thanks to my mitochondria at their place in the chain. It's the same thing my mitochondria are doing when I overeat and put on weight.
If you live paycheck to paycheck and then get a 25% salary increase, if everything else stays the same, in a year you have already saved 300% worth of your original salary vs 0%.
That is even with your unwarranted assumption that all energy use is the same and doesn't cause different adaptations. This kind of simplicity is just not happening in biology.
Exactly, this is called a marginal effect and it's very relevant for our bodies which basically need their homeostasis disrupted to be prompted to adapt.
If I go to the gym 5 times per week but otherwise sit all day, am I considered sedentary?
Seems like a potential use for peptides like Mots-C or SLU-PP-332
It would be cool if one could safely adapt to modern life (lots of sitting, required focus over long sessions) without having to spend time exercising if they don't want to (to be clear, some people want to). Imagine if you could just take something to get all the benefits of exercise, without having to actually spend the time. That'd be pretty great for everyone if it truly was safe and without downsides (skeptical).
What if we could just lay in a pod 24/7 taking peptides and nutrient supplements while having an endless stream of instagram reals beamed in to our eyeballs on our Meta Raybans. That way we would never have to do pesky things like go outside or move.
They make stationary bikes that fit under a desk. I've never used or seen one, but they exist. I considered getting one during 2020, but they seemed impossible to source.
This study and most similar do not take into account bone density, this is a concern for women who have to actively build this up early in life to have a reserve (to account for the continual decline after about age 25 that is worse for women) to stave off osteoporosis - as well as continually work on maintenance after that with weight bearing/resistance exercise and diet. At least this is what I learned from my exercise and physiology textbook, the best antidote is building up of bone density in a woman's younger years and I doubt there's research into a substitute for that.