My anecdotal experience is that whenever old people fall and break something, then it all start going downhill, health wise, very quickly.
I’ve always thought it’s because they don’t have very much muscle to begin with, that braking a leg or something, forces you to be still so much that you loose whatever muscle you do have left. That in turn has other negative effects; socially from not going out of your house, maybe even cardiovascularly, mentally, etc.
That’s how it’s been for my grandmother, and for my wife’s grandparents. Purely anecdotal.
Exercising strengthens the bones in addition to building muscle. DEXA scans will show this... when a person starts squatting for example, bone density goes up as well
I'm in my 50s, lifting weights for about 3 years now, slow steady increases in weight and am much stronger than I was in 2019. Recently while bench pressing I felt something "pop" in my shoulder and now can't do any pressing movement at all without significant pain. Diagnosed and tried to rehab it as a tendon strain with no improvement. Getting an MRI soon to see what's going on.
At my age I don't really feel "old" mentally or physically, so hitting my body's physical limits in the gym is both difficult to accept and discouraging, as I had been making decent progress up until then. I can still squat and deadlift and do many other accessories but I am paying much more attention to what my joints and ligaments are telling me.
The problem is (and it increases with age) - muscles are not your limiting factor long term, connective tissues are. They can be damaged by long term fatigue, or sudden burst of too much strain.
Pushing weights continuously, in higher age, will eventually lead to injury, even if muscles would easily go even further, they are much better at repairing/building up quickly compared to ie tendons or ligaments. Even for young, there is general advice to put 1 week out of ie 10/12 of complete rest, or probably active rest. It is for all those little fractures and sprains in connective tissue to heal a bit. With age, this should be more frequent and/or longer and as usually everything is very individual.
I would advice to lose the barbell and focus on dumbbells and machines. Try training more like bodybuilders instead of power lifters. Using the full range of motion, and being able to rotate while performing the movement will decrease the tension on your joints and ligaments.
> Running, swimming, playing soccer and other aerobic exercise do a lot for the cardiovascular system — our heart and blood vessels — but they don’t do much for overall muscle mass or strength.
Preface: like most people here, I'm not a doctor or physiological specialist.
I am decently active, and what I've found from the papers and science that gets brought up, and from my own self experimentation, is that the majority of our aerobic exercise isn't aerobic. In order for your body to use the aerobic energy system, we need a much higher base to raise our lactic thresholds to levels where we can use that system for things like running, swimming, or playing soccer. Instead, our bodies use the glycemic anaerobic systems by default because we don't have that aerobic base.
In order to change this over the winter, I've been doing workouts at much, much lower intensities to try to build up my aerobic ability. For example, this morning I did an hour long walk on a treadmill with slight incline while keeping my heart rate at a consistent 100 bpm. This is a much, much lower level than might even be considered a heart rate for the workout. But I could feel my body doing work the whole time. Other workout is on an indoor bike where I also find a pace where I'm giving effort, but super low intensity to build up my base.
Again, n=1 and I'm not an expert, but my true guess, which is one that I'm working on myself, is that very few people have a good aerobic base to where very little of our exercise is truly aerobic.
Yeah, the science around endurance sports (cycling, nordic skiing, rowing, running etc) has got this covered in quite the detail and does recommend that majority (80%) of your training should be aerobic - i.e. below first lactate threshold.
That said, especially as you're unfit early on, doing above aerobic exercices is absolutely fine to increase toe aerobic capacity.
What I'm saying is that for the majority of people, even those who are considered "fit", don't default to aerobic system of energy when doing endurance sports because they don't have a solid enough base. They think because they're going for a 30 minute run it _must_ be aerobic, but if tested, they'd find it wasn't.
To know if this is true or not would require testing and numbers and defining what's considered "fit", rather than commenting on HN. That said, I truly have relatively high confidence in that the active population these days very much relies on the glycolytic energy system rather than oxidative, anaerobic rather than aerobic.
Agreed. I'm an extremely fit runner doing 50+ miles a week and almost all of my runs are in a super easy zone that is equivalent to an uphill walk for most people. A lot of this has to due with well developed biomechanics, but also superior vo2max.
Most health focused runners should be walking at an incline or running downhill except for 1-2 high intensity interval days. There are huge benefits to low intensity activity and higher doses are almost always better. The sort of intense, grueling runs that most people do are likely counterproductive. It's like running a race every day as a workout. It's just not sustainable and unhealthy at high doses.
(Of course, if the goal is to be a runner and not simply be healthy, you'll need to push your body to a point where running is like walking but it takes a long time to do correctly.)
> The sort of intense, grueling runs that most people do are likely counterproductive. It's like running a race every day as a workout. It's just not sustainable and unhealthy at high doses.
Totally, I agree, in that the reason they're intense because they're using the wrong energy system.
My half baked theory is that the reason people (like me) don't like running at all is because the our subconscious mind tells our conscious mind to not like it because it's so inefficient and a waste. If, however, we trained our bodies and mitochondria to use more fat for energy aerobic-style, we'd like running a ton more. I'm betting that'll be the case with me.
Soccer is more like HIIT if you think about it (and actually play it with a bit of heart) - few +-100% sprints and a lot of walking/slow running to fill the rest.
In team sports in general you are not so much in control of intensity, the game/other players are. Other sports you mention are more like that.
You're on the right track but you can get more benefits out of doing work at a rate of 120-150 bpm and still be considered "low intensity" aerobic work.
You can even do this while incline walking at a moderate pace.
100 bpm is probably just barely an increase over your typical heart rate throughout the day.
This is music to my ears, as I've started re-emphasizing gym workouts over my cycling workouts.
It's already widely known that aging and inactivity tend to reduce muscle mass (muscle atrophy) and longer aerobic/endurace exercices such as cycling or running will improve your stamina and will lower your body fat, but will not increase your muscle mass by much.
I've gone this rabbit hole of doing bicycle training and very long bike rides and lost a lot of weight/fat without even needing to change my diet much, but I have not gained muscle.
This year I am improving on that by mixing in some gym session early on in the season (and hopefully keeping some gym work later in the season too)
For the past few months I've been doing cycling,10-15 minutes, on a stationary bike right before lifting for about 30-45 minutes. And then trying to squeeze a longer bike ride 30 minutes at the end of the week. I find cycling beforehand makes the overall workout more intense.
I'm a barely functional human being who feels as though he is faking his way though being an adult.
What I can say is that two years ago in my early 40s I had a L5-S1 spinal fusion after decades of pain, tremendous weight gain, and crippling depression. My surgeon really only said two things after I woke up from the surgery. He loomed over me in what my post-anesthetic stupor remembers as a pose resembling the nun scene in Blues Brothers and said "if you want to recover, waaaaaaaalk" and then the next day when I was a little more cognizant he said "lift weights". When I asked him what else, he said "DO YOGA".
Every day I walk at least 1 mile, which takes 20 minutes. Three days per week I lift weights under the direction of a trainer specifically educated to deal with people with fused backs and I'm extremely close to "graduating" from her on to "normal people weightlifting". The other four days I do yoga, a mix of ashtanga or yin depending on how I'm feeling the day after the strength training.
It has completely, radically, transformed my physique, mental health, and life in general.
Walking and yoga cost $0.00, weightlifting costs me a lot but can be very inexpensive, and it is all more than worth it.
> people who hit the cardio and the weights realized an approximately 40 percent reduced risk of all-cause mortality and 50 percent reduced risk of cardiovascular disease mortality
it makes sense, but damn is that figure staggering. 40% reduced risk of all-cause mortality?!
I am a firm believer that the first 15 minutes of daily light exercise are not for fitness, they're simply for basic health. You can and should definitely do more, but if you don't even do that you go down.
I’ve always thought there’s something misguided about the legions of “want to get fit” types who self flagellate with long runs.
Running is terrible exercise. Terrible because it’s extremely hard on the body unless you’re on the lower end of the BMI scale. If you do any sport with a high mobility requirement, you can feel how tight a single run makes you.
The killer in old age is immobility, of your knees and hips. Running really doesn’t help.
Now before people point me to some article debunking how running isn’t in fact bad for your knees, that’s not what I’m saying. Efficient running is all about maximising power through a very small range of motion. Runners by and large have terrible hip mobility for athletes.
This is not a scientific argument, but if you build up conditioning safely, i think running should be excellent for you - especially if sprinting is involved. My take is that it’s a natural movement that evolution has prepared you for. Just my 2 cents.
Agreed. Natural movements of all types are critical. Just running long slow distances on hard surfaces can be rough on the body. Running is addictive and costless aside from your time. That's maybe why the legions (myself included) use it as their primary exercise.
>This is not a scientific argument, but if you build up conditioning safely, i think running should be excellent for you
the problem is that running/jogging is usually the first thing people turn to for "getting in shape" and these people are often significantly overweight. Starting off with a high impact exercise is a recipe for disaster. Put on a 50-100lb weight vest and try running around and feel the impact on your joints and back, not ideal
If you are 50lbs "overweight" your body has built the strength to carry that weight. Look at any champion powerlifter or "strongman" champion, they all look overweight. It's not all fat, it's the muscle to move that weight around as well. So it's not really the same as a normal-weight person putting on a weight vest.
But long term overweight is hard on your joints, no disupting that.
A powerlifter who skews the BMI charts is different than someone who carries 50 pounds of fat.
The powerlifter is mobile and carrying the extra weight and has the strength to do so. The fat person is sedentary and doing whatever possible to NOT carry the fat. They do not have the strength to do so.
As someone that is about 30kg overweight, no my body can't carry that weight for a run. I used to run 5km 3 times a week. That was about 15kg ago. It was okay but now my knees just can't take that punishment. My shoes can't handle it either at well over 120kg they get destroyed after a few runs.
I would consider myself above average in strength after spending most of my 20s lifting regularly but that doesn't counter the impact of being this fat. It is shocking the impact it has on your life.
Your body builds the strength necessary to support your activity level. Unless you already have an active exercise regimen, an overweight person has generally only built the strength to support walking shorter distances. So the more overweight you are, the more careful you need to be when increasing distance while running.
Alternatives like cycling and swimming are better for the knees, especially for the old and overweight.
But powerlifters still have terrible conditioning and those who do it competitively will tell you that they're uncomfortably overweight for a lot of their daily activities.
for stress on the ligaments and joints weight is one the most important factors. Be it from a weighted vest, fat, or muscle. Joints of humans are not made to carry the weight of a strongman.
Anecdotal. While I was in Netherlands I was quite pleasantly surprised to see so many old people, judging by their looks 70+, cycling to their daily chores. They seemed quite fit and mobile just fine to me. After a while I stopped being surprised because I realised it's a common occurrence there. So make of this what you will.
No, quite the opposite. Cycling is a very low impact activity, especially compared to running. Many runners get on a bike to develop or maintain aerobic fitness when they are healing from overuse injuries like stress fractures.
Can you clarify, do you mean lower than 'normal' range (i.e. < 18.5), or lower than the US average (i.e. < 26), or what? And is this mostly anecdotal or is there evidence to support it (the view that running is a bad exercise for people above a certain BMI)? Not challenging this, I just haven't heard it before and am intrigued. And can you clarify what you mean by "any sport with a high mobility requirement?
For best results distance runners should have a BMI on the lower end of the healthy range. If you’re serious about improving your performance over <1500m having a BMI of ~25 will be the biggest impediment. Not sure what the range is but I think your average elite marathon runner will have a BMI of 18-20.
Sport with a high mobility requirement? Things like weightlifting, gymnastics, ballet etc.
Strange opinion... no runner I ever knew nor heard of does just running, its part of whole fit regime, usually on cardio side, but its relatively easy to do some form of HIIT once achieving certain level of fitness. All runners I know do quite rigorous stretching after each run, so I'd say they have better hip mobility than average. You keep challenging your body with variation, not daily grind of exactly same exercise and 0 of anything else. It also adds fun and mental challenge.
Also, nobody overweight nor sedentary should start with running (nor do it generally), this is 101 of getting fit.
Our bodies are not that complex, but behaving stupidly ain't reaching anything good, ie I am fat and weak, everybody is running, so out of blue lets do that... and in max 3 months joints are a mess. Heck, I'd say health and fitness is one of the most important matters in each of our lives, isn't it worth spending just few hours learning about it? Resources are literally everywhere, expert physiotherapists too if one can't wade through all available info easily. Every gym has host of trainers that tailor working out to person's abilities and goals.
It defined a large part of our genetic makeup: our (relative) lack of body hair, the way we sweat, our bone structure, the function of our leg muscles in pumping blood back to the heart, a cardiovascular system with more endurance than any other land mammal.
presumably this already is a kind of a fitness test. anyone able to walk 10 miles per day is already fitter than most boomer Americans, even 5 miles, is not likely to die
Yup, but there's also the reverse factor that those who are approaching death rarely are capable of walking that far. I strongly suspect that most measurements of factors related to longevity are actually measures of health.
That being said, I think both strength and cardiovascular fitness matter. If nothing else, strength matters in terms of being able to save yourself from a stumble.
feels like a correlation/causation thing once again. If you are in good enough health to lift weights at an older age by definition you are healthier because you aren't suffering from a debilitating illness. People who are dedicated enough to lift weights are also probably following a much better diet than the average person
regardless it's good to see strength training getting some love instead of the cult of cardio. People associating fitness/working out with misery on a treadmill is why so few people workout
it almost doesn't matter if the chicken or egg was first - if you're in the cohort that is exercising beyond cardio sports, your odds of being healthy/alive at any particular age actually go up with age.
"Tryptophan is among the nine amino acids our body can't make and we must consume in foods like turkey and soybeans so we can perform essentials like making protein. The researchers also think the fuel sends signals to cells, ones that aging stem cells apparently don't get." https://scienmag.com/major-research-initiative-explores-how-...
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[ 17.5 ms ] story [ 3026 ms ] threadI’ve always thought it’s because they don’t have very much muscle to begin with, that braking a leg or something, forces you to be still so much that you loose whatever muscle you do have left. That in turn has other negative effects; socially from not going out of your house, maybe even cardiovascularly, mentally, etc.
That’s how it’s been for my grandmother, and for my wife’s grandparents. Purely anecdotal.
I'm in my 50s, lifting weights for about 3 years now, slow steady increases in weight and am much stronger than I was in 2019. Recently while bench pressing I felt something "pop" in my shoulder and now can't do any pressing movement at all without significant pain. Diagnosed and tried to rehab it as a tendon strain with no improvement. Getting an MRI soon to see what's going on.
At my age I don't really feel "old" mentally or physically, so hitting my body's physical limits in the gym is both difficult to accept and discouraging, as I had been making decent progress up until then. I can still squat and deadlift and do many other accessories but I am paying much more attention to what my joints and ligaments are telling me.
Pushing weights continuously, in higher age, will eventually lead to injury, even if muscles would easily go even further, they are much better at repairing/building up quickly compared to ie tendons or ligaments. Even for young, there is general advice to put 1 week out of ie 10/12 of complete rest, or probably active rest. It is for all those little fractures and sprains in connective tissue to heal a bit. With age, this should be more frequent and/or longer and as usually everything is very individual.
I strength train for about 8-10 hours a week.
Preface: like most people here, I'm not a doctor or physiological specialist.
I am decently active, and what I've found from the papers and science that gets brought up, and from my own self experimentation, is that the majority of our aerobic exercise isn't aerobic. In order for your body to use the aerobic energy system, we need a much higher base to raise our lactic thresholds to levels where we can use that system for things like running, swimming, or playing soccer. Instead, our bodies use the glycemic anaerobic systems by default because we don't have that aerobic base.
In order to change this over the winter, I've been doing workouts at much, much lower intensities to try to build up my aerobic ability. For example, this morning I did an hour long walk on a treadmill with slight incline while keeping my heart rate at a consistent 100 bpm. This is a much, much lower level than might even be considered a heart rate for the workout. But I could feel my body doing work the whole time. Other workout is on an indoor bike where I also find a pace where I'm giving effort, but super low intensity to build up my base.
Again, n=1 and I'm not an expert, but my true guess, which is one that I'm working on myself, is that very few people have a good aerobic base to where very little of our exercise is truly aerobic.
To know if this is true or not would require testing and numbers and defining what's considered "fit", rather than commenting on HN. That said, I truly have relatively high confidence in that the active population these days very much relies on the glycolytic energy system rather than oxidative, anaerobic rather than aerobic.
Most health focused runners should be walking at an incline or running downhill except for 1-2 high intensity interval days. There are huge benefits to low intensity activity and higher doses are almost always better. The sort of intense, grueling runs that most people do are likely counterproductive. It's like running a race every day as a workout. It's just not sustainable and unhealthy at high doses.
(Of course, if the goal is to be a runner and not simply be healthy, you'll need to push your body to a point where running is like walking but it takes a long time to do correctly.)
Totally, I agree, in that the reason they're intense because they're using the wrong energy system.
My half baked theory is that the reason people (like me) don't like running at all is because the our subconscious mind tells our conscious mind to not like it because it's so inefficient and a waste. If, however, we trained our bodies and mitochondria to use more fat for energy aerobic-style, we'd like running a ton more. I'm betting that'll be the case with me.
In team sports in general you are not so much in control of intensity, the game/other players are. Other sports you mention are more like that.
You can even do this while incline walking at a moderate pace.
100 bpm is probably just barely an increase over your typical heart rate throughout the day.
I'm a barely functional human being who feels as though he is faking his way though being an adult.
What I can say is that two years ago in my early 40s I had a L5-S1 spinal fusion after decades of pain, tremendous weight gain, and crippling depression. My surgeon really only said two things after I woke up from the surgery. He loomed over me in what my post-anesthetic stupor remembers as a pose resembling the nun scene in Blues Brothers and said "if you want to recover, waaaaaaaalk" and then the next day when I was a little more cognizant he said "lift weights". When I asked him what else, he said "DO YOGA".
Doctor surgeon looming over my bed: https://i.imgur.com/jlMRimz.jpg
Every day I walk at least 1 mile, which takes 20 minutes. Three days per week I lift weights under the direction of a trainer specifically educated to deal with people with fused backs and I'm extremely close to "graduating" from her on to "normal people weightlifting". The other four days I do yoga, a mix of ashtanga or yin depending on how I'm feeling the day after the strength training.
It has completely, radically, transformed my physique, mental health, and life in general.
Walking and yoga cost $0.00, weightlifting costs me a lot but can be very inexpensive, and it is all more than worth it.
it makes sense, but damn is that figure staggering. 40% reduced risk of all-cause mortality?!
Running is terrible exercise. Terrible because it’s extremely hard on the body unless you’re on the lower end of the BMI scale. If you do any sport with a high mobility requirement, you can feel how tight a single run makes you.
The killer in old age is immobility, of your knees and hips. Running really doesn’t help.
Now before people point me to some article debunking how running isn’t in fact bad for your knees, that’s not what I’m saying. Efficient running is all about maximising power through a very small range of motion. Runners by and large have terrible hip mobility for athletes.
the problem is that running/jogging is usually the first thing people turn to for "getting in shape" and these people are often significantly overweight. Starting off with a high impact exercise is a recipe for disaster. Put on a 50-100lb weight vest and try running around and feel the impact on your joints and back, not ideal
But long term overweight is hard on your joints, no disupting that.
The powerlifter is mobile and carrying the extra weight and has the strength to do so. The fat person is sedentary and doing whatever possible to NOT carry the fat. They do not have the strength to do so.
I would consider myself above average in strength after spending most of my 20s lifting regularly but that doesn't counter the impact of being this fat. It is shocking the impact it has on your life.
Alternatives like cycling and swimming are better for the knees, especially for the old and overweight.
Completely different energy systems, <90% anaerobic, and has a level of skill acquisition that distance running doesn’t have.
Can you clarify, do you mean lower than 'normal' range (i.e. < 18.5), or lower than the US average (i.e. < 26), or what? And is this mostly anecdotal or is there evidence to support it (the view that running is a bad exercise for people above a certain BMI)? Not challenging this, I just haven't heard it before and am intrigued. And can you clarify what you mean by "any sport with a high mobility requirement?
Sport with a high mobility requirement? Things like weightlifting, gymnastics, ballet etc.
Also, nobody overweight nor sedentary should start with running (nor do it generally), this is 101 of getting fit.
Our bodies are not that complex, but behaving stupidly ain't reaching anything good, ie I am fat and weak, everybody is running, so out of blue lets do that... and in max 3 months joints are a mess. Heck, I'd say health and fitness is one of the most important matters in each of our lives, isn't it worth spending just few hours learning about it? Resources are literally everywhere, expert physiotherapists too if one can't wade through all available info easily. Every gym has host of trainers that tailor working out to person's abilities and goals.
It defined a large part of our genetic makeup: our (relative) lack of body hair, the way we sweat, our bone structure, the function of our leg muscles in pumping blood back to the heart, a cardiovascular system with more endurance than any other land mammal.
That being said, I think both strength and cardiovascular fitness matter. If nothing else, strength matters in terms of being able to save yourself from a stumble.
regardless it's good to see strength training getting some love instead of the cult of cardio. People associating fitness/working out with misery on a treadmill is why so few people workout