This reminds me of something Goggins said, along the lines of working out is almost entirely a mental thing.
You access parts of your brain and your being when you’re giving everything you got to squeeze out that extra rep, or when you are going for a new PR with heavy weight. Or even when you don’t feel like working out, and you say okay I have to get my brain out of this and just do it, similar to life where I have to do work when I sometimes don’t want to.
The physical benefits (muscle mass, testosterone, appearance, strength) for me are entirely secondary to the mental/emotional benefits of working out.
100% agree. Working out for me is often an exercise in learning to be fully embodied and seeing what my limits are. At the age of 40 I finally feel like I understand myself a bit more on some deep level, probably because I'm not trying to ignore the reality of having a body.
Re: testosterone, for men it helps keep your marriage together, I’ll let you figure that out
Muscle mass starts to erode with age (I think correlated with decrease in test) separate from the looks, you don’t want to be losing muscle mass because it means you’ll be weaker. Being weaker makes you more prone to injury and increases your risk of all-cause mortality.
The other thing is muscle mass takes time and effort to put on, so you really need to start early, I missed out on my prime years (teens and early 20s) but better late than never I guess!
Peter Attia (Stanford MD, longevity researcher) great source on this subject
You don't need a lot of muscle mass to stay strong enough to avoid injury. Any form of regular medium intensity exercise will probably be fine from that point of view.
Of course if you want to build big muscles, that's fine. I am always a little wary of people extolling the health benefits of doing so. Eating well and doing a moderate amount of exercise will get you 90% of the way to any purely health-related benefits that you'll get from more intense exercise. And more intense forms of exercise carry their own non-negligible risk of injury.
Attitudes to health, diet and exercise seem increasingly to vacillate between extremes. There's a happy medium between sitting on your couch eating cheetos and straining to lift huge weights four times a week.
Dunno, I feel the effect of lifting is mostly one of persistent clarity.
Whatever wandering thoughts I had bouncing around in my head before a set of heavy deadlifts, all that is gone after, because the effort of pulling up the bar doesn't permit anything but complete focus.
I think what's being challenged here is whether tasks that we consider "cognitively challenging" do actually require more "computing power" than physical exercise does. I guess it's decoupling "cognitively challenging" from "computing power".
I love lifting, and I agree with this. Even running outside, though repetitive, causes you to constantly scan the ground ahead of you for obstacles (crack in the cement, puddles, dog poop, etc), you have the stimulus of the moving background, cars/people/stray pets to avoid. You may not have to think hard about theses things, but your mind is always processing and responding to the stimulus.
For me, I think I get the most mental benefits out BJJ. I'd wager any martial art with live sparring would give the same results.
When you're doing live sparring, as opposed to just drills, you have to make constant, near instant, adjustments to your defense, look for offensive openings, scan your rolling partner's movements and try to anticipate their next attack, all while being aware of other trainees on the mats (to avoid a random foot or falling body), and working to slow your breathing and maintain composure.
I totally agree regarding bjj and live sparring. I do bjj, a bit of judo and also climbing. I think climbing is a bit similar in the way that you need almost constant focus, doing small adjustments and so on. For all these three (and similar) activities there will be consequences if losing focus and starting to think about something else.
I tried out the square dancing class my boomer parents attend and found it similarly challenging. You're changing direction, changing partners, and remembering calls. Now I wonder if I'm stagnating by just doing trail run.
I'd argue against that. If you offer someone a choice between a suduko puzzle or a solidly difficult workout before they're allowed to get one with their evening, I'd guess most people would choose the puzzle. Drumming up the mental fortitude to force yourself to do something difficult is a cognitive challenge.
On a sample of size one. I found that sticking to hard exercise (I am a runner, so intervals, tempo runs, long runs, etc) seems like it is making it easier for me to stick to hard exercise in the future. I have some theories about it (like upping my tolerance for pain) but I think ultimately it all comes down to willpower. If so, it means that willpower can also be exercised and you can increase/improve it to let you do things that are not necessarily pleasurable right now but give you delayed gratification.
Can't tell if it transfers from exercise to my actual work.
In a sense yes. I started a low carb diet a month ago and at this point i no longer actively crave those things. Not saying I would never eat them again but I have definitely lost the habit of doing so.
It works on multiple levels. After a month without chocolate you might find it much easier to avoid buying it, and if you don't have it in your home it will be easier to avoid eating it.
I used to drink at least one can of soda every day, and after almost a decade of regularly going without it, I can now drink a soda at a restaurant without falling back into the soda trap.
I'd argue that habituating lowers the amount of willpower required. I'd also note that it is easy to lose habits of activities that require a lot of willpower to create a habit around.
I don't have any references to hand, but drawing from both personal experience and anecdotal stories from places like r/nootropics, the link between cognitive performance and physical exercise is already well established and almost universally accepted. In comparison, brain training games and sudoku puzzles are rarely, if ever, mentioned as beneficial (again, anecdotally). Am I misunderstanding what's being speculated here?
Somewhat related - something that I do find quite curious from my own personal experience is that lifting heavy weights has a far greater impact on my ability to concentrate (and therefore perceived cognitive ability, I guess) than cardio/aerobic exercise does. Like night and day. I've recently started attributing it to creatine supplementation, but I do wonder if there's anything more to it than that.
creatine supplementation is supported by the literature to have cognitive benefits.
Also, lifting heavy does train your central nervous system too, which might be a pathway to better cognitive ability? (This second part is 100% bro science, though)
Yeah, I guess 'lifting heavy does train your CNS too' isn't too far away from what the author of this post is speculating also. The implication seems to be that physical activity is more 'computationally challenging', rather than 'cognitively challenging' like sudoku is. 'Computationally challenging' to me implies a higher level of CNS activation than 'cognitively challenging' tasks that employ conscious reasoning only.
I think the idea this person has is pretty novel. That physical excercise is great for the mind, not only because it has some nebulous general benefits but because it computationally is a very hard task for the brain. Harder than anything you could throw at it consciously.
It might be wrong but it's interesting and somewhat novel.
Don't most mammals have about the same number of joints? This implies a very small part of our mind is responsible for that.
Even pumpkin toadlets, who famously can't coordinate their landings, the problem isn't the size of their brain, it's their vestibular system.
I'm of the opinion that most animals are probably a lot higher up the sentience scale than is the current social consensus, but I don't think exercise is itself a major cognitive effort. Arbitrary games sure (not just the rules, anything social involves modelling multiple entities like yourself), but not the physical exercise itself.
I don’t think the point is that physical work makes humans intelligent in comparison to animals. I think the point is that physically active humans exercise aspects of their intelligence that modern sedentary humans do not.
Processing of visual information, especially on short time scales. Feedback mechanisms for balance. Adapting to changing environmental conditions (e.g. how much should a stride be adjusted on gravel, in mud, on damp pavement). These are all detailed tasks that are done during physical exercise, just not typically tasks that are done at a conscious level.
While it's true that Boston Dynamics robots can barely walk, they can't write coherent and innovative stories, solve abstract problems, or other related tasks at all yet.
I haven't heard people mention it before but I've often wondered why physical exercise wasn't considered "intelligent" when so much of the brain was dedicated to tasks like moving around and coordination.
Not disagreeing, but let me point out that animals can move their bodies quite well and we consider most of them significantly less intelligent. I don't know what proportion of the brain is used for movement and what proportion is used for cognition.
Dolphins and bears can balance a ball on their nose. Human artists can balance multiple plates on sticks. Is it a difference in computing power, or just because we can't force animals to practice enough?
Couldn't this prove the point that we don't equate movement with intelligence, though? Who's to say animals also don't possess this intelligence? Maybe we'd have to go down the chain then, to more inert species like plants and fungi, though they also possess intelligence I can't begin to comprehend.
IANAB, but large animal bodies correlate with large brain size. Huge animals like elephants and whales have much bigger brains than humans, but are not considered cognitively equivalent to humans.
Maybe moving and maintaining a body requires body size proportional "raw" computational power and maybe human brains have mostly just qualitative differences not related to mass when compared to animals (ok, and a bit of extra proportional brain mass too).
If this is the case the connection between excercise and cognitive capacity could seem natural. Excercise requires massive neural resources and thus physical excercises also excercise the brain to a large degree and the whatever qualitative bit that humans have "on top" simply rides the wave to some improvement.
from personal experience i can say: after i started working out extensively, often for 10+ hours a week, i did notice that i just had a lot less time and energy left for intellectual endeavours (which consisted of mostly reading and programming exercise projects). not only was the time spent in the gym "lost" (intellectually), but afterwards (i mostly trained in the evening) i was just too tired and exhausted for longer periods of intense concentration.
that said, i began spending a lot of time reading about exercising instead, which is surprisingly intellectually stimulating. there are a bunch of high level powerlifters, bodybuilders and weightlifters who do, for example, scientific paper reviews and criticism. i learned a lot about second-guessing findings there. road cycling is probably on of the most data driven sports out there (i kinda quit strength sports during covid and started cycling, which is probably even more time consuming).
there are intellectually aspects to - and surrounding - most sports to a degree, but i doubt intelligence is the decicive factor even in comparably tactical athletic disciplines (team sports).
sorry, i'm not sure what you mean. i can't recommend any books or papers. on the one hand i'm not a scientist myself, on the other hand i have no idea what you're interested in or what is relevant for you.
The thing about cycling which is nice is it allows for your brain to decompress and wander into deep thought (assuming a solo ride) while tour body is physically working. Whereas mountain biking is more action and coordinated and quite fun but doesnt get me into a deep state if mind. Powerlifting builds muscle and does provide benefits (structural integrity especially for the end years of my life) but i don't feel rejuvenated more just tired after working out. I find that im not as sharp during the hour or two after from tiredness (for an intense workout). To be fair both cycling and mountain biking im totally cooked for something equivalently intense.
But not before you have reached a rather high level of technique. Before that, it feels like a sustained fight against drowning that fills your entire attention like few other things do. I'd say the threshold to mentally let go is lower in almost every other sport. That state of a background task that keeps the kind from dozing off, it's leaving plenty of attention to the mind wandering? I rarely hear that mentioned by swimmers, the state of mind trope frequently occurring is "counting tiles", which rather sounds like as if even those with perfect technique and routine don't disconnect mind from physical activity all that much.
for me it's complicated. sometimes i do get into those deep thoughts on long solo rides, but i found that i couldn't really concentrate on complicated issues enough without neglecting my concentration on the road. i did have a couple of good ideas from time to time, but it wasn't a regular experience and highly dependend on the type of riding. moreover, i run the risk of forgetting about the good ideas if the ride goes on for several more hours and i fall into other deep thought mind traps.
if i do structured training i try to stay concentrated on the task at hand, i.e. pedalling technique, breathing, recovery (heart rate), keeping watts constant, controlling cadence and so on. i do long virtual endurance rides with the ERG on but tend to watch entertaining movies.
i don't seem to get into deep though states much during weightlifting, as the lifts require me to be concentrated and fully focussed and the pauses are too short to get lost on the one hand and require active recovery on the other.
the big difference here is that most people who want to use training time for intellectual improvement just listen to podcasts, but that's not really an option for me as i'm hearing impaired and barely understand anything.
Fair - i think my point is that there is some value getting into those deep thought spaces for benefit cognitive function in addition to the physical exercise. Not scientifically proven but i suspect it has a benefit.
The conventional wisdom of exercising alternate days, 20 minutes per day, etc. may lead to many people over-training themselves. In my experience, the "exercise-life" balance (similar to work-life balance) has to be had for benefits to accumulate and our ability to continue it.
That said, I lift twice a week for a total of about 4 to 4.5 hours, and that strikes an optimum balance for my age, physiology and everything else. I tried many other forms and failed to find that exercise-life balance.
Additionally a lot of conventional wisdom in exercise science borders on "voodoo", and some are challenging it [1].
It's definitely about finding your personal balance of effort versus capacity to recover, although do make sure to read up on conventional wisdom and use that to guide you first. It takes a while to know what you're actually looking for.
To add an anecdote, my balance changes depending on my focus at the time. If I'm on a strength training arc, it's 3 days a week at 1-2hrs a session. If I've shifted focus to functional fitness I can train 3-4 times a week at ~40minutes a session, as it just doesn't take as long to do the work, and doesn't take as long to recover from that work.
Food and sleep are usually the limiting factor, I just can't recover fast enough and that is what over training really is, it's training over your capacity to recover.
there's a lot of bro science regarding overtraining. almost all of the time it's actually undersleeping and undereating, i.e. recovery is the limiting factor. back then i was single, didn't work full time and also had flexible work time, so sleeping 8-10 hours a night and eating huge heaps of food every day was the norm. endurance sports are a little different in some aspects, mostly body weight management.
i'm not the biggest fan of rippetoe. e.g. the article you linked is at least partially bullshit for high(er) level athletes (i only skimmed it though). it's important to keep the audience in mind though; it may be valuable advice for _some_.
The way I've heard it is 'what most people think is overtraining is underrecovering'. My brother is a sports medicine doctor and what he told me is that actual overtraining is pretty much only seen in real athletes after months of sustained excessive training. What most people go through is actually called 'overreaching' and while it's not optimal you can keep going if you recover properly.
Most of the professional athletes I've met get 10-12 hours of sleep. Now that I do lifting I need a solid 9 hours of sleep to recover and I need to stuff my face full of food to make gains.
Not impossible but certainly something that a lot of people can't do consistently if they want to have a job and do other things in life. Getting a half day of rest is almost a luxury for many.
yes, i usually slept without an alarm and there's a very noticable difference of about 2 hours between training and non-training days (i.e. 7 vs. 9 hours). i'm not a professional athlete, i'm a motivated amateur.
non-athletes often think it's nice to eat whatever you want and not gain weight, but it's actually quite unpleasant to having to force feed yourself all the time; not at least because you start wanting to eat certain meals - with a purpose. it took me a ridiculous amount of time and effort to put on some mass.
i used to go to the gym because i was bored. when i didn't feel great, i went to the gym because i knew i'd feel better afterwards. the gym was my safe space and my default activity. now that i have a family conditions have changed considerably; training is usually done late at night, in between obligations or on a few "me time" weekend hours for longer bike rides. works well enough, i can't complain.
as they say: "you get stronger on rest days". this applies to both endurance and strength sports. the trick is to use your rest days productively; it doesn't necessarily require being inactive (for those who really want to go all in).
also, there's the principle of polarized training (for endurance sports): "go easy on the easy days, go hard on the hard days", because if you go to hard on the easy days, you can't go hard enough on the hard days.
a lot of people are under the impression that giving 100% every time, every day is the best way, probably thanks to years of training montages of sly dragging sleds through waist deep snow and karate-kid ... idk, kicking a tree really hard or whatever karate kid does, when actually it just leads to exhaustion and burnout.
Spot on, the article does begin with this sentence: "If you are a competitive distance runner or cyclist who is serious about your sport, this article has not been written for you."
funnily enough, dedicated strength training (i.e. heavy squats) is one of the most effective methods to improve the performance of endurance athletes (especially cyclists).
Exercise-life balance will change, as well, throughout your life. We all have different seasons.
Some years ago I was working at a university and could go to the gym and lift heavy over lunch. That was great -- a good decompression, opportunity to talk w/people in other parts of the university, and the strongest I ever got. At another time in life I did CrossFit. It gave me some community when traveling and I could fit it outside the workday. Now due to covid/kid/corporate job I switched for a few years to circuit training/HIIT in the basement. That got me into very good shape in a different way than lifting heavy a few times a week. And now I have to change again -- different family schedule has taken away my early-morning workout slot and my short bike commute and so I'm trying to find the new normal. Maybe I can join a gym again, but with the family morning grind and family evening routine I cannot easily spend more than 40 min a day on fitness, and as winter approaches the outside activities possible change.
It is important to acknowledge the different seasons of life.
Back to the article. Mathematicians know the power of walking; that's why it's a tradition for many week-long conferences to have a Wednesday afternoon hike. The best of course is the one at Oberwolfach but the hike I went on at Luminy is a close second. Many mathematicians run, play Ultimate Frisbee, rock climb, dance, etc. From my own experience exercise is significant in clearing my mind and thus enabling creativity (rather than rumination), and it has a significant effect on my resting heart rate and sleeping heart rate. Sleep in turn is very important to cognition and creativity. As I get older, the more I notice I need to pay attention to these things and can't take them for granted. Building exercise into my routine is crucial. Systems are important.
I appreciate Rippetoe for getting me into strength training but the article is complete and utter BS and he does peddle quite a bit of it.
The antagonistic effect of endurance training on strength is not really relevant for recreational runners and this has been show time and time again in multiple high-quality studies. You should only really care if you're a competitive lifter; a ton of people who go to the gym have terrible cardio, and I would argue that good cardio fitness is much more relevant to overall health; you should _not_ be getting winded going up a couple flights of stairs.
Furthermore the cardiovascular effects of strength training are insufficient for all-around good health. Cardio stimulates different metabolic pathways that are very much useful in life; having done both activities I can tell you when I was an active marathon runner I just had way more energy in the tank for everything.
The article makes a mention that nutrition is more relevant for heart health than cardiovascular condititioning, something that not only is just plain false, but also ignores that body mass is body mass and having an excessive amount of muscle mass does not correspond with cardiovascular health either.
The critiques about repetitive motion in running are just downright ridiculous. Runners get injured, of course. So do people who deadlift with bad technique. As a species we are frankly much more adapted to running than moving heavy weights, as evidenced by the amount of effort our bodies go through to keep muscle mass off as compared to any other primate. There is a balance between both but Rippetoe just goes on about things like being "harder to kill" which is plain fanboying; I would contend that being an ultramarthon runner or an Ironman triathlete corresponds far better with grit and not getting killed over all the gymgoers that can barely run a mile.
I am curious what type of people are you categorizing in "gymgoers that can barely run a mile". Certainly no the ones who follow Starting Strength program, since with personal experience I can say my mile time is way better it is now with SS, than it was before. Maybe the "gym bros" who are more into hypertrophy? :-)
sure, the person only doing strength training will have better endurance than a person doing nothing at all. i also agree strength training is usually critically neglected compared to cardio (which is slowly changing tho).
it's the toxic "cardio kills your gains" broscience that's harmful, as it leads to people actively avoiding healthy cardio. i've seen strength athletes use the escalator instead of the stairs because they tried to avoid getting their heart rate up outside the squat rack. this is counterproductive to both health and athletic ability.
I had a friend of mine who was a jock played in varsity athletes and was quite strong. He also happened to a be 100% average student in the STEM field. His professors were always shocked when he was the too student in the class - significant amount of disbelief.
> because it computationally is a very hard task for the brain
No they didn't say harder, they said it uses "more computation", there's a difference.
Your brain has many parallel systems specialized for exercise, because our ancestors have used similar systems to move their bodies for eons. Exercise fires all these systems in parallel, so your brain is getting great "throughput".
On the other hand stuff like Sudoku is using a much smaller fraction of our brain that developed recently, probably for language, and then trying to use the language part to do math, which feels "difficult" precisely because we're trying to do it with just a small, unspecialized part of our brain, instead of a bunch of specialized parallel systems.
So exercise is both "easier", but also more efficiently gets your brain working because of parallelism.
It is not just that, but it's also because you have to apply a surprising amount of mental concentration in power lifting. Basically, you have to be hyper-aware of your entire form while you are lifting. From my experience that takes as much concentration as working on a hard mental problem.
In the articles hypothesis were correct this might not be a surprise, building a weight lifting robot would likely be much easier than one that could traverse complex terrain at even 4 mph.
Sure, you could build a weight lifting robot just by increasing it's raw mechanical ability. But to build one that's made of hundreds of strings only capable of individually lifting a single pound and coordinating them around multiple axes to lift hundreds of pounds would be much more difficult.
But there's really no reason to do that since you can just increase the raw mechanics.
A dedicated weight-lifting robot could have far fewer degrees of movement. It could essentially be a couple of pistons at a camber with one more powered axis for balance.
You may want to play around with not working out to exhaustion. There is a whole set of routines built around just depleting your ATP, triggering mTOR, and not damaging muscle tissue or creating lactic acid build up. The Quick and the Dead book by Pavel Tsatsouline is one such routine, it uses 10 sets of 10 push-ups and 10 sets of 10 kettlebell swings with resting in between (30 minutes total, 3 times a week). I've found it to be quite effective, there are other options out there. The key is that they don't deplete you, and you can go on to do things the rest of your day without soreness or inability to walk down stairs. YMMV.
Maths/Physics now need a full time career just to reach the current frontier of knowledge, you have to build on existing ground, Athletes must somehow take time to learn this knowledge, and by the time they have learned it, they are not as physically fit as they once were.
Roger Bannister, first person to run under 4 minutes for the mile, was a neurologist. He considered his work in medicine to be more important than running the first sub-4 minute mile.
Just because a person does not use a thing does not mean that he/she is not capable of doing so. Additionally, to quote my favorite math teacher, what one fool can do, so can any other. The issue is our most limited resource: time. I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time doing things that further no ability. As such, I’m less than mediocre at both sport and and work. Becoming a good athlete requires an insane investment of time into diet, exercise, training, and study of the sport not only modern but past. To claim that an athlete is dumb is to make a prescriptive claim about what knowledge is valuable. The athlete has an intuitive understanding of physics, tactics, and strategy that others do not. The athlete may also have some formal scholarly knowledge on the topic as well. The physicist would not be capable of matching the athlete in use of those same physics with his/her own body without the same training regimen and time use; and should they swap time spent, each would begin to become the other.
Magnus Carlsen talks a lot about the physical stamina you need to play chess, a purely mental game. Niels Bohr was famously a passionate footballer, who played at club level in Denmark.
Edwin Hubble, while not a Nobel prize winner, was a basketball player, football, baseball player, and pugalist. He also did track and field and waterpolo polo while studying Law at Oxford .
Not sure why this is so surprising, your body is at the very least the thing carrying your brain around. Having it in good condition would obviously maximize your brain's potential
Socrates was talking about this stuff thousands of years ago:
>For be you assured that there is no contest of any sort, nor any transaction, in which you will be the worse off for being well prepared in body; and in fact there is nothing which men do for which the body is not a help. In every demand, therefore, which can be laid upon the body it is much better that it should be in the best condition; since, even where you might imagine the claims upon the body to be slightest—in the act of reasoning—who does not know the terrible stumbles which are made through being out of health?
> It suffices to say that forgetfulness, and despondency, and moroseness, and madness take occasion often of ill-health to visit the intellectual faculties so severely as to expel all knowledge from the brain. But he who is in good bodily plight has large security. He runs no risk of incurring any such catastrophe through ill-health at any rate
> I've recently started attributing it to creatine supplementation, but I do wonder if there's anything more to it than that.
My boxing coach used to say concentration trains concentration (failing to concentrate in the ring results in automatic negative feedback).
I suspect that the focus you have when lifting (so much going on there trying to control your body while exerting at maximum effort), is helping your brain learn to better focus. If you are like most people who lift, you probably are paying attention to what is going in and coming out of your body, which also requires focus as well.
In my experience, focus is a skill that is learned, and like all things, is easy for some, and very difficult to master for others.
> So, here’s the speculation / thesis: exercising, that is, operating our bodies at a higher than baseline level, with everything that entails - energy regulation, unconscious balancing, spatial awareness, etc - requires more computing power than crosswords, sudoku, finding relations between measure theory and first-order logic through category theory, etc
Even if this is true (which seems plausible, but I'm not aware of it being proven), I don't think it tells us anything about the extent to which we're looking at "exercise inhibits cognitive decline" vs. "cognitive decline inhibits exercise".
>Robots still have a hard time navigating terrain and manipulating stuff
The author argues that doing things at higher pace should be cognitive intensive. But robots are not bad at doing things fast: if they can do things, they can do them also "fast" (at my understanding)
You gotta be real careful when generalising like this. A human-like robot is generally going to struggle to be faster and stronger than a human, even for a pre-programmed action. The robots which are faster and/or stronger are purpose-built (and usually are stronger because they are much larger). But also robots can be super-fast at object recognition. See automatic sorting machines, for example, which can process data extremely quickly to reject bad fruit/veg/cooked crisps/etc from a full conveyor belt. Everything is a tradeoff: there are multiple avenues in which robots will beat humans every time and many where robots are not even close on multiple fronts, not just cognitive.
Of course! I guess I should drop the ‘very fast’ comment (Though that is typical).
They can move as fast as they have been designed to move, if further computation is not required.
In most cases (repetitive work, stuff with relatively basic, straightforward computation - the human equivalent of reflexes), that means they’re basically constrained by their physical limits.
Those fast object detection algorithms require an extremely artificial environment (with high contrast backgrounds, tuned high intensity light), and are generally only good at sorting specific classes of items, at least last I researched them.
The algorithms involve do a LOT of down sampling too, if I remember.
They aren’t general purpose navigation or object detection algorithms, I’m trying to say, and won’t work at that speed in anything but a very controlled environment. It’s the problem that a lot of players have been dumping billions into for decades - Waymo, DJI, Tesla, and a million smaller names.
General purpose navigation in an unknown environment starts running up against real hardware limits right now at speed, even with essentially unlimited power budgets (aka a car, truck, drone with a huge battery and limited flight time, etc). Based on the context, I understood the question to be in reference to something portable, and most of those hardware implementations would be nearly impossible to fit in a humanoid style robot.
It’s going to take a decade or so for that to change probably, maybe a half that, depending on what Skydio and DJI have cooking.
> But robots are not bad at doing things fast: if they can do things, they can do them also "fast"
Robots are not a single thing. You can't draw general conclusions about them like that.
They are objects designed by humans, they go as fast or as slow as they are designed to go. The design space is heavily constrained by physics. This means some things are possible, some things are possible but very expensive and other things are just not possible.
A FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile is a robot. It has an onboard computer, a sensor, and fins to change direction. It flies about 300 m/s as top speed and it doesn't do things slow. It can't. [1]
A Konecranes AGV is a giant self-driving platform carrying containers in automated ports. It carries a maximum of 70t and the top speed of it is about 6 m/s. It is also a robot. [2]
There are many kinds of robots. I intentionally selected here two extremes here to show how you can't make generalisation like that.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it matches my subjective experience.
I think better when I've been exercising, but it doesn't feel like I've given my brain a workout so much as it feels like I gave it percussive maintenance. It feels like exercise turns the sound of my subconscious from a buzzy rattle to a gentle hum, keeping it out of my way except to help. It very much does not feel like I've given my mind a workout.
Though I also have unmedicated ADHD, so my subjective experience of my subconscious might be different than most.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, my health varied a lot; sometimes I was sedentary and sometimes I was very active. But I never noticed a cognitive effect.
Now that I'm well into my 40s, it's very noticeable when I've been off the exercise wagon. Not day to day, but definitely on timescales of a week or two. When I'm active, my recall is sharper and my memory clearer. I also feel this with my diet (real vs. processed foods) and drinking.
Not the op, but I am 45, did a lot of sport till my 20s, I don't exercise anymore, since at least 20 years, what I notice now is the lack of proper rest: not sleeping enough, for example.
Exercise actually makes me numb these days and I need a couple of days to recover.
While immersing in deep focused studying or exercising my mind by learning new stuff, makes me feel a lot better and much sharper.
To each his own I think.
edit: a friend of mine who never did sports at young age tells me he feels better now that he goes swimming regularly at the age of 42, but who can tell if it is just because exercise is a new experience to him?
> While immersing in deep focused studying or exercising my mind by learning new stuff, makes me feel a lot better and much sharper.
I certainly agree with you on this. In my case, a healthy lifestyle makes taking on new challenges much easier: I'm less intimidated, and less frustrated by the slope of the inevitable learning curve.
My cognitive abilities at my actual age (mid 40s) improved significantly when I quit with my younger age lifestyle, much more than exercise could do.
Of course I'm not saying that exercise is futile it surely keeps the body healthy and that's extremely important as years go by.
the old saying "mens sana in corpore sano" ( a healthy mind in an healthy body) is still relevant today for a good reason.
My theory is that is not exercise per se, but the power drained by the excercise.
There's a good example about it in an episode of the BBC series Horizon where people are asked to solve simple arithmetic computations and then to do the same while walking at a fast pace.
All of the people involved need to stop to complete them.
The cognitive part of our brain is very power hungry and can't function properly when power is needed somewhere else.
I think that power drain from exercise can prevent becoming more and more risk adverse because it keeps us from over thinking things, the inner thoughts are mostly about negative outcomes (not specifically negative thoughts, just the outcome)
So theoretically we could gain the same benefits by tricking us into thinking about the positive outcomes.
I am not an expert in such matter, so take everything I say with many grains of salt.
p.s. I was walking when writing this and I had to stop to write something that made sense.
>Exercise actually makes me numb these days and I need a couple of days to recover.
Sounds like you're under-recovering. With proper food and rest, a normal intensity exercise shouldn't make you feel tired the next day. I had a similar problem and turns out I wasn't eating enough protein(I have to get in at least 200 grams when working out or I feel awful, idk why)
I'm in my mid 30s, and feel that same effect on the timescales of a week. I was particularly sedentary for most of my youth, and have only been intermittently active since my early 20s.
I also have unmedicated, diagnosed adhd. I view it as training my brain to STFU. It’s gotten good enough that in my every day life, I find that now, even a few sets of push ups can help me reset when I’m in a doom loop.
IME running allows me to solve problems and my theory is that my brain has less capacity to waste because it’s having to concentrate on all those things it needs to propel me safely, leaving my thoughts less cluttered. When I become fit enough I often find myself ‘waking up’ during longer runs, as though I had been in a meditative state. It seems completely plausible that the brain has to do more when running than when solving a puzzle.
Here's a short (unscientific) article (that kinda links to scinetific articles) about the link between lactic acid buildup and its relation in the brain. Sounds like exercise generates a natural nootropic. https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/lactic-acid-...
I believe that the Brain-Computer analogy has been very harmful.
I grew up thinking of myself as a "brain on a stick" - my body didn't really matter and only my brain was important. I think read a bunch of science fiction that made fun of this idea, but I didn't realize it was making fun of it and I took it seriously.
You are not a brain on a stick - your body is important. Developing an understanding of your sensations and emotions is important. Developing an understanding of your deeply held beliefs and assumptions is important. Keeping your body healthy is important.
Mind-body dualism is an older position than Descartes, but cartesian dualism is distinct from the Aristotelian hylemorphic theories that were popular for a long time before, and still profoundly shapes the way we think in ways that may be difficult to even realize because the world view completely permeates all modern western thought.
It does however become very apparent when you read pre-cartesian authors that their views on the soul are off.
If you equate the soul with consciousness, it's obvious that a potted plant does not have a soul.
If you view it as the animating principle, it's equally ridiculous to say a potted plant doesn't have a soul, since it's so clearly growing.
We probably are not, but I'm not convinced that the opposite is true.
Stephen Hawkins did not notoriously exercise much, given his condition, and yet he died at 76, despite the odds.
Einstein routinely walked a few miles a day and that's all the exercise he did.
Many other popular great thinkers of the past spent a lot more time on books than improving their bodies.
In Italy we learn as children about Giacomo Leopardi, a very popular poet, writer and philosopher of the 19th century, according to Wikipedia "considered the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and one of the most important figures in the literature of the world", that His continual studies undermined an already fragile physical constitution, and his illness, probably Pott's disease or ankylosing spondylitis, denied him youth's simplest pleasures
Without evidence I reckon that all we can conclude is that only sometimes exercise is the best cognitive exercise, but we don't know why nor if it is actually true.
Without attempting to take away anything from your comment I will point out that a routine of walking a few miles a day is sufficient to reap most cognitive benefits.
Most people in the US don't walk a "few" miles a day, the average is 1.5-2.5 miles (depending on the study). Our very car-centric society makes it difficult to get incidental walking distances up. If you switch to kilometers, then yes, the average person in the US walks a few kilometers a day.
I'm lucky if I even get that without supplementing with intentional exercise and I guarantee I walk more than anyone else in my office (during the work day)
I'd agree with that. Unless I'm trying to increase the amount I walk, I usually come in under 5K steps a day. It's not at all hard to add a few tasks to get it up to a more reasonable number, and I do, but if I don't intentionally add those tasks, the baseline is very low indeed.
Yes, it is a relative thing, not a determinative thing.
It's hard to talk about this without tripping on ableism - but - Stephen Hawkins started out with such a great cognitive ability that a deficit later in life would have been less noticeable. Life is more than a cognitive experience, it's a human experience. Hawkins' human experience was not great. I've read that he was very hard on the people close to him. Even if exercise 'only' helped with dealing with emotions, that would still show up as a cognitive improvement - it's hard to think straight when you are upset.
> I'm not convinced that the opposite is true.
I'm not entirely sure what 'the opposite' means. "You are a brain on a stick"? It is evident that the brain does not survive without the body. It is evident that the brain is affected by what the body does. The body is not a stick.
The brain does compute, but it is not a computer. A computer does not actively take in information about the world. A computer does not form familial and tribal affiliations. A computer has a very limited experience of the world.
> Einstein routinely walked a few miles a day and that's all the exercise he did.
Do you mean to say this is insignificant? I think even if you don't work up much of a sweat or do some heavy lifting or whatever, a daily walk is very good for your health.
The first mistake is to exclude the brain from the body. The brain is just another part of the body. It doesn’t live in a universe of its own hermetically sealed off from the body. It is the body! Every region of you is you. Certainly, some regions (I hesitate to use the word “parts“ with all its mechanistic baggage) are more critical to your existence and operation, but that doesn’t have anything to do with your identity qua identity. The brain is seamless with “the rest”, and in a state of mutual and coherent dependence with “the rest”.
(Now, I can argue that the intellect as abstracting faculty is not material, but this faculty is not disconnected from the brain and needs the brain to operate, and so again, the health of the body affects even those faculties which, strictly speaking, are not bodily per se.)
I always understood the brain as a computer analogy to be more that the brain performs computations, which seems kind of obvious but wasn't really obvious before it was adopted as a model. That doesn't mean it's entirely distinct/separate from the rest of the body at all.
The book "Spark" by John Ratey also talks a lot about how regular aerobic exercise simply balances out a lot of systems, and very likely will help against everything from depression to Alzheimers.
I came here to post the same thing re: Ratey's work. Spark has been an important book for me, it's the reason I bought an exercise bike for my apartment. I've always worked out 2 or 3 times per week, but extended high heart rate cardio was something I always avoided before I discovered the neurological/cognitive benefits.
I guess it depends on what one considers "exercise". I don't think lifting weights in disgusting smelly rooms translates improved cognition by itself but I don't mind if people think it does.
That said, I experienced a real physical and mental decline quickly after I gave up my morning routine because it was too hot. I felt it mere weeks into the pause. Pretty ordinary.
Lots of handwavy / subjective comments led me to post this.
Personally I prefer understanding the acronyms as to what's been measured in the body due to regular exercise. No need for anything less than hard detail, imo. BDNF/VEGF expression, etc etc. Worth reading and looking up all the words you don't know yet.
I agree that this is a good idea overall, but also keep in mind that there are some major caveats:
1) A specific measure going up or down with exercise might or might not actually lead to the practical improvements that "should" go with it (cf. Goodhart's law)
2) Many studies are poorly designed or outright defective, and it tends to take a shockingly long time for people to stop routinely citing known-bad studies.
3) Even studies that lack fundamental flaws still often come with major practical limitations that tend to undermine attempts to generalize them. Exercise studies in particular are often limited to either "healthy" people of a relatively narrow age range or people who have a specific medical condition. In the latter case, there may be exclusion criteria that render the sample population non-representative of the overall population with that condition (e.g. in terms of overall severity, specific complications, or comorbidities).
4) Results are often summarized in a way that exaggerates their importance. A small effect size might be glossed over by emphasizing the large percentage of subjects for whom the change was statistically significant, for example.
“Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered. For starters, the willpower benefits of exercise are immediate. Fifteen minutes on a treadmill reduces cravings, as seen when researchers try to tempt dieters with chocolate and smokers with cigarettes. The long-term effects of exercise are even more impressive. It not only relieves ordinary, everyday stress, but it’s as powerful an antidepressant as Prozac. Working out also enhances the biology of self-control by increasing baseline heart rate variability and training the brain. When neuroscientists have peered inside the brains of new exercisers, they have seen increases in both gray matter—brain cells—and white matter, the insulation on brain cells that helps them communicate quickly and efficiently with each other. Physical exercise—like meditation—makes your brain bigger and faster, and the prefrontal cortex shows the largest training effect.” - Kelly McGonigal
When I read things like this I can't help but wonder why so many "gym rats" are... lets just say "not quite all there". Obviously some are far above, above, or of average cognitive abilities, but at my school many athletes/kinesthesiology students were embarrassingly, shockingly bad at math/science/logic despite spending by far the most time in the gym - and all the tutoring in the world doesn't seem to make up for it.
You restricted your sample to student athletes and kinesthesiology majors. There are plenty of people who work out regularly who don't fall into those categories.
The student athletes are, likely, being forced to seek out tutoring to remain on an active roster. Academics is not generally their top concern, and they're being coerced to see you. They're there to check a box.
I'm sure there are good people going through a kinesthesiology program, but it doesn't have the best reputation for attracting the best students.
Depends on the relevant margin. If you get adequate sleep then sleeping more won't help (and may actually hurt) but exercise can actually raise the baseline. To use a very rough analogy, sleep is like the fan in your computer. If it's working optimally it ensures you can utilize the CPU close to its physical limit. But exercise is like upgrading the CPU.
The logic makes sense, especially if you consider sensory negotiation its own special activity using various cognitive tools.
But also, there are some very interesting layers of things going on.
In talking to various athletes about running, the mental process and related result of the activity sometimes seems completely different from person to person to a stark degree.
As an example, some long-distance runners experience running as a de facto journaling exercise, as they are able to benefit from an ongoing internal monologue. So the results are similar to getting free mental wellness care for as long as you care to run.
So, that's also a lot of what we'd call growth and development going on.
They also report that this is unique to running for them, IOW they don't experience this sitting at a desk.
And that's just one example process and outcome, with others being similarly prized, if completely different.
(If this was something I experienced myself, I think I might be a distance runner too... It's pretty cool.)
+1 for the theory. I do my best thinking running, biking, and walking while I find sitting in place inhibits my ability to think dramatically. However, I also find staring out the window in a moving train or car conducive to thinking in a way staring out a stationary window is not.
Exercising is just more honest than using brain, for say, reasoning with words. In the order, I will say 1. Physical Exercise 2. Building Something that stands by itself and works, 3. Solving a well defined problem are all honest undertakings. In real messy world, we deal with ambiguities and people, and it requires some skill reduce them to the above three and be honest about it.
Working out makes you more cognitively sharp because it increases the rate of fluid transfer throughout your body and increases metabolism. Ancillary effects of this are calmness, endorphins, and regulated sleep. There I said it, no magic science required. You bring balance in, you get balance out. This ain't the type of cut throat science most of you on HN expect, but sometimes the simple explanation is the one.
I believe most of this, except that no one I know who works out a lot is calm.
If anything, I’m always looking around for empty syringes. They act like they are gonna climb a mountain then come back and try to make me do Beachbody and chalean extreme, then yell at me about what I eat ;)
Not saying exercise is bad, but I do not associate it with calmness. (I’m a healthy dude, you are not hearing this from someone 50 lbs overweight)
Letting you in. It was a joke about people coming at you and the contrast with health. I am a writer, it was intentional. Hope the wild ride was enjoyable!
Working out doesn’t by itself make you Albert Einstein or Dalai Lama. It just makes you better than you were before, at least according to these studies.
One could speculate why folks who are already prone to exercising aren’t necessarily calm folks but that’s just speculation.
A lot of gym people really do seem to be addicts and/or have at least mild eating disorders or significant body image issues. Exercise in general is good so it’s not necessarily framed this way. There is a lot of overlap between behaviors of people I’ve known with substance use problems and people who really like exercise. It’s just that for example drinking to excess on a regular basis has quite a few more drawbacks than a gym obsession.
> I believe most of this, except that no one I know who works out a lot is calm.
Back when I tried exercising a lot more for a bit, I actually experienced way more calmness in my life. A part of that might have been that a lot of physical exhaustion brought about unparalleled ease of falling asleep and actually improved the quality of the rest I got.
Another part might have been the fact that for a while it felt like the "baseline" of how much energy I had slightly increased. It was easier to find motivation to do things and I didn't need to rely upon discipline so much as I do now, a zen sort of feeling instead of (as much) procrastination doom and fidgety thoughts. One might also talk of some minute cardiovascular/metabolism improvements as well.
Maybe I should take up more exercise again, it's been a few months and even though I hate actually exercising the benefits, even if relatively minor, are hard to argue against. Just need to find a podcast or something of that sort to keep myself busy and make the experience less mundane.
Though exercise alone won't have any really significant effects, you also need to eat right, take care of yourself in other ways (e.g. sleep schedule, mental state, any addictions or unhealthy habits), so there are a lot of factors to consider.
Disclaimer: these are my subjective and anecdotal experiences.
Strenuous resistance exercise also powerfully stimulates the central nervous system. It’s conceivable that the adaptations for better recruiting motor units might spill over.
> Even before physiological changes, there's something strange in moving. 200m from my house, my brain starts to have different ideas.
> I cannot keep from thinking that our brain and our legs are connected neurologically. They tap on the same space exploration abstractions.
Absolutely. Something happens during a bike marathon where my body and brain are eventually independent of my thoughts and I'm moving on autopilot with mild tunnel vision while thinking about complex thoughts, old memories, things I could have handled better. I can only attribute it to persistent eustress and the post-metabolic state of endorphin saturation combined with adrenaline.
That's exactly the state I get into on a long mountain bike ride. Right before I have a crash!
Which is to say some sports have a way of forcing you back into the present moment. It can actually be a good thing for those whose minds tend to wander.
Anecdotally, I find that I come up with ideas almost every time I'm on a long drive. There might be a shared mechanism, whether that's something related to navigation or simply an inability to occupy oneself in a way other than thinking.
How about working out makes you cognitively sharp because it requires COGNITION? It's not the kind of "thinking" we normally consider but your brain is working to direct your body.
Basketball is my favorite way to exercise and there is a lot of analysis of how to get my body to the right places to achieve a goal. Or how to deceive a defender and manipulate their body to the wrong place. Or simple shot mechanics or how to move my eyes so I don't lose awareness of other players.
I started dance because it's such a different way of moving my body that I never tried before. Figuring out how to do something and improve (even physically) takes strategizing.
This is a very good answer. Even walking on a treadmill requires cognition you typically take for granted. There are other exercises that are more obviously related to cognition such as mental math and crosswords, but physical exercise is likely in the same league.
Yep. I find climbing 100% mentally absorbing, and the problems and solutions are so far from my day job’s domain that I believe it helps with mental adaptability.
Running doesn't require much cognition (imho), my body is on auto pilot and I forget time has passed - but I still feel like I get the beneficial effects from doing it.
In my experience, the cognitive load depends on the speed at which you're running.
Jogging at a leisurely pace, I don't need to consciously think about the jogging process at all and my mind is free to think about the books I have been reading lately, or to listen to an information-dense podcast, or to plan out the rest of my week.
But that all changes if I switch to running at near my maximum speed for the distance I'm going to run. Then understanding a podcast becomes nearly impossible and/or it interferes with the running. Indeed, having any internal, verbal 'train of thought' is difficult, other than my internal voice metronomically saying 'left, right, left, right' in time with my leg movements.
FWIW, one set of snippets from Joe Rogan on YT included this statement: I believe academics underestimate just how mental it is to get through a hard workout.
Is this a thing where it makes a big difference even if you’re typically sedentary, or you have to be pretty active over a long period (e.g. years/decades) to make a real difference?
For me, the main benefit of exercise is immediate. However - the magnitude of the immediate positive effect is somewhat related to the intensity/duration of the exercise that I can tolerate.
So I would say something like "A 5k run would make anybody above a certain fitness level feel pretty good". Like, in a way that you'd notice immediately during, and after. For me, there's runners' high and good body-chemicals and a sharp mind the rest of the day. There's not as much of the good stuff if it's like a real strain to run that far. There's an optimal level of physical stress. Taking a sedentary person and chasing them through a 5k run with an electric cattle prod them is not going to help them feel good. Similarly, someone who regularly runs marathons is not going to notice much of an effect from a short walk at a slow pace.
How to balance this out (how much exercise do you need to feel good) is a very individual thing. Practically speaking, you just have to try stuff and get to know your body.
I will say though that marked changes in physical condition can occur over more like weeks than decades. So if you go for a walk and think "well that was a little bit nice, but not worth taking an hour to do", maybe invest the time to build up to something more intense like cycling or jogging, because, as anyone who exercises intentionally will tell you, it seems to be worth it once you find out what's right for you.
I don't know... looking back at my career software engineers I've worked with have on a whole been overweight or skinny fat.
Honestly can't remember chatting to any of them about the gym - there's been a couple into biking or swimming but only really a handful that seemed into the gym or into doing sports of some kind.
As a software engineer, I would classify myself as a computer nerd, but honestly feel a bit out of place with a lot of ppl that work in the industry. I don't watch Dr Who or Star Trek, don't read fiction, and I enjoy extreme sports, martial arts etc.
It can feel like a strange dynamic, and I can see how thinking of a "computer nerd" brings up an image of Bill Gates or Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons for most people.
Because most stories are told through stereotypes, not through deep diving into every character's background and motivations. James Bond wouldn't be as fun if you got the back story about the Russkies he callously snapped the neck of and saw that they only took what he thought was a low key security job because he needed to pay for cancer treatment for his babushka.
I’ve got a really obscure personal anecdote. I have cerebral palsy. For all intents and purposes it’s really mild. It only really affects my left hand and slightly my left foot.
I’ve been an average runner at times in my life (10 minute miles up to 15Ks), a part time fitness instructor for slightly over a decade from my mid 20s to mid 30s extra.
What I noticed when it came to anything highly choreographed like dancing or a complex fitness routine and trying to listen to the beat and stay on beat, even though I can physically do the moves, it takes me a lot longer to process choreography than most people. It was mentally much more challenging and tiring than anything I do at my day job (software development).
I don’t see how simple exercise could be cognitive exercise. I could completely zone out while running.
Most of what your brain does is not available to consciousness. You can be zoned out and brain-busy. Placing your feet running on a rocky trail is an amazingly complex task.
I’ve been “fit” at various times in my life by various definitions - ie a decent runner, weightlifter, etc. But I’ve never been “coordinated” enough to be even average at any sport.
Luckily in High School and college, I could choose swimming and weightlifting as my Physical Ed requirements,
Even being a fitness instructor didn’t take dynamic coordination since I was in charge of the class, do moves I was completely comfortable with and rehearsed extensively. I was never a good student in a highly choreographed fitness class. I picked up moves here and there from other instructors and made them my own.
Interesting. I’m very similar myself. As far as I know I don’t have cerebral palsy or any other neurological condition, but I did grow up in a very “intellectually focused” family where any seemingly “out of control” activity was frowned upon. Have a feeling my brain just allocated a very large chunk of cognitive capacity to intellectual endeavors, and not enough to motor skills / coordination. At least not enough to be good at something like soccer.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadYou access parts of your brain and your being when you’re giving everything you got to squeeze out that extra rep, or when you are going for a new PR with heavy weight. Or even when you don’t feel like working out, and you say okay I have to get my brain out of this and just do it, similar to life where I have to do work when I sometimes don’t want to.
The physical benefits (muscle mass, testosterone, appearance, strength) for me are entirely secondary to the mental/emotional benefits of working out.
It’s all mental
Muscle mass starts to erode with age (I think correlated with decrease in test) separate from the looks, you don’t want to be losing muscle mass because it means you’ll be weaker. Being weaker makes you more prone to injury and increases your risk of all-cause mortality.
The other thing is muscle mass takes time and effort to put on, so you really need to start early, I missed out on my prime years (teens and early 20s) but better late than never I guess!
Peter Attia (Stanford MD, longevity researcher) great source on this subject
Of course if you want to build big muscles, that's fine. I am always a little wary of people extolling the health benefits of doing so. Eating well and doing a moderate amount of exercise will get you 90% of the way to any purely health-related benefits that you'll get from more intense exercise. And more intense forms of exercise carry their own non-negligible risk of injury.
Attitudes to health, diet and exercise seem increasingly to vacillate between extremes. There's a happy medium between sitting on your couch eating cheetos and straining to lift huge weights four times a week.
Whatever wandering thoughts I had bouncing around in my head before a set of heavy deadlifts, all that is gone after, because the effort of pulling up the bar doesn't permit anything but complete focus.
For me, I think I get the most mental benefits out BJJ. I'd wager any martial art with live sparring would give the same results.
When you're doing live sparring, as opposed to just drills, you have to make constant, near instant, adjustments to your defense, look for offensive openings, scan your rolling partner's movements and try to anticipate their next attack, all while being aware of other trainees on the mats (to avoid a random foot or falling body), and working to slow your breathing and maintain composure.
Can't tell if it transfers from exercise to my actual work.
The hard parts are mostly front-loaded (excepting the phenomenon of hitting the wall) which seems profoundly unfair, but it is what it is.
My annecdata agrees with this point.
>Can't tell if it transfers from exercise to my actual work
IME, it all comes down to whether I truly care about my work.
Somewhat related - something that I do find quite curious from my own personal experience is that lifting heavy weights has a far greater impact on my ability to concentrate (and therefore perceived cognitive ability, I guess) than cardio/aerobic exercise does. Like night and day. I've recently started attributing it to creatine supplementation, but I do wonder if there's anything more to it than that.
Also, lifting heavy does train your central nervous system too, which might be a pathway to better cognitive ability? (This second part is 100% bro science, though)
It might be wrong but it's interesting and somewhat novel.
Can you explain what part of physical exercise is computationally hard for the brain?
Even pumpkin toadlets, who famously can't coordinate their landings, the problem isn't the size of their brain, it's their vestibular system.
I'm of the opinion that most animals are probably a lot higher up the sentience scale than is the current social consensus, but I don't think exercise is itself a major cognitive effort. Arbitrary games sure (not just the rules, anything social involves modelling multiple entities like yourself), but not the physical exercise itself.
Making an AI that learns to control a purely virtual body appears to be a fairly standard project.
1) https://youtu.be/XrOTgZ14fJg
2) https://youtu.be/882O_7hsAms
3) https://youtu.be/1kV-rZZw50Q
4) https://youtu.be/gn4nRCC9TwQ
As soon as we make a robot that’s as good as a human child in every way, then I’m going to start worrying seriously about Skynet.
You can throw at it few gpus worth of computing power and still end up short.
Stereotypes are powerful things.
Maybe moving and maintaining a body requires body size proportional "raw" computational power and maybe human brains have mostly just qualitative differences not related to mass when compared to animals (ok, and a bit of extra proportional brain mass too).
If this is the case the connection between excercise and cognitive capacity could seem natural. Excercise requires massive neural resources and thus physical excercises also excercise the brain to a large degree and the whatever qualitative bit that humans have "on top" simply rides the wave to some improvement.
that said, i began spending a lot of time reading about exercising instead, which is surprisingly intellectually stimulating. there are a bunch of high level powerlifters, bodybuilders and weightlifters who do, for example, scientific paper reviews and criticism. i learned a lot about second-guessing findings there. road cycling is probably on of the most data driven sports out there (i kinda quit strength sports during covid and started cycling, which is probably even more time consuming).
there are intellectually aspects to - and surrounding - most sports to a degree, but i doubt intelligence is the decicive factor even in comparably tactical athletic disciplines (team sports).
but if i'd have to recommend ONE book, i'd say https://www.parktool.com/en-us/product/big-blue-book-of-bicy... - because you can't exercise at all on your bike if it's broken
for random study reviews: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/research-spotlight/ , for nutrition and supplements: https://examine.com/ , for cycling, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/c/DylanJohnsonCycling
I was referring to what you said about reading.
>i began spending a lot of time reading about exercising instead
if there's something interesting going on in the field of (strength) training science, it'll be linked and discussed there.
tbh., the guys there seem to adhere to the scientific method a lot more than the software developers i know.
if i do structured training i try to stay concentrated on the task at hand, i.e. pedalling technique, breathing, recovery (heart rate), keeping watts constant, controlling cadence and so on. i do long virtual endurance rides with the ERG on but tend to watch entertaining movies.
i don't seem to get into deep though states much during weightlifting, as the lifts require me to be concentrated and fully focussed and the pauses are too short to get lost on the one hand and require active recovery on the other.
the big difference here is that most people who want to use training time for intellectual improvement just listen to podcasts, but that's not really an option for me as i'm hearing impaired and barely understand anything.
That said, I lift twice a week for a total of about 4 to 4.5 hours, and that strikes an optimum balance for my age, physiology and everything else. I tried many other forms and failed to find that exercise-life balance.
Additionally a lot of conventional wisdom in exercise science borders on "voodoo", and some are challenging it [1].
[1] Search for Mark Rippetoe's articles on Starting Strength. See, for instance, https://startingstrength.com/article/why-you-should-not-be-r... (the name is a bit misleading).
To add an anecdote, my balance changes depending on my focus at the time. If I'm on a strength training arc, it's 3 days a week at 1-2hrs a session. If I've shifted focus to functional fitness I can train 3-4 times a week at ~40minutes a session, as it just doesn't take as long to do the work, and doesn't take as long to recover from that work.
Food and sleep are usually the limiting factor, I just can't recover fast enough and that is what over training really is, it's training over your capacity to recover.
i'm not the biggest fan of rippetoe. e.g. the article you linked is at least partially bullshit for high(er) level athletes (i only skimmed it though). it's important to keep the audience in mind though; it may be valuable advice for _some_.
Not impossible but certainly something that a lot of people can't do consistently if they want to have a job and do other things in life. Getting a half day of rest is almost a luxury for many.
non-athletes often think it's nice to eat whatever you want and not gain weight, but it's actually quite unpleasant to having to force feed yourself all the time; not at least because you start wanting to eat certain meals - with a purpose. it took me a ridiculous amount of time and effort to put on some mass.
i used to go to the gym because i was bored. when i didn't feel great, i went to the gym because i knew i'd feel better afterwards. the gym was my safe space and my default activity. now that i have a family conditions have changed considerably; training is usually done late at night, in between obligations or on a few "me time" weekend hours for longer bike rides. works well enough, i can't complain.
also, there's the principle of polarized training (for endurance sports): "go easy on the easy days, go hard on the hard days", because if you go to hard on the easy days, you can't go hard enough on the hard days.
a lot of people are under the impression that giving 100% every time, every day is the best way, probably thanks to years of training montages of sly dragging sleds through waist deep snow and karate-kid ... idk, kicking a tree really hard or whatever karate kid does, when actually it just leads to exhaustion and burnout.
Some years ago I was working at a university and could go to the gym and lift heavy over lunch. That was great -- a good decompression, opportunity to talk w/people in other parts of the university, and the strongest I ever got. At another time in life I did CrossFit. It gave me some community when traveling and I could fit it outside the workday. Now due to covid/kid/corporate job I switched for a few years to circuit training/HIIT in the basement. That got me into very good shape in a different way than lifting heavy a few times a week. And now I have to change again -- different family schedule has taken away my early-morning workout slot and my short bike commute and so I'm trying to find the new normal. Maybe I can join a gym again, but with the family morning grind and family evening routine I cannot easily spend more than 40 min a day on fitness, and as winter approaches the outside activities possible change.
It is important to acknowledge the different seasons of life.
Back to the article. Mathematicians know the power of walking; that's why it's a tradition for many week-long conferences to have a Wednesday afternoon hike. The best of course is the one at Oberwolfach but the hike I went on at Luminy is a close second. Many mathematicians run, play Ultimate Frisbee, rock climb, dance, etc. From my own experience exercise is significant in clearing my mind and thus enabling creativity (rather than rumination), and it has a significant effect on my resting heart rate and sleeping heart rate. Sleep in turn is very important to cognition and creativity. As I get older, the more I notice I need to pay attention to these things and can't take them for granted. Building exercise into my routine is crucial. Systems are important.
The antagonistic effect of endurance training on strength is not really relevant for recreational runners and this has been show time and time again in multiple high-quality studies. You should only really care if you're a competitive lifter; a ton of people who go to the gym have terrible cardio, and I would argue that good cardio fitness is much more relevant to overall health; you should _not_ be getting winded going up a couple flights of stairs.
Furthermore the cardiovascular effects of strength training are insufficient for all-around good health. Cardio stimulates different metabolic pathways that are very much useful in life; having done both activities I can tell you when I was an active marathon runner I just had way more energy in the tank for everything.
The article makes a mention that nutrition is more relevant for heart health than cardiovascular condititioning, something that not only is just plain false, but also ignores that body mass is body mass and having an excessive amount of muscle mass does not correspond with cardiovascular health either.
The critiques about repetitive motion in running are just downright ridiculous. Runners get injured, of course. So do people who deadlift with bad technique. As a species we are frankly much more adapted to running than moving heavy weights, as evidenced by the amount of effort our bodies go through to keep muscle mass off as compared to any other primate. There is a balance between both but Rippetoe just goes on about things like being "harder to kill" which is plain fanboying; I would contend that being an ultramarthon runner or an Ironman triathlete corresponds far better with grit and not getting killed over all the gymgoers that can barely run a mile.
it's the toxic "cardio kills your gains" broscience that's harmful, as it leads to people actively avoiding healthy cardio. i've seen strength athletes use the escalator instead of the stairs because they tried to avoid getting their heart rate up outside the squat rack. this is counterproductive to both health and athletic ability.
No they didn't say harder, they said it uses "more computation", there's a difference.
Your brain has many parallel systems specialized for exercise, because our ancestors have used similar systems to move their bodies for eons. Exercise fires all these systems in parallel, so your brain is getting great "throughput".
On the other hand stuff like Sudoku is using a much smaller fraction of our brain that developed recently, probably for language, and then trying to use the language part to do math, which feels "difficult" precisely because we're trying to do it with just a small, unspecialized part of our brain, instead of a bunch of specialized parallel systems.
So exercise is both "easier", but also more efficiently gets your brain working because of parallelism.
But there's really no reason to do that since you can just increase the raw mechanics.
or the calming effect of exhaustion so I can tackle intense managerial problems without an emotional overhead.
Alternatively, why is not a single successful scientist in great physical shape?
You're comparing top-level performers
Diminishing returns.
> Alternatively, why is not a single successful scientist in great physical shape?
This is just complete falsehood. Utter nonsense.
Alan Turing was a good runner.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bannister
I like to run so here is the first person I thought of:
Wolfgang Ketterle: Nobel Prize Physics & Marathon PB = 2:50
https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a20837391/im-a-...
Socrates was talking about this stuff thousands of years ago:
>For be you assured that there is no contest of any sort, nor any transaction, in which you will be the worse off for being well prepared in body; and in fact there is nothing which men do for which the body is not a help. In every demand, therefore, which can be laid upon the body it is much better that it should be in the best condition; since, even where you might imagine the claims upon the body to be slightest—in the act of reasoning—who does not know the terrible stumbles which are made through being out of health?
> It suffices to say that forgetfulness, and despondency, and moroseness, and madness take occasion often of ill-health to visit the intellectual faculties so severely as to expel all knowledge from the brain. But he who is in good bodily plight has large security. He runs no risk of incurring any such catastrophe through ill-health at any rate
My boxing coach used to say concentration trains concentration (failing to concentrate in the ring results in automatic negative feedback).
I suspect that the focus you have when lifting (so much going on there trying to control your body while exerting at maximum effort), is helping your brain learn to better focus. If you are like most people who lift, you probably are paying attention to what is going in and coming out of your body, which also requires focus as well.
In my experience, focus is a skill that is learned, and like all things, is easy for some, and very difficult to master for others.
Even if this is true (which seems plausible, but I'm not aware of it being proven), I don't think it tells us anything about the extent to which we're looking at "exercise inhibits cognitive decline" vs. "cognitive decline inhibits exercise".
The author argues that doing things at higher pace should be cognitive intensive. But robots are not bad at doing things fast: if they can do things, they can do them also "fast" (at my understanding)
They are still computationally limited in how fast they can process new terrain, course-find, object detect, etc.
If their sensors only saw that object 10ms ago, they probably don’t have an idea what it is yet. At speed, 10ms can be a long time.
60mph == 88 feet per second == .8 feet (about 10 inches) per 10 milliseconds.
10 inches matters a lot when you’re on terrain, or even on a road.
They can move as fast as they have been designed to move, if further computation is not required.
In most cases (repetitive work, stuff with relatively basic, straightforward computation - the human equivalent of reflexes), that means they’re basically constrained by their physical limits.
Those fast object detection algorithms require an extremely artificial environment (with high contrast backgrounds, tuned high intensity light), and are generally only good at sorting specific classes of items, at least last I researched them.
The algorithms involve do a LOT of down sampling too, if I remember.
They aren’t general purpose navigation or object detection algorithms, I’m trying to say, and won’t work at that speed in anything but a very controlled environment. It’s the problem that a lot of players have been dumping billions into for decades - Waymo, DJI, Tesla, and a million smaller names.
General purpose navigation in an unknown environment starts running up against real hardware limits right now at speed, even with essentially unlimited power budgets (aka a car, truck, drone with a huge battery and limited flight time, etc). Based on the context, I understood the question to be in reference to something portable, and most of those hardware implementations would be nearly impossible to fit in a humanoid style robot.
It’s going to take a decade or so for that to change probably, maybe a half that, depending on what Skydio and DJI have cooking.
Robots are not a single thing. You can't draw general conclusions about them like that.
They are objects designed by humans, they go as fast or as slow as they are designed to go. The design space is heavily constrained by physics. This means some things are possible, some things are possible but very expensive and other things are just not possible.
A FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile is a robot. It has an onboard computer, a sensor, and fins to change direction. It flies about 300 m/s as top speed and it doesn't do things slow. It can't. [1]
A Konecranes AGV is a giant self-driving platform carrying containers in automated ports. It carries a maximum of 70t and the top speed of it is about 6 m/s. It is also a robot. [2]
There are many kinds of robots. I intentionally selected here two extremes here to show how you can't make generalisation like that.
1: https://en.missilery.info/missile/javelin 2: https://www.nauticexpo.com/prod/konecranes/product-30447-521...
Incidentally, is it well grounded that exercise prevents aging, and at what level? We should be watching aging research more carefully
I promise this is highly relevant and worth hearing, even though it may not seem directly related.
I think better when I've been exercising, but it doesn't feel like I've given my brain a workout so much as it feels like I gave it percussive maintenance. It feels like exercise turns the sound of my subconscious from a buzzy rattle to a gentle hum, keeping it out of my way except to help. It very much does not feel like I've given my mind a workout.
Though I also have unmedicated ADHD, so my subjective experience of my subconscious might be different than most.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, my health varied a lot; sometimes I was sedentary and sometimes I was very active. But I never noticed a cognitive effect.
Now that I'm well into my 40s, it's very noticeable when I've been off the exercise wagon. Not day to day, but definitely on timescales of a week or two. When I'm active, my recall is sharper and my memory clearer. I also feel this with my diet (real vs. processed foods) and drinking.
Exercise actually makes me numb these days and I need a couple of days to recover.
While immersing in deep focused studying or exercising my mind by learning new stuff, makes me feel a lot better and much sharper.
To each his own I think.
edit: a friend of mine who never did sports at young age tells me he feels better now that he goes swimming regularly at the age of 42, but who can tell if it is just because exercise is a new experience to him?
I certainly agree with you on this. In my case, a healthy lifestyle makes taking on new challenges much easier: I'm less intimidated, and less frustrated by the slope of the inevitable learning curve.
My cognitive abilities at my actual age (mid 40s) improved significantly when I quit with my younger age lifestyle, much more than exercise could do.
Of course I'm not saying that exercise is futile it surely keeps the body healthy and that's extremely important as years go by.
the old saying "mens sana in corpore sano" ( a healthy mind in an healthy body) is still relevant today for a good reason.
My theory is that is not exercise per se, but the power drained by the excercise.
There's a good example about it in an episode of the BBC series Horizon where people are asked to solve simple arithmetic computations and then to do the same while walking at a fast pace.
All of the people involved need to stop to complete them.
The cognitive part of our brain is very power hungry and can't function properly when power is needed somewhere else.
I think that power drain from exercise can prevent becoming more and more risk adverse because it keeps us from over thinking things, the inner thoughts are mostly about negative outcomes (not specifically negative thoughts, just the outcome)
So theoretically we could gain the same benefits by tricking us into thinking about the positive outcomes.
I am not an expert in such matter, so take everything I say with many grains of salt.
p.s. I was walking when writing this and I had to stop to write something that made sense.
Sounds like you're under-recovering. With proper food and rest, a normal intensity exercise shouldn't make you feel tired the next day. I had a similar problem and turns out I wasn't eating enough protein(I have to get in at least 200 grams when working out or I feel awful, idk why)
I grew up thinking of myself as a "brain on a stick" - my body didn't really matter and only my brain was important. I think read a bunch of science fiction that made fun of this idea, but I didn't realize it was making fun of it and I took it seriously.
You are not a brain on a stick - your body is important. Developing an understanding of your sensations and emotions is important. Developing an understanding of your deeply held beliefs and assumptions is important. Keeping your body healthy is important.
It does however become very apparent when you read pre-cartesian authors that their views on the soul are off.
If you equate the soul with consciousness, it's obvious that a potted plant does not have a soul.
If you view it as the animating principle, it's equally ridiculous to say a potted plant doesn't have a soul, since it's so clearly growing.
There are pleasant social side effects from doing this but sometimes being so in tune can affect you in weird ways too.
We probably are not, but I'm not convinced that the opposite is true.
Stephen Hawkins did not notoriously exercise much, given his condition, and yet he died at 76, despite the odds.
Einstein routinely walked a few miles a day and that's all the exercise he did.
Many other popular great thinkers of the past spent a lot more time on books than improving their bodies.
In Italy we learn as children about Giacomo Leopardi, a very popular poet, writer and philosopher of the 19th century, according to Wikipedia "considered the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and one of the most important figures in the literature of the world", that His continual studies undermined an already fragile physical constitution, and his illness, probably Pott's disease or ankylosing spondylitis, denied him youth's simplest pleasures
Without evidence I reckon that all we can conclude is that only sometimes exercise is the best cognitive exercise, but we don't know why nor if it is actually true.
But who actually doesn't?
We all (almost) walk a few miles (or kms) a day, without even realising it.
It's hard to talk about this without tripping on ableism - but - Stephen Hawkins started out with such a great cognitive ability that a deficit later in life would have been less noticeable. Life is more than a cognitive experience, it's a human experience. Hawkins' human experience was not great. I've read that he was very hard on the people close to him. Even if exercise 'only' helped with dealing with emotions, that would still show up as a cognitive improvement - it's hard to think straight when you are upset.
> I'm not convinced that the opposite is true.
I'm not entirely sure what 'the opposite' means. "You are a brain on a stick"? It is evident that the brain does not survive without the body. It is evident that the brain is affected by what the body does. The body is not a stick.
The brain does compute, but it is not a computer. A computer does not actively take in information about the world. A computer does not form familial and tribal affiliations. A computer has a very limited experience of the world.
Do you mean to say this is insignificant? I think even if you don't work up much of a sweat or do some heavy lifting or whatever, a daily walk is very good for your health.
(Now, I can argue that the intellect as abstracting faculty is not material, but this faculty is not disconnected from the brain and needs the brain to operate, and so again, the health of the body affects even those faculties which, strictly speaking, are not bodily per se.)
That said, I experienced a real physical and mental decline quickly after I gave up my morning routine because it was too hot. I felt it mere weeks into the pause. Pretty ordinary.
Take my comment as a meta commentary - making fun of the bro science here that I didn't want to engage directly.
"Neurobiological effects of physical exercise"
Lots of handwavy / subjective comments led me to post this.
Personally I prefer understanding the acronyms as to what's been measured in the body due to regular exercise. No need for anything less than hard detail, imo. BDNF/VEGF expression, etc etc. Worth reading and looking up all the words you don't know yet.
1) A specific measure going up or down with exercise might or might not actually lead to the practical improvements that "should" go with it (cf. Goodhart's law)
2) Many studies are poorly designed or outright defective, and it tends to take a shockingly long time for people to stop routinely citing known-bad studies.
3) Even studies that lack fundamental flaws still often come with major practical limitations that tend to undermine attempts to generalize them. Exercise studies in particular are often limited to either "healthy" people of a relatively narrow age range or people who have a specific medical condition. In the latter case, there may be exclusion criteria that render the sample population non-representative of the overall population with that condition (e.g. in terms of overall severity, specific complications, or comorbidities).
4) Results are often summarized in a way that exaggerates their importance. A small effect size might be glossed over by emphasizing the large percentage of subjects for whom the change was statistically significant, for example.
This sounds so unethical. If I were a dieter or ex-smoker I would definitely not sign up for this sort of study.
The student athletes are, likely, being forced to seek out tutoring to remain on an active roster. Academics is not generally their top concern, and they're being coerced to see you. They're there to check a box.
I'm sure there are good people going through a kinesthesiology program, but it doesn't have the best reputation for attracting the best students.
But also, there are some very interesting layers of things going on.
In talking to various athletes about running, the mental process and related result of the activity sometimes seems completely different from person to person to a stark degree.
As an example, some long-distance runners experience running as a de facto journaling exercise, as they are able to benefit from an ongoing internal monologue. So the results are similar to getting free mental wellness care for as long as you care to run.
So, that's also a lot of what we'd call growth and development going on.
They also report that this is unique to running for them, IOW they don't experience this sitting at a desk.
And that's just one example process and outcome, with others being similarly prized, if completely different.
(If this was something I experienced myself, I think I might be a distance runner too... It's pretty cool.)
The body / mind paradigm is false. There is no separation. They are deeply - and wisely - entangled.
The brain is an organ, and organs in aggregate benefit from exercise. The result is a healthier system / unit.
Are puzzels and such a bad thing? No. But they're not going to fix a compromised, or too often, broken system.
If anything, I’m always looking around for empty syringes. They act like they are gonna climb a mountain then come back and try to make me do Beachbody and chalean extreme, then yell at me about what I eat ;)
Not saying exercise is bad, but I do not associate it with calmness. (I’m a healthy dude, you are not hearing this from someone 50 lbs overweight)
One could speculate why folks who are already prone to exercising aren’t necessarily calm folks but that’s just speculation.
Regular people workout as well, not just steroid junkies.
Back when I tried exercising a lot more for a bit, I actually experienced way more calmness in my life. A part of that might have been that a lot of physical exhaustion brought about unparalleled ease of falling asleep and actually improved the quality of the rest I got.
Another part might have been the fact that for a while it felt like the "baseline" of how much energy I had slightly increased. It was easier to find motivation to do things and I didn't need to rely upon discipline so much as I do now, a zen sort of feeling instead of (as much) procrastination doom and fidgety thoughts. One might also talk of some minute cardiovascular/metabolism improvements as well.
Maybe I should take up more exercise again, it's been a few months and even though I hate actually exercising the benefits, even if relatively minor, are hard to argue against. Just need to find a podcast or something of that sort to keep myself busy and make the experience less mundane.
Though exercise alone won't have any really significant effects, you also need to eat right, take care of yourself in other ways (e.g. sleep schedule, mental state, any addictions or unhealthy habits), so there are a lot of factors to consider.
Disclaimer: these are my subjective and anecdotal experiences.
I cannot keep from thinking that our brain and our legs are connected neurologically. They tap on the same space exploration abstractions.
> I cannot keep from thinking that our brain and our legs are connected neurologically. They tap on the same space exploration abstractions.
Absolutely. Something happens during a bike marathon where my body and brain are eventually independent of my thoughts and I'm moving on autopilot with mild tunnel vision while thinking about complex thoughts, old memories, things I could have handled better. I can only attribute it to persistent eustress and the post-metabolic state of endorphin saturation combined with adrenaline.
Let's name it. The aliqot state. Or getting to Aliqot.
Which is to say some sports have a way of forcing you back into the present moment. It can actually be a good thing for those whose minds tend to wander.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2019/0531/Fancy-a-stroll-Gre...
The New Yorker also had an article about walking and thinking in 2014.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/walking-...
Basketball is my favorite way to exercise and there is a lot of analysis of how to get my body to the right places to achieve a goal. Or how to deceive a defender and manipulate their body to the wrong place. Or simple shot mechanics or how to move my eyes so I don't lose awareness of other players.
I started dance because it's such a different way of moving my body that I never tried before. Figuring out how to do something and improve (even physically) takes strategizing.
Jogging at a leisurely pace, I don't need to consciously think about the jogging process at all and my mind is free to think about the books I have been reading lately, or to listen to an information-dense podcast, or to plan out the rest of my week.
But that all changes if I switch to running at near my maximum speed for the distance I'm going to run. Then understanding a podcast becomes nearly impossible and/or it interferes with the running. Indeed, having any internal, verbal 'train of thought' is difficult, other than my internal voice metronomically saying 'left, right, left, right' in time with my leg movements.
FWIW, one set of snippets from Joe Rogan on YT included this statement: I believe academics underestimate just how mental it is to get through a hard workout.
So I would say something like "A 5k run would make anybody above a certain fitness level feel pretty good". Like, in a way that you'd notice immediately during, and after. For me, there's runners' high and good body-chemicals and a sharp mind the rest of the day. There's not as much of the good stuff if it's like a real strain to run that far. There's an optimal level of physical stress. Taking a sedentary person and chasing them through a 5k run with an electric cattle prod them is not going to help them feel good. Similarly, someone who regularly runs marathons is not going to notice much of an effect from a short walk at a slow pace.
How to balance this out (how much exercise do you need to feel good) is a very individual thing. Practically speaking, you just have to try stuff and get to know your body.
I will say though that marked changes in physical condition can occur over more like weeks than decades. So if you go for a walk and think "well that was a little bit nice, but not worth taking an hour to do", maybe invest the time to build up to something more intense like cycling or jogging, because, as anyone who exercises intentionally will tell you, it seems to be worth it once you find out what's right for you.
Nothing in human biology is simple.
Honestly can't remember chatting to any of them about the gym - there's been a couple into biking or swimming but only really a handful that seemed into the gym or into doing sports of some kind.
As a software engineer, I would classify myself as a computer nerd, but honestly feel a bit out of place with a lot of ppl that work in the industry. I don't watch Dr Who or Star Trek, don't read fiction, and I enjoy extreme sports, martial arts etc.
It can feel like a strange dynamic, and I can see how thinking of a "computer nerd" brings up an image of Bill Gates or Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons for most people.
I’ve been an average runner at times in my life (10 minute miles up to 15Ks), a part time fitness instructor for slightly over a decade from my mid 20s to mid 30s extra.
What I noticed when it came to anything highly choreographed like dancing or a complex fitness routine and trying to listen to the beat and stay on beat, even though I can physically do the moves, it takes me a lot longer to process choreography than most people. It was mentally much more challenging and tiring than anything I do at my day job (software development).
I don’t see how simple exercise could be cognitive exercise. I could completely zone out while running.
Luckily in High School and college, I could choose swimming and weightlifting as my Physical Ed requirements,
Even being a fitness instructor didn’t take dynamic coordination since I was in charge of the class, do moves I was completely comfortable with and rehearsed extensively. I was never a good student in a highly choreographed fitness class. I picked up moves here and there from other instructors and made them my own.