
No Such Thing as Too Much Exercise, Study Finds - devy
https://gizmodo.com/no-such-thing-as-too-much-exercise-study-finds-1829874676
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everybodyknows
News content of article contained in these 12 words:

>... elite athletes only being slightly more death-proof than merely highly
active people ...

So, rational expectation confirmed: gradually diminishing returns to general
health as fitness increases.

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bko
If I'm reading this correctly the study tested people's athletic ability at
some point in time and tracked when they died.

The article conflates athletic ability and exercise. Sure a person that has
great athletic ability would likely exercise a lot. But not necessarily and
certainly not for the remainder of their life.

Good athletes might have good genes. Maybe over exercise actually hurts your
fitness and you would scores lower on the initial fitness test. Either way, I
don't think the study even remotely supports the claim purported by the
article

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peterlk
This headline and article may be right in spirit, but are obviously wrong in
letter. And we do ourselves a disservice calling this oversimplification news.
If you run/bike/whatever too hard for too long, you die. Plain and simple.
Obviously, almost no one reading this article would ever be in danger of doing
such a thing, but there is obviously an upper bound to how much exercise a
human can perform. For those who don't feel like reading the article, the
claim is that running is good for you, and that those who claim running too
much can harm your health are wrong.

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gmiller123456
I suppose it's theoretically possible to perform some type of exercise until
you die. It's also a lot more likely that exercise will strain your heart
enough to cause a heart attack, or some other injury that leads to death. What
the study is saying is that even accounting for all of those situations that
actually happened, the odds are still in your favor to exercise more. So the
odds are, you won't exercise until you die.

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stevewodil
>So the odds are, you won't exercise until you die.

How did you know this about me?

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gmiller123456
Statistics say nothing about individuals. I cannot say you won't exercise
until you die, but I can say there's a very low probability you will.

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mixmastamyk
Interesting, have always believed in exercise, but felt marathons were "too
much" of a good thing. Should I reevaluate that?

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francisofascii
Just an anecdotal observation, people I know that run 70+ miles a week, and
have full time jobs/families, etc. have to get up at 4:30 AM to get the miles
in or rearrange schedules to fit everything in. So maybe any health decline is
due to a decrease in quality sleep and increased stress to get the miles in,
not the increased mileage. If you have tons of free time, run as much as you
like.

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mixmastamyk
To be honest, I won't be running that long anyway, though do ride my bike and
hit the gym. It's just before I had a nice justification. ;-)

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risto1
This is just another one of those issues where a scientifically illiterate
magazine/paper picks up some article to confuse people even more. It's just
pop science, you can't rely on single studies, a lot of studies suck in terms
of how they're designed.

One example where this is wrong: It's been clearly established that enough
long distance running, like marathons, is cardiotoxic

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moat
A more educated view without the clickbait title:
[http://suppversity.blogspot.com/2018/10/survival-of-
fittest-...](http://suppversity.blogspot.com/2018/10/survival-of-fittest-
large-scale-study.html)

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jwilk
Different article about the same study from 2 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18264436](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18264436)

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projektir
What about overtraining syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome?

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icotyl
What about chronic fatigue syndrome? Is there some relation to too much
exercise? Will it kill you?

