
More exercise better in long run - kqr2
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/31/MNFC1BID8F.DTL&tsp=1
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sown
The last paragraph about marathons reminded me of a PBS Nova documentary about
a dozen people who just picked up running to compete in the Boston Marathon
starting off from basically couch potato status.

<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/marathon/>

I won't spoil it for you but it does not end like you expect.

I personally found that doing away with car and biking two hours a day has
done me well. By combining exercise and commuting times I save a great deal of
time.

~~~
drenei
Biking to work is great. For me the hour spent commuting guarantees some sort
of exercise 5 days/week and I can add to that with something else during the
week or on the weekends. Its also a great way to wake up, and to get my mind
in the right space before a day (or after). My only complaint - it can be hard
to do in the -10c winter months up here in Canada.

~~~
elblanco
I worked with a guy that did that. We have no showers at my office (like most
offices), he quite after a couple of weeks when people started to complain
that they didn't like the sweaty B.O. mess coming in with them in the
mornings.

~~~
drenei
Its unfortunate there wasn't a better solution for your colleague. The half
hour ride in the morning isn't at a hard enough pace to make me a sweaty mess,
though if it did, luckily, we have showers (along with a gym) at the office.

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keeptrying
I think present research shows that 10 hours per week is the minimum required
to achieve a body transformation in 3-4 months. Some recommendations: 1\.
"Body For Life" if you want a simple way to lose weight and gain strength. 2\.
"Maximum Strength" if you'r already been lifting for a while and want to get
stronger. This is system also has you challenging your own limits so that you
feel certain sense of achievement instead of just "wow I look thinner" ... 3\.
"P90X" if you like intense workouts with results.

I've personally done all 3 in the above order to pretty good results. After
achieving the results , you really need to maintain a minimum level to keep
it.

~~~
akadien
I wholeheartedly vouch for P90X. After getting over the commercials, my wife
and I bought the DVDs. We got results within four weeks. The challenge with
that system is maintaining a high level of commitment to something that kicks
your butt over the long term.

~~~
keeptrying
Yeah its true for all systems. Its hard to keep the results if your a
sedentary worker like a soft-engineer :) ... Thats why I've always wanted to
be a kitesurfing/adventure sports trainer or something of that sort.

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sethg
I am reminded of a piece of alleged research I read a few years back:
Scientists have determined that regular jogging extends your life span. The
amount by which it extends your life span is precisely equal to the amount of
time you spend jogging.

~~~
icey
That seems like a net win to me; you get a lot of time to think when you're
out running (which is to say it's not wasted time).

~~~
jamesbritt
Plus you feel better the rest of time.

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tungstenfurnace
Unfortunately there's no _explanation_ which means there's no science here.
(The world seems to be full of studies which measure things that are easy to
measure and say things that people want to hear.)

Here's an explanation as to why exercise might be good for you: exercise
transfers attention away from repetitive thoughts and into one's body and
one's surroundings. It thus confers benefits similar to those of meditation.

This theory may well be totally false. But, hey, at least it offers an
explanation. There's something there to _be_ false.

The next step would be to criticise the theory and then, if it stands up, to
test it against current theories.

Any testing though, would be highly unlikely to resemble the observations
referred to in the linked article. It would instead depend on the relevant
details of the rival theories.

~~~
xiaoma
> _"Unfortunately there's no explanation which means there's no science
> here."_

Experimental science has a long and colorful history of answering the what
before the how or why. Consider the question of black body radiation. Without
the experimental research results and Plank's desperate attempts to fit them
to a mathematical model, Einstein wouldn't have had a reason to think of light
existing as discrete particles and theoretical quantum mechanics would not
have possible.

Creating frameworks for _why_ things work is satisfying, but gathering data is
just as vital to science.

~~~
tungstenfurnace
Yeah, sometimes novel phenomena are stumbled upon. Where they are deliberately
stumbled upon I would call it _exploration_ rather than science.

I don't think that exercise falls into that category. There is nothing
surprising about exercise per se.

Popper once challenged an audience to go out and 'observe'; I think the point
of his joke was that without knowing what you're trying to observe and why
then the instruction is absurd.

In order to claim that 'more exercise is good' you need to start by guessing
why _some_ exercise might be good, whilst being open to the possibility that
it may not be, and then start testing the best guesses. Otherwise you
literally won't be able to interpret your 'more exercise' data, even if it is
relevant.

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greenlblue
I don't think a blanket exercise regimen of more is the way to go. I feel
miserable when I exercise more than 5 times a week because it takes me at
least one day to recover so piling on more exercise just keeps me in a
constant state of recovery which is quite counterproductive. That being said I
wonder what kind of diet those 100 mile a week runners are on to have such
stamina.

~~~
fr0sty
If you require more than a day to recover you should either be doing less
strenuous exercise or you should be lowering your number of workouts per week.

I used to sit next to a 100+ mile/wk runner and he ate nothing out of the
ordinary, just more of it (100miles of running is a 10-14k net calorie
increase, depending on who you believe).

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kingkongreveng_
"He started by buying the Runner's World subscription list, which yielded
about 55,000 runners to study."

People are taking this garbage seriously? Some guy surveys a bunch of hardcore
yuppie runners (the kind who subscribe to runner's world) and finds the ones
who continue to run a lot more haven't had heart attacks. Ya don't say. Where
are the folks who usually reflexively scream about correlation/causation?

The gold standard for research into this kind of thing is the controlled
intervention. You can't simply survey runners. You have to pick people and
make them run. I don't think especially encouraging results have come out of
this.

Everything else I've ever read says exercise is dwarfed by diet when it comes
to health, and the health benefits are pretty minimal to fitness beyond a
pretty low threshold. Pro athletes are not long lived.

~~~
xiaoma
> _"Everything else I've ever read says exercise is dwarfed by diet when it
> comes to health, and the health benefits are pretty minimal to fitness
> beyond a pretty low threshold"_ <citation needed>

We've already been over this ground more than once:

According to one 32,000 person study in the American Journal of Clinical
Nutrition (1999), "fit persons with any combination of smoking, elevated blood
pressure, or elevated cholesterol level had lower adjusted death rates than
low-fit persons with none of these characteristics". The same study found that
aerobic fitness had a far more important impact on longevity than obesity did.
This was cited in _Fantastic Voyage, Kurzweil and Grossman, Chapter 22._

Another 100,000+ person study found that men who ran two or more marathons per
year were 41 percent less likely to suffer from high blood pressure, 32
percent less likely to have high cholesterol, and 87 percent less likely to be
diabetic than non-marathoners. Those who ran only one marathon every two to
five years also had significantly lower risk for these conditions than non-
marathoners. <http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/140104.php>

Here's a different piece on how regular hour-long runs stimulate neurogenesis
and memory improvements in middle aged humans:
<http://www.dana.org/news/brainwork/detail.aspx?id=7374>

Distance running is one of the most beneficial things you can do for yourself.
Racing marathons is also fine, with sufficient training.

~~~
kingkongreveng_
[http://eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/29/15/1...](http://eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/29/15/1903)

"The more marathons run, the higher the likelihood of heart disease. The
number of marathons run was an independent and significant predictor of the
likelihood of myocardial damage.

The runners had about the same prevalence of non-zero coronary calcium
compared to age matched controls randomly assigned from a survey population."

~~~
xiaoma
The "quotation" you've written appears nowhere in that article you've linked
to. Trying to pass that off as an excerpt from the the article is not the most
ethical way to make your case.

What the article _did_ say in the heading titled Conclusions was this:

 _"Regular marathon running has a beneficial effect on the cardiovascular risk
factor profile but the extent of calcified coronary plaque is underestimated
from that risk factor profile"_

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prakash
Running marathons is horrible advice. Here's 10 reasons why you shouldn't be
running marathons -
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080702233135/http://www.arthurd...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080702233135/http://www.arthurdevany.com/2005/08/top_ten_reasons.html)

~~~
karzeem
By listing only negative effects, you can make anything sound bad (e.g.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dihydrogen_monoxide_hoax>).

It doesn't seem crazy to think that there's such a thing as too much exercise,
but there are a couple problems with this top ten list you cite.

First, maybe there are right and wrong ways to run a marathon and the people
doing it the wrong way have skewed the results of these studies.

Second, if running a marathon is bad, then surely running half a marathon is
still not good, right? What about a quarter-marathon? One mile? Etc. I think
everyone agrees that there is some amount of running that does more good than
harm. But it's not that helpful to simply say that marathons cause harm
without looking at the good (if any) they do and then trying to find the
distance that properly balances good and harm.

~~~
thras
And by listing negative effects, you can also make _bad_ things sound bad.

Lots of people kill themselves with marathons. Maybe there's a _right_ way to
do it, but obviously it's easy to do it the wrong way. Which makes marathons
dangerous until someone figures out your right way.

"if running a marathon is bad, then surely running half a marathon is still
not good, right?"

No. Does not follow. As you say, there are probably distances where the good
far outweighs the bad. 26 miles is not that distance.

~~~
dgordon
No, "lots of people" don't kill themselves with marathons. A few people who
try to go from couch potato to marathon in 12 weeks or who chug ridiculous
amounts of water over the course of a 5-hour walk-jog kill themselves with
marathons. (It's possible to drink to the point of excessive dilution of the
sodium in your bloodstream, which can kill you just like dehydration can, but
this is basically impossible to induce below an Ironman triathlon distance if
you're reasonable about water intake.) That's not "lots."

Distance running is what humans evolved to do, according to a good deal of
evidence. Admittedly, running on asphalt and concrete with awful form created
by a lifetime walking and running in awkwardly built shoes and sitting in
chairs all day is not what humans evolved to do.

