Exercise to stay healthy seems a pretty interesting meme of the last 50 years.
You make an assumption that more is always better with doesn’t seem to be the case.
Recent studies suggest that exercising for 5 hours per week is actually worse than doing 3 hours.
We don’t really have a good theory of how exercise provides health benefits.
A winner doesn’t “exercise,” they train in something (martial arts, running, swimming, biking, cross fit, boxing, weights, whatever).
Personally the more I think about the human body the more I get convinced that while the current frame is obviously better than engaging in no physical activity at all, it’s still the dark ages of knowledge.
I think it will be very interesting to see how people in 100 years will speak about how people today go jogging on concrete or go to a gym and lift weights in fixed positions and most of the people haven’t shown how to do the movement in an ergonomic way.
It is straightforward. Your cardiovascular system becomes capable of more throughput—your lungs can take in more air (higher VO2max), your heart can pump more blood, etc. What you get is called reserve capacity. People with high reserve capacity can survive illnesses which people with low reserve capacity do not.
That’s no theory of why endurance exercise increases reserve capacity in most people. It’s jut an observation that this frequently happens. It not even good enough to tell you the optimum duration of your exercise.
I also don’t happen to be an believer in the idea that VO2max is the best possible value that one could come up with, when it comes to issues like surviving illnesses.
It took it quite a while to figure out that keeping medical ventilators at a static pressure level is a pretty bad idea. A static pressure level is really straightforward. With better research I think it’s likely we find a more complex variable that does a much better job than VO2max.
Exercise to stay healthy seems a pretty interesting meme of the last 50 years.
You make an assumption that more is always better with doesn’t seem to be the case. Recent studies suggest that exercising for 5 hours per week is actually worse than doing 3 hours.
We don’t really have a good theory of how exercise provides health benefits.
Ryan Holiday recently wrote:
Personally the more I think about the human body the more I get convinced that while the current frame is obviously better than engaging in no physical activity at all, it’s still the dark ages of knowledge.
I think it will be very interesting to see how people in 100 years will speak about how people today go jogging on concrete or go to a gym and lift weights in fixed positions and most of the people haven’t shown how to do the movement in an ergonomic way.
That depends on the exercise. The cardiovascular benefits to endurance exercise are very straightforward.
How do you know?
Especially does your theory accurately predict how different people vary in how they benefit from endurance exercise?
It is straightforward. Your cardiovascular system becomes capable of more throughput—your lungs can take in more air (higher VO2max), your heart can pump more blood, etc. What you get is called reserve capacity. People with high reserve capacity can survive illnesses which people with low reserve capacity do not.
That’s no theory of why endurance exercise increases reserve capacity in most people. It’s jut an observation that this frequently happens. It not even good enough to tell you the optimum duration of your exercise.
I also don’t happen to be an believer in the idea that VO2max is the best possible value that one could come up with, when it comes to issues like surviving illnesses.
It took it quite a while to figure out that keeping medical ventilators at a static pressure level is a pretty bad idea. A static pressure level is really straightforward. With better research I think it’s likely we find a more complex variable that does a much better job than VO2max.