Update 9/2: A friend pointed out that I was ignoring the time costs of exercise, which ended up being pretty significant. See new numbers here. I then double checked the math on the microlife numbers and the news is not good.
Tl;dr: under my current conditions, outdoor exercise is slightly safer than indoor for me, but the risks of both are dwarfed by the benefits of exercise.
Recently I’ve been weighing trade offs around exercise. At the gym I’m risking covid exposure. I can reduce that by wearing a mask, at the cost of making the exercise less effective or enjoyable. I could use my friend’s outdoor gym, but it’s fire season here in California so there are prolonged periods where I don’t want to be sucking in all that unfiltered air. This is also addressable with a mask, but at the same cost. I could exercise indoors in my own home, but I do not have that much space and it gets miserable really fast. I could not exercise until conditions improve, but that has its own health costs. So I did some math.
Wikipedia says 10 minutes of exercise = 1 micromort lost (as in, you live longer). That’s obviously going to depend a lot on the type of exercise but we’ll use it.
This calculator translates time * AQI into cigarette equivalents. At 50 AQI, it takes 12 minutes to generate .01 cigarettes. I’m going to treat that as 10 minutes because exercising is slightly worse than merely existing out doors and it makes the math much easier.
Wikipedia lists an equivalent of 1.4 cigarettes = 1 micromort.
N95 masks block 95% of PM2.5 particles (which is what the AQI is based on). I couldn’t immediately find a translation of that to micromorts so let’s assume it’s linear discounting. EDIT: On Twitter Divia Eden points out that 95% assumes a perfect seal, which you probably don’t have. This isn’t material at my current air quality; I did this whole thing without including masks at all and then added them in afterwords, but when you do your own math you should include that.
That means that 10 minutes unmasked outdoor cardio, at 50 AQI = .01/1.4 = .007 micromorts, which is clearly dwarfed by the 1 micromort lost from exercise (even if you assume it’s 10x worse for me due to the existing chest congestion, and don’t give the exercise a corresponding impact bump). If I wear a mask the risk is probably below the significant figures I’m allowed. It’s so negligible compared to the benefits that if allowing myself to go outside increases total exercise by any amount at all, it’s obviously worth it.
How about covid risk?
My gym is personal training focused with a single cardio machine, which you must schedule in advance. If I’m doing cardio there will be at most two clients doing weight training and two trainers in the room, plus me, all > 10 feet away, in a large room with filtration they claim is good. If I’m doing weight training there’s me, my trainer (fairly nearby), and potentially a farther away client and trainer pair. In theory there could be an additional person on the cardio machine but I’ve yet to see it happen.
Under an excessively conservative set of assumptions (City-average vaccination, no mask, constant talking), my cardio scenario is 7 microcovids. If I give everyone masks it’s 0.5. My weight training scenario is <=10 microcovids (7 for the other pair, which may or may not exist, and 3 for my trainer. Note that weight training is 2.5x as long as cardio). But microcovids are not micromorts. The Economist calculator (pre-delta, pre-vaccine) has the risk of dying of acute covid at my age and sex as immeasurably low, despite it being prone to overestimate because its denominator is only diagnosed cases. Long covid is a concern (although I’ve tentatively concluded its overblown: more on that soon hopefully), but lack of exercise is bad for long covid in particular. If we generously use my age/sex hospitalization rate as the discount factor (2.6%), the micromorts from my indoor cardio are <=0.16, and my weight training is <=0.23. These are not quite as negligible as the pollution, but still very safely under the benefits of exercising.
Some caveats: I didn’t examine any of these numbers that closely because the verdict was so overwhelmingly clear; the values would need to be off by orders of magnitude to change my conclusion. But that is always an option, and when I tried to follow up on the 0.1 micromort/minute of exercise number, I hit a dead end.
I’ve made a very crude spreadsheet with sources linked in comments so you can make a copy and play around with your own numbers, based on your local air quality, covid prevalence, etc.
Exercise Trade Offs
Link post
Update 9/2: A friend pointed out that I was ignoring the time costs of exercise, which ended up being pretty significant. See new numbers here. I then double checked the math on the microlife numbers and the news is not good.Tl;dr: under my current conditions, outdoor exercise is slightly safer than indoor for me, but the risks of both are dwarfed by the benefits of exercise.
Recently I’ve been weighing trade offs around exercise. At the gym I’m risking covid exposure. I can reduce that by wearing a mask, at the cost of making the exercise less effective or enjoyable. I could use my friend’s outdoor gym, but it’s fire season here in California so there are prolonged periods where I don’t want to be sucking in all that unfiltered air. This is also addressable with a mask, but at the same cost. I could exercise indoors in my own home, but I do not have that much space and it gets miserable really fast. I could not exercise until conditions improve, but that has its own health costs. So I did some math.
Wikipedia says 10 minutes of exercise = 1 micromort lost (as in, you live longer). That’s obviously going to depend a lot on the type of exercise but we’ll use it.
This calculator translates time * AQI into cigarette equivalents. At 50 AQI, it takes 12 minutes to generate .01 cigarettes. I’m going to treat that as 10 minutes because exercising is slightly worse than merely existing out doors and it makes the math much easier.
Wikipedia lists an equivalent of 1.4 cigarettes = 1 micromort.
N95 masks block 95% of PM2.5 particles (which is what the AQI is based on). I couldn’t immediately find a translation of that to micromorts so let’s assume it’s linear discounting. EDIT: On Twitter Divia Eden points out that 95% assumes a perfect seal, which you probably don’t have. This isn’t material at my current air quality; I did this whole thing without including masks at all and then added them in afterwords, but when you do your own math you should include that.
That means that 10 minutes unmasked outdoor cardio, at 50 AQI = .01/1.4 = .007 micromorts, which is clearly dwarfed by the 1 micromort lost from exercise (even if you assume it’s 10x worse for me due to the existing chest congestion, and don’t give the exercise a corresponding impact bump). If I wear a mask the risk is probably below the significant figures I’m allowed. It’s so negligible compared to the benefits that if allowing myself to go outside increases total exercise by any amount at all, it’s obviously worth it.
How about covid risk?
My gym is personal training focused with a single cardio machine, which you must schedule in advance. If I’m doing cardio there will be at most two clients doing weight training and two trainers in the room, plus me, all > 10 feet away, in a large room with filtration they claim is good. If I’m doing weight training there’s me, my trainer (fairly nearby), and potentially a farther away client and trainer pair. In theory there could be an additional person on the cardio machine but I’ve yet to see it happen.
Under an excessively conservative set of assumptions (City-average vaccination, no mask, constant talking), my cardio scenario is 7 microcovids. If I give everyone masks it’s 0.5. My weight training scenario is <=10 microcovids (7 for the other pair, which may or may not exist, and 3 for my trainer. Note that weight training is 2.5x as long as cardio). But microcovids are not micromorts. The Economist calculator (pre-delta, pre-vaccine) has the risk of dying of acute covid at my age and sex as immeasurably low, despite it being prone to overestimate because its denominator is only diagnosed cases. Long covid is a concern (although I’ve tentatively concluded its overblown: more on that soon hopefully), but lack of exercise is bad for long covid in particular. If we generously use my age/sex hospitalization rate as the discount factor (2.6%), the micromorts from my indoor cardio are <=0.16, and my weight training is <=0.23. These are not quite as negligible as the pollution, but still very safely under the benefits of exercising.
Some caveats: I didn’t examine any of these numbers that closely because the verdict was so overwhelmingly clear; the values would need to be off by orders of magnitude to change my conclusion. But that is always an option, and when I tried to follow up on the 0.1 micromort/minute of exercise number, I hit a dead end.
I’ve made a very crude spreadsheet with sources linked in comments so you can make a copy and play around with your own numbers, based on your local air quality, covid prevalence, etc.