There is something that makes me skeptical about “exercise” considered as an abstract quantity. There are many different ways of doing “exercising”, and they have many different effects on the body. How much exercise you do (but then, counting in hours ? spent calories ?) do matter, but in which conditions also matters a lot : how regularly, what kind of exercise, …
Exercising usually is good for urban sedentary people who “naturally” don’t do much of it, but it can also have negative side-effects, in accelerated aging or articulation damage. Professional sport players have a very short average lifespan, and it’s not only because some of them use drugs.
There is surprisingly few literature on the topic (or I couldn’t find it), but from what I remember finding, something important is the regularity (doing 3 hours of exercise twice a week is not nearly as good as doing 1⁄2 hour each day, even if 1⁄2 hour each day is just 3.5 hours in total) and the kind of activity : constant medium/low intensity, long duration activity (walking, long-distance running, bicycling or swimming at a moderate speed for a long while, …) is much better than variable intensity (like ball games, where you run and stop and run again and kick and …) or high-intensity short-duration (like sprinting).
As for opportunity cost, something to consider is doing exercise that fits a purpose, instead of just “wasting” hours doing it, for example, running/walking/bicycling instead of using a car means you do some exercise but also save on money and on accident risks, especially if your environment (public transport network, proximity of things, …) allows to not own a car at all (making the money gain very significant), or finding an activity that you actually enjoy so the time isn’t fully wasted.
Professional sport players have a very short average lifespan, and it’s not only because some of them use drugs.
Olympic athletes, however, have a longer than average life expectancy. This held across endurance, team, and power sports, with individual variations; the consensus (note: this isn’t in the linked article) seems to be that sports with a lot of hard physical contact, like rugby or boxing, are bad enough for you to overcome the general benefits of exercise. There doesn’t seem to be consensus about longevity effects of endurance vs. power sports, or about variation vs. monotony in exercise; the linked paper finds higher longevity for endurance athletes than the other two categories, but I’ve read papers finding differences in the opposite direction.
(There was some buzz recently about a different paper finding that players of very-low-intensity sports like golf enjoyed the same longevity benefits as players of high-intensity sports, but I think that’s been overinterpreted in the press; to name one confounder, low-intensity athletes quite often cross-train in higher-intensity activities.)
Olympic athletes, however, have a longer than average life expectancy.
We have to very careful with correlation/causation here. Olympic athletes are a select group of people who won the genetic lottery by certain measures. It might well be that their apparent longevity is a pure selection bias.
On genetic grounds, at least, I might actually expect a bias in the opposite direction. The “genetic lottery” as you put it works on specific traits; there’s no general qualityOfPerson attribute (though see below). We might expect a few of those traits (like those relating to cardiovascular resilience, say) to contribute both to athleticism and longevity, but I’d expect some to involve tradeoffs between the two: we could imagine a trait that improved metabolic efficiency at the cost of adding oxidative stress, for example, or one that made muscle cells respond quicker to injury (==faster strength gains) but increased the chance of cancer in those cells.
Mutational load might be an important confounder here, though, as something that I’d expect to affect fitness in a very general sense. And of course I’d expect Olympians to come from higher social classes on average, since those are the families that have the money to support intense early training. The linked paper controlled for “occupational group”, but I don’t know if that completely captured the latter.
The “genetic lottery” as you put it works on specific traits;
Yes, but the selection works from two directions: to be an Olympic-class athlete you need to a have a major advantage in some particular trait and no noticeable fitness disadvantages. In a random selection from the population there will be somewhat-ill people (e.g. with chronic diseases, say, autoimmune), but these people will be absent from the Olympic athlete sample. That by itself is probably enough to generate a noticeable longevity advantage for the athletes.
consensus (note: this isn’t in the linked article) seems to be that sports with a lot of hard physical contact, like rugby or boxing, are bad enough for you to overcome the general benefits of exercise.
This based on any evidence, or is this just fashion?
Can’t be bothered to dig up a reference, but boxing and American football at the very least are pretty unambiguously unhealthy: repeated concussions do nasty dementia-like things to your brain, and the incidence rates are surprisingly high (I think the phrase to google is “chronic traumatic encephalopathy”). I also wouldn’t be surprised if the kind of joint problems that contact sports tend to give you led to mobility problems and attendant issues later in life, although that’s a little more speculative.
There is something that makes me skeptical about “exercise” considered as an abstract quantity. There are many different ways of doing “exercising”, and they have many different effects on the body. How much exercise you do (but then, counting in hours ? spent calories ?) do matter, but in which conditions also matters a lot : how regularly, what kind of exercise, …
Exercising usually is good for urban sedentary people who “naturally” don’t do much of it, but it can also have negative side-effects, in accelerated aging or articulation damage. Professional sport players have a very short average lifespan, and it’s not only because some of them use drugs.
There is surprisingly few literature on the topic (or I couldn’t find it), but from what I remember finding, something important is the regularity (doing 3 hours of exercise twice a week is not nearly as good as doing 1⁄2 hour each day, even if 1⁄2 hour each day is just 3.5 hours in total) and the kind of activity : constant medium/low intensity, long duration activity (walking, long-distance running, bicycling or swimming at a moderate speed for a long while, …) is much better than variable intensity (like ball games, where you run and stop and run again and kick and …) or high-intensity short-duration (like sprinting).
As for opportunity cost, something to consider is doing exercise that fits a purpose, instead of just “wasting” hours doing it, for example, running/walking/bicycling instead of using a car means you do some exercise but also save on money and on accident risks, especially if your environment (public transport network, proximity of things, …) allows to not own a car at all (making the money gain very significant), or finding an activity that you actually enjoy so the time isn’t fully wasted.
Olympic athletes, however, have a longer than average life expectancy. This held across endurance, team, and power sports, with individual variations; the consensus (note: this isn’t in the linked article) seems to be that sports with a lot of hard physical contact, like rugby or boxing, are bad enough for you to overcome the general benefits of exercise. There doesn’t seem to be consensus about longevity effects of endurance vs. power sports, or about variation vs. monotony in exercise; the linked paper finds higher longevity for endurance athletes than the other two categories, but I’ve read papers finding differences in the opposite direction.
(There was some buzz recently about a different paper finding that players of very-low-intensity sports like golf enjoyed the same longevity benefits as players of high-intensity sports, but I think that’s been overinterpreted in the press; to name one confounder, low-intensity athletes quite often cross-train in higher-intensity activities.)
We have to very careful with correlation/causation here. Olympic athletes are a select group of people who won the genetic lottery by certain measures. It might well be that their apparent longevity is a pure selection bias.
On genetic grounds, at least, I might actually expect a bias in the opposite direction. The “genetic lottery” as you put it works on specific traits; there’s no general qualityOfPerson attribute (though see below). We might expect a few of those traits (like those relating to cardiovascular resilience, say) to contribute both to athleticism and longevity, but I’d expect some to involve tradeoffs between the two: we could imagine a trait that improved metabolic efficiency at the cost of adding oxidative stress, for example, or one that made muscle cells respond quicker to injury (==faster strength gains) but increased the chance of cancer in those cells.
Mutational load might be an important confounder here, though, as something that I’d expect to affect fitness in a very general sense. And of course I’d expect Olympians to come from higher social classes on average, since those are the families that have the money to support intense early training. The linked paper controlled for “occupational group”, but I don’t know if that completely captured the latter.
Yes, but the selection works from two directions: to be an Olympic-class athlete you need to a have a major advantage in some particular trait and no noticeable fitness disadvantages. In a random selection from the population there will be somewhat-ill people (e.g. with chronic diseases, say, autoimmune), but these people will be absent from the Olympic athlete sample. That by itself is probably enough to generate a noticeable longevity advantage for the athletes.
This based on any evidence, or is this just fashion?
Can’t be bothered to dig up a reference, but boxing and American football at the very least are pretty unambiguously unhealthy: repeated concussions do nasty dementia-like things to your brain, and the incidence rates are surprisingly high (I think the phrase to google is “chronic traumatic encephalopathy”). I also wouldn’t be surprised if the kind of joint problems that contact sports tend to give you led to mobility problems and attendant issues later in life, although that’s a little more speculative.
No, they don’t.