Science has finally validated my life choices to sit inside a air conditioned room, lights on, windows covered, minimal physical activity, doing things that don't require brain power.
Depends on what kind of programming or reading. Writing out boilerplate code or just skimming text don't seem to require much brain power. Neither does a task which one is so used to that it becomes "effortless".
I work out with a serious body builder and a serious power lifter. Both of them are engaged in minimizing the amount of exercise they do to get the greatest benefit.
> Both of them are engaged in minimizing the amount of exercise they do to get the greatest benefit.
Absolutely! I can only go full effort lifting for maybe 45 minutes. After that I'm just going through the motions.
Another thing to remember is that gains do not come while you're in the gym. The gains happen during the rest periods between workouts, so resting is just as important as the workout.
Well, find some 70 year olds near you that never exercised, and find some runners / triathletes. Choose which 70 year old you would rather be, and use that to chart your own path.
Not intended to support the parent's assertions, but it has been established that endurance exercise increases the propensity for Atrial Fibrillation, a potentially dangerous arrhythmia of the heart. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2638655/.
Sure, but it also decreases mortality by reducing the risk for hundreds of diseases, including heart disease, the leading killer for over-65s. You have to balance pros/cons, obviously!
"It"? In addition to a specific type of exercise, we're talking about a continuous variable here. Are you so sure it's a linear relationship, with the heaviest exercisers experiencing the greatest benefits? Because that seems like a tenuous position.
I believe there have been studies linking higher death rates to some endurance exercisers, and others showing the opposite (esp. among 'elite athletes', who may be especially adapted to this behavior).[0] Sorry I don't have more links... please apply skepticism and look deeper as you like. This is what I can provide.
First, it seems reasonable that, as a stressor, there is going to be a hormetic level of exercise, and then above that, a level that isn't healthy. That's in line with the linked article's advice, and also this summary of early death research from NYT:
'In the largest such study to date, involving more than 50,000 adults and presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine, participants who ran between 1 and 20 miles per week had almost 20 percent less risk of dying prematurely than people who didn’t exercise. But those who ran more than 20 miles per week enjoyed no such benefit. They had about the same risk of premature death as those who were sedentary.' [1]
If the above establishes the basic principle that too much exercise is counterproductive, there is almost certainly a level that actually starts subtracting lifespan (that study did not single out the most extreme endurance exercises AFAIK). Ergo, why there are so many deaths during Marathons (running even one M. can cause measurable heart damage).
I haven't checked out this angle, but it's also possible that lower muscle mass associated with endurance athletes is linked to (less) longevity, since, I believe, it is in general [2].
But again, one cannot approach this too simplistically. IIRC there is some evidence among pro bodybuilders of early death. More generally, exercise could have many effects, going in both directions, all with different curves.
This is a concept that seems particularly hard for folks who have learned to push their bodies well past the evolved resistance to high levels of exertion, and who take that unconditionally as a virtue.
EDIT: see also [3] below. I didn't have time to find the actual paper.
Mechanical parts wear out from use, whether they are animal or machine. Animal parts will heal to an extent and may require a minimum level of use to stay healthy, but they still wear out.
In both cars and people I would ask the same thing: is there a 25-35000 miles option too ? Too low is worse, and 20 is a sure indicator of big problems. So is 200,000.
As to the general feeling here. I invite everyone here who thinks ridiculous exercise is good to volunteer at an emergency room for a week. I guarantee this idea will get cured on the first day in any large city.
> The entropy generated predicts a life span of 73.78 and 81.61 years for the average U.S. male and female individuals respectively, which are values that closely match the average lifespan from statistics (74.63 and 80.36 years).
This study is completely disconnected from biological reality. Exercise is the only general-purpose life-extending intervention we know of with certainty. See for yourself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_exercise
I'm perfectly willing to believe it. From an Occam's razor perspective, exercise most directly and clearly is wear and tear. Stories about how the body overcome and benefits from that are more complicated, hence more likely wrong.
I don't see it as wear and tear. If you exercise correctly, everything from your bones, tendons, ligaments, and muscles will become stronger. The athleticism and strength that come from exercising will be beneficial for aging people in preventing and recovering from accidents. Not to discount the possibility of harmful effects, but the other benefits of intense exercise (especially cognitive health benefits) are easily worth it for me.
Exactly this. Training principles are built upon the theory of supercompensation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercompensation) - by using something you make it weaker and your body makes it stronger.
It's two separate things. The exercise is most directly damaging. The repair and improve process is a response. Our experience with things like bench press shows the response generally works on the measure of lifting iron. However, it's simpler and more demonstrable that exercise damages all your parts, than the theory that all your parts can be repaired and improved. Hence perhaps arthritic wear and tear, or damage to some part of the heart, etc.
An entirely sedentary lifestyle has incredibly high mortality. Similarly so for extreme exercise/steroid abuse.
By definition, there is a point in between which maximises longevity on average. This may not be the same as the point which maximises quality of life.
How exactly does exercise "damage all your parts"? You need proof to back up that bizarre claim. Humans are evolutionarily designed to be long distance athletes.
A LOT of functions of your body work by simply accepting damage and working around it. That's how your muscles build strength: first cells overexert themselves and a portion of them die. If this happens a few times the other cells will overcompensate while replacing them and you become stronger, up to a point.
Both processes have both short term and long term cost and accelerate senescence. More cells need more replacing under normal circumstances and this is limited by your genes. The absolute number of cells that will ever get replaced in your muscles is strictly limited in what is probably a measure against cancer. So increasing strength in muscles brings the day you get cancer forward. Not by much.
To a point this can be a worthwhile trade off, as it improves other aspects of your body.
But if you need or use food additives, or, god help you, steroids, you're far past that point.
In the short term over exerting muscles releases toxins, and over taxes your liver, heart, sometimes lungs, pancreas, and more. Needless to say this can trigger problems, and cause cell death in those organs too.
And lastly physically stressing your body can and will of course damage it. Even when there aren't large scale injuries there is damage. Any exercise will cause blood vessel ruptures. Will cause cell deaths due to crushing. It will bend or reshape your bones. Minimally, but nonzero. Of course, having a bmi of 35 will do cause more of this stress.
Also, the worst use of Occam's razor I've ever seen. By your logic, superficial observation and intuitive models of reality are more likely right than in depth, much more-complicated science.
How is a process of building muscle through exercise, which humans have been doing for hundreds of years, and which is extremely well understood by modern science more likely wrong than a bizarre metaphorical similarity to how physical objects degrade due to stress? Use it or lose it is our latest understanding of both the mind and the body.
Physical objects degrading under use by natural forces, is a common pattern and all a part of entropy and so on. We also happen to be physical objects. We can propose, and we know it's true that the body has repair mechanisms. However, it is a far more complicated effort to repair everything than to damage everything. Therefore, one should be open to establishing where the burden of proof lies, so that we know how to process the science, which tends to be rather unconvincing, frequently contradictory, etc. when it comes to issues like this.
Okay, I am happy to leave this part of the discussion. I think biological processes are highly distinguishable from non-biological ones, however (i.e. heavy brain usage is highly beneficial).
However, the article just says minimum exercise should be maintained for minimum entropy... there's no analysis as to why minimum entropy is a good thing. Longevity and wellbeing are complicated, multifactorial goals, and are certainly not determined by something as reductive as "biological entropy".
I agree. This is someone with the barest of knowledge of physics, and suddenly thinks they can upheave decades of study. It's fine to have a hypothesis based on a rudimentary understanding, but back it up with contextual science (physiology) and proper studies.
Good thing you don't decide what gets published, then. The paper is cited by 29 other papers. And...
"Entropy is an extensive property. It has the dimension of energy divided by temperature, which has a unit of joules per kelvin (J K−1) in the International System of Units"
S = k log w. [1] S has units of energy divided by temperature.
> Every time you eat, you increase entropy.
Globally, yes, but it is very common to take the entropy of a bounded system. One can talk about e.g. cardiac entropy - the number of microstates (e.g. differentiated cells or even their individual molecules) that can form the same state observable at the boundary of the heart. One can likewise talk about cellular entropy (the boundary being the cellular membrane), or about the entropy of an organism (the boundary being its outer surface, like the human skin and related exposed structures).
The entropy of all of these is much lower than that of a container of 70 kg of water at 310 kelvins; you can swap a molecule of the water in one part of a container with that in another part without wrecking observables of the water at the boundary, repeating the process until you have moved every molecule of water. You can't swap many brain cells with liver cells and expect the organism not to die; you can't swap molecules from the cellular membrane with molecules with the genetic molecules in a cell and expect the cell not to die; and so forth.
"Non-swapability" goes hand-in-hand with "low entropy".
> Just because you entered the world, you have increased entropy
Globally, with the boundary at the horizon of the observable universe, entropy always increases.
As a human embryo grows into an adult, the entropy at the boundary of that individual's outer surface (mostly) increases, because the overall matter increases, with the increase in the number of differentiated cells offsetting the decrease in entropy from the non-swapability of cells that have differentiated into e.g. smooth muscle or glial cells. However, growing humans are still very low entropy.
Once the mass of an adult human stabilizes, it makes sense to think of the entropy of fatty vs non-fatty tissues. Adipose is relatively high entropy (you can move bits of it from one cell to another without killing the cells or the adult human; this is a normal part of fat metabolism even, and moving adipose tissues around is routine in cosmetic surgery) compared with e.g. the kidneys. The skeletal musculature, grossly, is lower entropy than fatty tissues, because moving a large piece of a whole muscle from one joint to another (e.g in some orthopedic surgeries) affects the observables of the adult human (e.g. by changing his or her gait or the range of motion of the affected joint(s)). However, as one "bulks up", there is more skeletal muscle, so the entropy of each, and the overall entropy of the individual, increases.
This [1] is a study which attempts to quantify the diminishing returns of exercise. Compared to no exercise, people who do 1-2 times the recommended 75 minutes of weekly intense exercise or 150 minutes of moderate exercise have a 31% lower chance of death across a median 14 year follow up period. Those who complete 2-3x the recommended amount had 37% lower and 3-5x a 39% lower chance. There was no sign of negative effects of 5-10x the recommended amount, however no additional benefit either.
46 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 99.1 ms ] threadIs there a proven cause-and-effect relationship to actual mortality?
Was this ever peer-reviewed?
(2007 study)
For a moment I thought that you were going to be either programming or reading.
Absolutely! I can only go full effort lifting for maybe 45 minutes. After that I'm just going through the motions.
Another thing to remember is that gains do not come while you're in the gym. The gains happen during the rest periods between workouts, so resting is just as important as the workout.
UPDATE: I have provided a more detailed account, with some citations, below.
Please provide a citation for that extraordinary claim.
A quick Google on marathon life expectancy:
http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20140401/too-much...
First, it seems reasonable that, as a stressor, there is going to be a hormetic level of exercise, and then above that, a level that isn't healthy. That's in line with the linked article's advice, and also this summary of early death research from NYT:
'In the largest such study to date, involving more than 50,000 adults and presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine, participants who ran between 1 and 20 miles per week had almost 20 percent less risk of dying prematurely than people who didn’t exercise. But those who ran more than 20 miles per week enjoyed no such benefit. They had about the same risk of premature death as those who were sedentary.' [1]
If the above establishes the basic principle that too much exercise is counterproductive, there is almost certainly a level that actually starts subtracting lifespan (that study did not single out the most extreme endurance exercises AFAIK). Ergo, why there are so many deaths during Marathons (running even one M. can cause measurable heart damage).
I haven't checked out this angle, but it's also possible that lower muscle mass associated with endurance athletes is linked to (less) longevity, since, I believe, it is in general [2].
But again, one cannot approach this too simplistically. IIRC there is some evidence among pro bodybuilders of early death. More generally, exercise could have many effects, going in both directions, all with different curves.
This is a concept that seems particularly hard for folks who have learned to push their bodies well past the evolved resistance to high levels of exertion, and who take that unconditionally as a virtue.
EDIT: see also [3] below. I didn't have time to find the actual paper.
0 https://primalcycle.com/2011/09/17/life-expectancy-o-enduran...
1 https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/ask-well-endurance...
2 https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/muscle-ma...
3 http://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20140401/too-much...
Mechanical parts wear out from use, whether they are animal or machine. Animal parts will heal to an extent and may require a minimum level of use to stay healthy, but they still wear out.
As to the general feeling here. I invite everyone here who thinks ridiculous exercise is good to volunteer at an emergency room for a week. I guarantee this idea will get cured on the first day in any large city.
If I go lift heavy weights, my bones self repair and get stronger.
If I sit on my butt all day on a computer, my bones get thinner and weaker.
No matter how much you drive a car, it is never going to get "stronger", only slowly wear out.
Since you are a human and not a car, I would suggest you maintain your body like it is alive and not made of metal.
Can...this be changed?
Or, as some would have it, "with certainty".
[1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170601-the-secret-to-a-lon...
By definition, there is a point in between which maximises longevity on average. This may not be the same as the point which maximises quality of life.
How exactly does exercise "damage all your parts"? You need proof to back up that bizarre claim. Humans are evolutionarily designed to be long distance athletes.
Both processes have both short term and long term cost and accelerate senescence. More cells need more replacing under normal circumstances and this is limited by your genes. The absolute number of cells that will ever get replaced in your muscles is strictly limited in what is probably a measure against cancer. So increasing strength in muscles brings the day you get cancer forward. Not by much.
To a point this can be a worthwhile trade off, as it improves other aspects of your body.
But if you need or use food additives, or, god help you, steroids, you're far past that point.
In the short term over exerting muscles releases toxins, and over taxes your liver, heart, sometimes lungs, pancreas, and more. Needless to say this can trigger problems, and cause cell death in those organs too.
And lastly physically stressing your body can and will of course damage it. Even when there aren't large scale injuries there is damage. Any exercise will cause blood vessel ruptures. Will cause cell deaths due to crushing. It will bend or reshape your bones. Minimally, but nonzero. Of course, having a bmi of 35 will do cause more of this stress.
How is a process of building muscle through exercise, which humans have been doing for hundreds of years, and which is extremely well understood by modern science more likely wrong than a bizarre metaphorical similarity to how physical objects degrade due to stress? Use it or lose it is our latest understanding of both the mind and the body.
However, the article just says minimum exercise should be maintained for minimum entropy... there's no analysis as to why minimum entropy is a good thing. Longevity and wellbeing are complicated, multifactorial goals, and are certainly not determined by something as reductive as "biological entropy".
I don't think anybody has a unit for entropy.
They are falling a fallacy.
Just because you entered the world, you have increased entropy. Every time you eat, you increase entropy.
I can't believe this got published.
"Entropy is an extensive property. It has the dimension of energy divided by temperature, which has a unit of joules per kelvin (J K−1) in the International System of Units"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
S = k log w. [1] S has units of energy divided by temperature.
> Every time you eat, you increase entropy.
Globally, yes, but it is very common to take the entropy of a bounded system. One can talk about e.g. cardiac entropy - the number of microstates (e.g. differentiated cells or even their individual molecules) that can form the same state observable at the boundary of the heart. One can likewise talk about cellular entropy (the boundary being the cellular membrane), or about the entropy of an organism (the boundary being its outer surface, like the human skin and related exposed structures).
The entropy of all of these is much lower than that of a container of 70 kg of water at 310 kelvins; you can swap a molecule of the water in one part of a container with that in another part without wrecking observables of the water at the boundary, repeating the process until you have moved every molecule of water. You can't swap many brain cells with liver cells and expect the organism not to die; you can't swap molecules from the cellular membrane with molecules with the genetic molecules in a cell and expect the cell not to die; and so forth.
"Non-swapability" goes hand-in-hand with "low entropy".
> Just because you entered the world, you have increased entropy
Globally, with the boundary at the horizon of the observable universe, entropy always increases.
As a human embryo grows into an adult, the entropy at the boundary of that individual's outer surface (mostly) increases, because the overall matter increases, with the increase in the number of differentiated cells offsetting the decrease in entropy from the non-swapability of cells that have differentiated into e.g. smooth muscle or glial cells. However, growing humans are still very low entropy.
Once the mass of an adult human stabilizes, it makes sense to think of the entropy of fatty vs non-fatty tissues. Adipose is relatively high entropy (you can move bits of it from one cell to another without killing the cells or the adult human; this is a normal part of fat metabolism even, and moving adipose tissues around is routine in cosmetic surgery) compared with e.g. the kidneys. The skeletal musculature, grossly, is lower entropy than fatty tissues, because moving a large piece of a whole muscle from one joint to another (e.g in some orthopedic surgeries) affects the observables of the adult human (e.g. by changing his or her gait or the range of motion of the affected joint(s)). However, as one "bulks up", there is more skeletal muscle, so the entropy of each, and the overall entropy of the individual, increases.
> I can't believe this got published.
vs
> They are falling a fallacy.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Divine_fallacy
A correlation between Boltzmannian entropy of an individual and the individual's lifespan is interesting.
---
[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Boltzmann%27s_entropy_formula
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25844730