Does this mean that anyone who has a > 11 minutes walk each way to their office won't experience the negative effects of sitting all day at work? That seems like an easily reachable target in that case.
Pretty much what the article alludes to, yes. Though, my Dr advises that it's best to get my HR up (to a level he recommends) and sustain that for 20-30 min per day* rather than break it up. But he also still says move every hour. So...
20-30 minutes of actual elevated heart rate a day, and like 200ish steps every hour. This is the consensus I've seen forming in the research over the past few years.
By contrast, HIIT research suggests you really only need to hit max heart rate and VO2max for < 4 minutes 3x a week for effectively all the benefit.
The "interval" idea is 4 sprints of 30 - 45 seconds to go into max heart rate band, each with a 30 - 15 sec recovery to let heart drop a touch, then hit the next one. You are not doing aerobic exercise, you are pushing into anaerobic.
They also suggest a warmup and cooldown of at least a couple minutes, so put that together and you're looking at 8 minutes 3x a week.
The problem is that the first I in HIIT is much too much Intensity for some. Fitness clubs had to get rid of or gate HIIT machines because guests would vomit. If you're doing it right, you will be anaerobic, many people don't tolerate that without working up to it, and people hate working up to things.
Supposedly -- though less research on this -- the same routine will "upshift" metabolism so after 6+ weeks of accommodation, your 24 hr calorie burn from these 8 mins 3x a week is greater than if doing traditional hour long fitness routines every day, and that upshift can last 6 - 9 most after cessation of the routine.
> The problem is that the first I in HIIT is much too much Intensity for some. Fitness clubs had to get rid of or gate HIIT machines because guests would vomit. If you're doing it right, you will be anaerobic, many people don't tolerate that without working up to it, and people hate working up to things.
A lot of people just can't go from sitting on their buts all day to sitting on their buts all day with the addition of a daily vomit enducing HIIT routine. They would explode.
Probably best to start by walking, then walking briskly, etc...
As someone who has done loads of different forms of exercise I am blown away by HIIT. 6 mins (not including 10-15 mins warm up) and I can feel the effects all day.
And as you get fitter you can just load more weight/exercise type.
Sustained walking (no red lights) is a highly underrated form of cardio.
Getting heart rate into a zone and keeping it there incrementally has a strange effect of growing a walk into a light jog on its own as well. The body seems to continue its improvement.
Dunno if this applies to anyone else, but if I go for a long walk, then at about the 25-30 minute mark my metabolism shifts gears. A distinct jump in body warmth. I open my jacket, or otherwise remove a layer.
Possibly - but in general 2 half sets of an exercise routine (cardio or strength) doesn't usually have exactly the same benefits as a full set.
I don't know about brisk walking, but if you run at a steady pace for 22 minutes, your heart rate will be higher in the second half than the first. If you split a weight training set in half - I believe it is more likely to increase the bulk and strength of your muscles but won't be as good at building stamina.
Then you might be surprised how many people get less exercise than 22 minutes of walking per day, even healthy young ones. I was one and it took effort to change. If you only walk from screen to fridge to screen to bathroom to screen to car to screen to bed, it's just a few minutes of body weight movement per day.
That's enough writing for me, time to go out and stack firewood.
That lifestyle led to severe lower back pain. The only cure for that was getting my body in motion. I've kept in motion because of a deep mewling fear of returning to that pain. You could say I'm driven by the lash.
But if you go to work a job someplace you definitely walk at least 10 mins, even if you park on site, just maneuvering around the property. Grocery shopping alone probably doubles that or more.
I can say anecdotally that when Covid hit and I started working from home I really started to feel like garbage. I think a big part of it was that I didn’t have my daily park and walk to the office building routine anymore. That and the rest of the surrounding movement to get ready, get into the car, get out of the car, etc. I think it was a pretty big change for the worse.
I mean, I think it's quite surprising that such a small amount of moderate exercise is effective; per the study 22 minutes _eliminates the increased mortality entirely_.
"People who sit for long periods more likely to die earlier – but moderate-to-vigorous activity can eliminate risk."
"Going for a brisk walk for just 22 minutes once a day may be enough to offset the negative health effects of sitting too much, research suggests."
Indeed, being active is natural and healthy. When will the next study show that being active is natural and healthy? I guess the recurrence of these articles can be the impetus for someone to break out of an inactive cycle, so commendable in that regard.
Walking has a direct casual impact on markers of cardiovascular health like vo2 max. I have no idea whether anyone has the funding to establish causality for exercise and all-cause mortality, but it would be astonishing if exercise improved your heart and circulation but not lifespan.
Edit: At least, astonishing if the effect persisted across multiple large and high quality studies.
I'm not so sure. I've seen some rat studies on longevity and fitness with pretty surprising results. Obese, idle rats were the shortest lived (not surprising). But surprisingly, fit, active rats actually had shorter life spans than anorexic, lazy rats. Who knows if it generalizes to humans, but results like this always make me skeptical that first principles thinking will hold up in complex biological systems.
I think this is also first principles thinking going wrong: calorie restriction increases rat longevity and (presumably) reduces rat movement, and there's no good way to make calorie-restricted rats voluntarily do more exercise without introducing confounding variables, but that doesn't show whether a calorie-restricted human would live longer if also doing some exercise.
It is a interesting question. Some percentage of the harm from smoking is probably that it makes you more sedentary and likely to avoid cardiovascular activity. People who walk briskly for 22 minutes probably also eat better.
There becomes a point for individuals where even walking becomes difficult, if you can imagine a sudden death is often a result of cardiac arrest and heart disease, then no it has nothing to do with walking but the issue of obesity. For most individuals in this category walking is considered strenuous exercise. Meaning that even doing 30 minutes of it can be considered the equivalent to a high intensity workout. It's a sad thought to think about about approximately 1 in 4 Americans are already on track for this by 2030.
Exercise is essential yet in our modern lives it does not exist in a mandatory form. The entire workplace structure of our society needs to be redone.
For those with limited time or patience for exercise, the details can be important. If only to (hopefully) help convince 'em to do a bit more or more-useful exercise.
I work a desk job, but when i have those 5-10 minute slots between meetings i'll just walk up the staircase in the office to top floor and back down. Seems to make me always hit my apple watch move targets and pretty easy to do
A stronger study pegged the requirement at 5 minutes of movement per 30 minutes of sedentary time.[1] I was inspired to set a regular prompt to try it and yes, subjectively this does improve a sense of well-being.
I simply set my phone to vibrate an alarm at intervals throughout the day. I was skeptical because it's the opposite of achieving deep focus, but its been a good change!
Please say more. I’ve been toying with this idea since hearing about this study, and the anecdote about someone on planet money “participating in the study” for a couple of days. I can imagine huge upside, but my fear is basically that I need sometimes upward of 3 hours uninterrupted to make my magic happen in a developer context. Just knowing I’m going to be interrupted is enough for my brain to refuse to make progress on certain tasks.
Think of it this way: you are a human. What did humans do 20000 years ago, what did we evolve to do before all this society bullshit? Certainly not sitting still for 3 hours at a time. We evolved to be persistant hunters walking down prey to death, foragers who rove over terrain for resources, craftsman and firetenders who cannot just sit still and expect the shelter to be built for them and the fire to be raging with no tending.
So yes, get up and walk around for 5 minutes. Simulate picking up some firewood or foraging for some berries. You will be all the more healthy for it, and thats something more meaningful to optimize for than getting more of your bosses work done.
Oh, without a doubt healthier overall. It’s the breaking up of 3 hour chunks that I struggle with. I have seen developer productivity tank with just 2 15 minute meetings placed perfectly to break up both the morning and afternoon. I’m simply trying to avoid this fate by intentionally doing it to myself. I’d like to know people who’ve made essentially the pomodoro technique work for dev tasks. The best I can do so far is hour chunks for most dev related tasks. But maybe there’s some inflection point that happens, like learning to break up your time like this forces some other way of working. I have many obligations that prevent long stretches of evening project time, so that means I’ve, through necessity, changed how I work on side projects, and I’m sort of wondering if something similar happens with these 5 minute walk breaks.
Not OP, but I'd say that a big difference between meetings and a 5 minute walk is that the walk does not imply a change of focus. Personally, my creativity and problem solving gets going when walking.
This is a good point. And I think this may be the key. Finding some way for the alert to get up and walk every half hour be not a distraction, just something you react to without breaking concentration. Because I can totally see myself just hitting cancel and getting up and walking without changing what I’m thinking about if the alarm wasn’t toi obnoxious. I already to that for certain alerts
Practice with this will help you. So, at first - it may distract you, but with repeated practice, you'll be able to sustain your focus even as you go for a walk.
i just got into a habit of drinking lots and lots of cups of tea to replace my coffee. I go get a new cup regularly, pacing around while it is brewing, then increased bathroom visits due to liquid consumed. It makes me stand up and walk every half an hour, and not because of an annoying alarm, which I would hate too, but because of a nagging physiological need, much easier to tolerate for me.
Last year I decided to lose weight (I lost 35kg / 70 pounds in 9 months). During that time, I also decided to start running. This year, once my weight stabilised, I started getting huge improvements in running performance (probably from not being on huge calorie deficit anymore). Little did I know, I completely outpaced my body's ability to strengthen tendons and got pretty serious injury in my foot.
I could not run for almost 2 months. Once I could walk (but not yet run) I started doing A LOT of walking. I got up to 2-3.5h of brisk walk (about 27k steps / 22km) every day and stayed there for a month.
When I started running again, I have noticed not only I did not lose any of my improvements, I actually was way ahead of where I would be if I kept running. It was as if my running performance kept steadily improving at a fast pace even with me doing no running.
I now use walking as part of my regular training and I regularly trade some walking volume into running or back, depending on situation. I had enormous running performance improvement (as measured by my ability to run fast and long at a specific low heart rate) and I attribute it to a large degree to high volume of walks (averaged 29k steps for the past 6 months, this includes running).
**
As to the topic of the submission, it is no wonder that walking offsets bad effects of sitting. For example, bad effects of sitting on our health include things like increased insulin resistance (this happens when you spend a long time not moving after a meal). When you go for a walk after a meal your muscles start consuming way more energy than when you are at your basal metabolic rate, not moving. This additional requirement for energy helps remove sugar from your bloodstream. This for your body is as if it was more sensitive to insulin -- it needs less insulin for a shorter time to achieve the same effect. And in fact muscle working IS more sensitive to insulin as it opens itself up to receive much needed energy sources.
Also training at low intensity (brisk walk for most people) is what athletes use to improve their mitochondria to improve their aerobic capacity. VO2.max has been found to correlate with longevity much more than even diabetes, smoking or even some cancers. It seems if you want to live long and healthy life you should strive to improve your mitochondrial health, aerobic capacity and low intensity aerobic activity that involves large parts of your body that you can do consistently every day, like walking, is the best way to achieve it.
I am now helping couple obese people help lose their weight. I asked them, rather than start running to just spend as much time as they can walking at a brisk pace. It carries much less injury risk. It is much easier to do consistently. It has much less overhead (you just walk out the door, no need to drive to gym). It is much more enjoyable and thus easier to stick to. It does not leave people in pain afterwards. And it has some additional utility -- you can walk places.
I had hit similar issues with weight lifting and climbing. As a beginner I adopted approach of others - keep pushing yourself, grow. I had frequent minor injuries, and it was very frustrating to stop for few weeks and lose gains from months of efforts. This gets worse with age, and earlier than you think.
These days, I just keep my stable set of weights, which are rather light compared to what I used to do, but I increased repetitions to at least 2x. Didn't have any injury anymore. Also, if you are smart you eventually realize huge muscles are outright stupid for real life, extremely hard o get to and maintain, especially without ruining your body, and completely impractical for any sport. Long term you end up exactly opposite than healthy. Same for climbing, I climb easier routes but have always tremendous fun, I simply love climbing and whole ballet on a vertical rockface, especially on real rock out there in the nature.
Great for health, longevity, happiness, but also attractive to other sex can be a bit of muscle and lean. Your personality, approach to life etc. makes much more impression and gets you stable long term relationships easier if that's the motivation.
Oh and I do similar but a bit shorter walks, earplugs in my ears, walking around wineyards around us in almost complete darkness, just moon and few villages far away. Sometimes stoned :) Since I love them I don't even think about them as a workout, rather head cleanup, connecting with nature.
Muscle mass, especially if it includes a lot of actually useful muscles and not just the ones that present best, is very good to have especially once your muscle mass starts declining inevitably later in life. Also, along with the muscle usually follow stronger tendons, joints and bones. All those develop through loading.
Good core muscles will protect against a lot of injuries and will make you much less fragile. Both physically and chemically (for example, by being able to buffer blood sugar).
The stronger the muscle, tendons, joints and bones you start with, the longer you will enjoy not being fragile.
But I do agree you can reach the point of diminishing returns very quickly and focusing on muscle doesn't make sense assuming you spend effort on other healthy activities like low intensity aerobic exercise, high intensity aerobic exercise, flexibility, etc. I do weight lifting and calisthenics session, once a week, to strengthen my muscles, tendons and joints to help with my running and from what I researched it should be enough to greatly reduce my chance of running injuries.
When I started taking my daughter to daycare(1300 metres and ~15min with the stroller one way) I noticed a positive change - but it was mostly about loosening up my shoulder muscles and lubricating my joints - stuff that previously made all other activities surprisingly energy-consuming.
Cycling 2+ hours weekly on top of that was the real bump in fitness. It's still the bare minimum a person should be doing, but it's nice to finally be able to sit comfortably after all these years.
First weeks were rough though - it felt as if I was morphing into something else - something with a higher lung capacity.
You probably were. Tight shoulders and ribs inhibit inhalation. Once you loosen up and grow stronger, you will increase the volume of your ribcage. As you do that, the tissues of the lungs unfold or stretch to fill them. Some corners of your airway will get cool/fresh air for the first time in ages. It all feels pretty odd -- tickles, itches, or even a fearful asthma response.
>What’s the clinical definition of “tight shoulders”?
Chronic contraction of the upper trapezius.
>[I]s it shown to correlate significantly with inhalation problems?
There’s not much in the medical literature beyond noting that that upper trapezius is an accessory muscle in expanding the lungs. (MDs correct me if this is wrong.)
Physiotherapy research is less rigorous but more expansive on the point. See e.g. Kim et al.
>BACKGROUND:
Forward head posture (FHP) causes changes in the strengths and rigidities of cervical muscles.
OBJECTIVE:
The aim of this study was to investigate correlations between FHP and respiratory functions and the muscle activities of respiratory accessory muscles in young adults in their 20s.
METHODS:
A volunteer sample of 33 healthy young adults participated in this study. Craniovertebral angle (CVA), cranial rotational angle (CRA), vital capacity (VC), forced vital capacity (FVC), forced expiratory volume at 1 second (FEV1), peak expiratory flow (PEF), maximal voluntary ventilation (MVV), and sternocleidomastoid (SCM) and upper trapezius activity ratios were measured.
RESULTS:
Significant positive correlations were found between CVA and VC, FVC, FEV1, PEF, and MVV, and a significant negative correlation was found between CVA and SCM activity ratio. Significant negative correlations existed between CRA and VC and FVC, and significant positive correlations between CRA and SCM and upper trapezius activity ratios.
You need a cite to understand that the bellows of the ribs might be constrained by tension held in the intercostals and shoulder girdle? Lol. Here ya go.
AFAIK, movement. Like, there’s parts of your elbow that get pretty much zilch for blood flow. Movement literally gets the fluids “pumped” in those places. Also, something-something your body will produce the right fluids when “prompted”, just like it’ll grow muscle when “prompted”.
Worth adding high doses of fish oil have the same results. This is common in strength training and athletic communities. I take handful each morning and feel great.
My wife would literally get sick from fishburps. But there's an easy solution, she just switched to special capsules* from Möllers that dissolve in the intestines instead of the stomach, which completely solves fishburps.
I just chug this stuff right from the bottle, but when the price is the same I buy lemon tasting tran, which gives lemon burps instead.
* can't find any special name on the packaging. The info about anti burp system is easy to miss. This is just one of many types of capsules produced by Möllers, anti burps are elongated and slightly cloudy, if it helps.
I'm not sure why this is downvoted. Even though technically you might be "lubricating" joints if the sibling comment is to be believed, but there's still the supposition that you can reliably feel this process and that that in fact is causative for your improvement, which is overly mechanistic and reductionist.
It's downvoted because it's low-key a personal attack and it's excessively dismissive. It shuts down conversation. Maybe the G*P literally meant lubrication and not just the subjective feeling I'm sure we all have had of movement easing further movement. The effect is real even if the explanation is not literally correct. Is the GP also going to scoff at calling alcohol a social lubricant?
Doing everyday Cardio is very beneficial if you are going to do high intensity cardio. If you try to only do high intensity you might be able to keep that max output a week or four, but that retention time can be doubled if you continue with daily low intensity cardio.
It is often vizualized as a pyramid you need a good base to be able to keep max going.
So even if you only do a daily commute you have an easier time getting better.
I feel as if this kind of reporting is a bit daft.
For the most part people know what's healthy, it's somewhere in between being a marathon runner or powerlifter and being obese.
I feel that someone who seeks to optimise their exercise in this way is kind of missing the point. The healthiest older people I know don't metricise everything, they just incorporate things like hikes, generally walking, eating proper food etc into their lives.
We are just launching something related. Basically the harm from static sitting actually begins at around 10-12 minutes and builds from there. The more often you can interrupt it before that the better, but of course that also starts impacting productivity. There are also many sitting health impacts from muskuloskeletal to metabolic and these kinds of studies might show benefit in some areas but aren't testing everything.
Our thought is if we can also build significant posture changes (sit-stand) more easily into the workday it can help a lot, and our first study showed this dramatically.
Anecdotally, I can sit in a chair for hours, but sitting on a rock or reclining on the ground (things I do often) seem to cause my (45+ year old) body to "set in" and it becomes difficult to move afterwards.
My guess is today's recommendations to move every 30m/45m or so were a compromise between ergonomists and employers given more frequent interruption was not practical in the workplace.
In our study 100% of participants reported no discomfort even compared to high end ergonomic chair. Aside from what our chair does it does show how impactful more frequent posture changes can be. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00036...
We're at that point in human history where you have to tell people to walk 20 min a day for "benefits".
It's so depressing I don't even know where to begin with, it's bellow the bare minimum I'd expect for a 70+ years old
Dedicating even 5 hours of your week for real vigorous activities will absolutely change your life. Is the baseline really "do just enough to not die of an heart attack before 50" ? So much wasted potential...
Would love to see the study. Per the other comments, it may mean that you can't concentrate the walking and the sitting? That is, 22 minutes of walking every 2 hours could be a lot different from 44 minutes every 4 hours.
This wouldn't be much different from any other process. And, of course, could call into question many other things we have fixed times in the day for.
Thanks! This seems to support the general thought I put up. You have to substitute sitting time with exercise. The article talked about people that would sit for 10-12 hours a day, and how if they sat that long, adding exercise did not help. My assertion is that added exercise has to reduce the time sitting.
I'm actually struggling to imagine sitting 12 hours a day and also getting real exercise in. Unless they don't count walking around the house to eat and such, that is a crap load of sitting.
Which is why the words "proof" and "fact" have no place in science.
Science is built upon a foundation of falsifiability. The pinnacle of understanding in science is an accepted theory which can, of course, be discarded if significant evidence to the contrary comes to light.
I've seen articles purporting this too and it always makes me wonder if my exercise time counts as standing time to them or not. I go for an hour run 5 days a week, do I count that as standing time?
As a point of anecdata: I walk about 1.5 to 2 hours a day, mostly for cannabis consumption, in my late 40's with at least 12 hours per day of sitting, no gym/jogging/weights, eat whatever I want and I have none of the symptoms of being excessively sedentary. Also my walking is quite brisk.
Not gonna walk around for 22 minutes, it's boring. I can barely get myself to exercise regularly, so I go on hikes on the weekend. During the day I do pushups, pullups, overhead press, squats, jump tucks. But I only do 10-20 reps per day (total); sometimes I only do 5. Surprisingly, I'm getting stronger every few weeks (can do more reps). And I'm a stronger hiker than anyone I know. So, if I die early, so be it.
I do a ~25 minute walk basically every day -- the key for me is doing a defined loop. Doesn't matter where, just so long as it's a single loop (eg no repeating, no backtracking) and it always stays interesting for me. And in fact the more you do it, the more it becomes rote, and the LESS you care about the route being interesting. You can just tune out, go on autopilot, and keep thinking about what ever you want to keep thinking about but also get some exercise in.
I go for a 50 min walk every night with my gf, virtually always the same route, and it's never boring quite the opposite. It's the only time where you have nothing else to do than focus on the essentials, no screen, no music, no food/snacks. Before I met her I did the same alone and it wasn't boring either. If it's boring it probably mean you're addicted to overstimulation
Not to disparage your intention here. But couldn't you apply the same argument to this paper's results?
I.e. "Some people don't need to walk 22 minutes a day, don't tell them to do so. Different people are wired differently."
Just as there is evidence walking 22 minutes a day improves lifespan for the /majority/ of people, drinking caffeine 6 hours before bed is considered negative for your sleep for the /majority/ of people. It's sound advice, even if it's telling someone what to do.
While I believe suggesting people be more lenient to other's life choices is good - it's a practice in empathy - sometimes people are misguided because the might not realize the impact of their actions, haven't thought about their actions thoroughly, etc. These mentions can be wakeup calls just as often as they can be negative/annoyances. I'd argue OP keep suggesting advice and instead we all try to keep open minds is the safer choice, for the /majority/ at least.
You can always get decaf or hot chocolate or something else if caffeine bothers you. But of course people have to pick on the use of coffee instead of the advice to have a goal.
Something magical happens to a walk when you do the same route again and again. At some point it stops being routine and turns into something else like you notice things differently each time. With another even more so.
The woods are a visual, olfactory, sonic, and proprioceptive environment that is almost overwhelmingly stimulating and ever changing, if you take the time to soak it in.
Around here it's peak mushroom fruiting season. Tons of interesting fungi popping up everywhere! My neighbourhood walks are taking about 10% longer as I stop to take pictures.
Likewise! If you live in a reasonable urban center, walking can just happen in the course of the day, without requiring special time and effort. I never exercise for exercise's sake, but I walk to work, walk to the store, walk to get coffee, walk to the bar, walk to friends' houses; at least 40 minutes of walking every day, often more. It is so much more pleasant than driving everywhere.
Its not about the environment, its about getting out of the damned house and away from distractions. When I go on walks in my neighborhood, thats when the deep thinking happens. Nothing to distract you, just you and your thoughts. I’m not even thinking about where I’m walking to. I’m thinking about all kinds of things. Sometimes the 20 minute walk turns into an hour and I don’t even realize it if I’ve really been pondering.
This kind of article is clearly targeted to people who do no exercise at all, and is aimed at motivating them to just walk, which most people consider to be easy and not a “real” exercise. The point is that walking, even though it’s easy, still has useful benefits. You’re not the target audience for this.
The article is targeted at people who sit for long periods of time. It says nothing about how much they might exercise or not. In any case, I don't do 22 minutes of exercise a day, more like 2 minutes.
So I'm still the target audience, you're wrong, and I'm not right, because I wasn't trying to make a point or win Internet Argument Points.
Why does every comment on HN need to be adversarial? I feel like it's a result of the rules being skewed to only comments that are "useful", and that leading to intellectual competition and constantly trying to "win" some point. Why can't we just share our thoughts without constant corrections?
The concern for most of us isn't dieing early but rather becoming disabled early by chronic disease or injury. Frequent hard exercise is one of the most effective ways to increase healthspan even if it doesn't necessarily do a lot to extend maximum lifespan.
If sitting for long periods is bad what about lying in bed for long periods (e.g. sleeping)? It's difficult to reconcile the findings that sleeping is great for the body and mind (essential actually) but sitting is terrible.
Sleeping for too long causes lots of problems, right? I thought that was part of why they paid people to do rest studies, to monitor muscle atrophy from lying down 12 hours a day or similar.
What the body does during sleep is quite different. During sleep your muscles relax and the body fills them with blood and hormones that trigger tissue repair and growth. Sleep is part of the body's repair process. When you're just sitting none of that happens.
Sounds a lot like "if water is good why is coke bad ?"
Just look at the average desk worker posture and it'll tell you more than half of the story already, it's bad for your back, it's bad for your neck, it's bad for you hips, it's bad for breathing, it's bad for blood circulation, it's bad for lymph circulation, &c.
Then there is the fact that you cannot survive without sleep, if you were to spend another 8 hours in bed you'd likely develop bed sores and all kind of nasty things
I used to do a fairly brisk walk on most nights and still felt like shit. But I recently got back into running. Thirty minutes a night, every night - no exceptions. Weight loss was the primary goal, alas it's still slow. I do however feel less stressed during the day and feel I'm less of an asshole towards colleagues.
You can't out run your diet. Cardio for weight loss is mostly a waste of time. It has secondary benefits like reducing hunger post work out but it's hard to exercise enough to quickly lose weight. Running a marathon will burn around 2500 calories, less than a pound of fat.
2500 calories for a marathon sounds way too low. I do bike rides every weekend that are typically burning over 3000 calories. This is with a power meter on the bike so it's not going to be miles off.
Running maybe not, but if you get too into cycling or swimming (or I guess any low-impact endurance sport), it can sometimes be a chore to shovel enough food into you.
Ish? Yes, you can't just "run off the calories" of food, per se. That said, the more time you spend running/walking/whatever, the less time you spend eating, in many cases. That marathon, for example, is not nearly as simple as eating a burger. One takes several hours for a very fit athlete. The other is minutes for most people.
That is, it is easy to view some exercising as a substitute for some snacking. And, in that job, it works rather well. Is my hypothesis on why the simple walk around the neighborhood has outsized impact on weight loss.
Just walking around is much better for calories burned vs. exertion. It's just worse from a time standpoint. Running has been shown to induce hunger, so erasing the caloric benefit of it with a snack is very easy. Walking, since it's so much lower impact, doesn't really have the same issue, and you can sustain it for much longer periods (especially if you're untrained) than you can with running.
Right, agreed that the time is the important part. If you can sustain a run for an hour or so a day, that is a lot different than a 20 minute one. And, my assertion is that a lot of the benefit of the extra 40 minutes is the substitution effect.
This is a lot of what I think many studies find that show benefits to coffee and such. Nowadays, that is as often a substitute for sodas. And the amount of calories you get from a soda is just flat out absurd. I'm fairly certain even those of us that know it is bad for you underestimate just how bad it is.
I didn't really need to lose any weight, but found I just naturally did when I started swimming once and then later twice a week (for about 40 minutes to an hour/2km to 2.5km per session). I basically didn't change my diet (although I had started eating generally healthier six months or so before just because I thought it was a good idea), and after a while I found I was getting lighter than I wanted to be and actually had to consciously eat more to maintain my weight.
Are you sure about that? Walking is great for many reasons but unless you're really unfit it won't get your heart rate into zone 2. It's more of a zone 1 activity.
If you want to lose weight you should (in order of effectiveness):
- Watch what you eat/count calories
- Lift heavy weights
- Do cardio
#3 on its own is rarely ever going to show results. So many people will jog for an hour or more every day and then eat a candy bar as a reward, instantly undoing all the work, then eventually get discouraged when they see no progress.
seconded. of course, ideally you should do all three as best you can.
the way i always think about it is that humans are among the most efficient runners in the entire animal kingdom; some tribes in Africa still practice persistence hunting. so by extension, cardio is going to be the worst choice for weight loss - but the other benefits still make it worth it.
The lifting heavy weights just ensures you retain muscle during weight loss, doesn't it?
While weight loss is mostly diet, if you did want to use exercise to burn additional calories, cardio would do more than weight training. I burn up to 1000 calories in an hour of very strenuous cycling (from normal weight), which I doubt I could ever do lifting dumbbells and barbells.
I've always used weight training during weight loss to try and tell my body to retain muscle and target fat primarily.
In order to retain lean muscle mass while losing weight you also have to maintain a high protein intake, something like 2 grams per kilogram of lean body weight. This can be challenging while eating at a calorie deficit: after you consume the necessary protein you might not have much room in your diet for other macronutrients.
Anecdotally, when our previous dog passed away, mine and my wife's health declined significantly because we weren't walking regularly. This continued for a year, until we got our new pup, and now we're walking again. Unfortunately my wife has hypermobile ehlers-danlos syndrome (HEDS) and her connective tissue is very weak, so the lack of exercise affected her hugely.
With the dog, I walk for at least an hour a day, but maybe 20 minutes of that is brisk.
Mine is in his later years (he's 14) and now walking him is basically "Walk really slowly in front of him while trying to encourage him to move at more than a snail's pace" so enjoy that while you can!
Mine is 5, but I have already planned for this. I plan to get something like stroller or a wagon, and I will just cart him around the neighborhood, on trails, etc. so he can at least still sightsee.
We are best friends, and I can't do our activities without him.
<3 Right?! I feel bad if I go to a park or go for a walk without him. He needs the exercise and he's my buddy. I haven't done the stroller or wagon thing yet but I love that! Right now I'm still hoping that forcing some activity will slowly strengthen him. He had some seizures at the beginning of the year and has been slower since but I've seen him go from barely being able to get up and walk to being able to run around inside pretty happily and keeping a better pace outside. Not sure how much longer I've got with him but I hope he is happy he's alive still.
Mine's 12 and still gives the neighborhood dog hell whenever she sees them! Plus, she keeps pushing to walk faster all the time. I don't know where she gets it, and I'm starting not to look forward to the days when she inevitably slows down.
I am currently on a 400+ day runstreak where i run around 20 minutes/day (what my lunch-hour allows).
The psychology behind the streak is that it is somewhat tough the first month, but after that there simply isn't enough reason to stop.
When it comes to health, I am not sure. Possible that I sleep better, at least I get more tired in the evenings.
I think I may get a cold a bit more often. But as someone else noted, my muscles are less tense, and that is throughout the body, not legs in particular.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] thread* Minimum
By contrast, HIIT research suggests you really only need to hit max heart rate and VO2max for < 4 minutes 3x a week for effectively all the benefit.
The "interval" idea is 4 sprints of 30 - 45 seconds to go into max heart rate band, each with a 30 - 15 sec recovery to let heart drop a touch, then hit the next one. You are not doing aerobic exercise, you are pushing into anaerobic.
They also suggest a warmup and cooldown of at least a couple minutes, so put that together and you're looking at 8 minutes 3x a week.
The problem is that the first I in HIIT is much too much Intensity for some. Fitness clubs had to get rid of or gate HIIT machines because guests would vomit. If you're doing it right, you will be anaerobic, many people don't tolerate that without working up to it, and people hate working up to things.
Supposedly -- though less research on this -- the same routine will "upshift" metabolism so after 6+ weeks of accommodation, your 24 hr calorie burn from these 8 mins 3x a week is greater than if doing traditional hour long fitness routines every day, and that upshift can last 6 - 9 most after cessation of the routine.
A lot of people just can't go from sitting on their buts all day to sitting on their buts all day with the addition of a daily vomit enducing HIIT routine. They would explode.
Probably best to start by walking, then walking briskly, etc...
And as you get fitter you can just load more weight/exercise type.
Of course it comes with the taste of bile….
Getting heart rate into a zone and keeping it there incrementally has a strange effect of growing a walk into a light jog on its own as well. The body seems to continue its improvement.
aye, there's the rub
there are very few places I can walk without hitting multiple red lights
Reducing the number of lights on a walk can help.
For winter time finding a walking treadmill (they are a few hundred) can be a great way to watch those YouTube playlists of things you mean to.
I don't know about brisk walking, but if you run at a steady pace for 22 minutes, your heart rate will be higher in the second half than the first. If you split a weight training set in half - I believe it is more likely to increase the bulk and strength of your muscles but won't be as good at building stamina.
That's enough writing for me, time to go out and stack firewood.
I have never been healthier than when I got to work by walking or biking.
How much did this study cost? I could have saved them some money.
"Going for a brisk walk for just 22 minutes once a day may be enough to offset the negative health effects of sitting too much, research suggests."
Indeed, being active is natural and healthy. When will the next study show that being active is natural and healthy? I guess the recurrence of these articles can be the impetus for someone to break out of an inactive cycle, so commendable in that regard.
Reducing it to "exercise good" is too blunt an instrument
Let’s look for more walking for 20min articles posted on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Woooooot! Ifuckinglovescience!!!!
But how do we know this destined-to-die cohort will change that destiny by merely pretending to be the other group insofar as walking >=22 mins?
Edit: At least, astonishing if the effect persisted across multiple large and high quality studies.
Exercise is essential yet in our modern lives it does not exist in a mandatory form. The entire workplace structure of our society needs to be redone.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/03/1203173458/ted-radio-hour-lau...
So yes, get up and walk around for 5 minutes. Simulate picking up some firewood or foraging for some berries. You will be all the more healthy for it, and thats something more meaningful to optimize for than getting more of your bosses work done.
Last year I decided to lose weight (I lost 35kg / 70 pounds in 9 months). During that time, I also decided to start running. This year, once my weight stabilised, I started getting huge improvements in running performance (probably from not being on huge calorie deficit anymore). Little did I know, I completely outpaced my body's ability to strengthen tendons and got pretty serious injury in my foot.
I could not run for almost 2 months. Once I could walk (but not yet run) I started doing A LOT of walking. I got up to 2-3.5h of brisk walk (about 27k steps / 22km) every day and stayed there for a month.
When I started running again, I have noticed not only I did not lose any of my improvements, I actually was way ahead of where I would be if I kept running. It was as if my running performance kept steadily improving at a fast pace even with me doing no running.
I now use walking as part of my regular training and I regularly trade some walking volume into running or back, depending on situation. I had enormous running performance improvement (as measured by my ability to run fast and long at a specific low heart rate) and I attribute it to a large degree to high volume of walks (averaged 29k steps for the past 6 months, this includes running).
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As to the topic of the submission, it is no wonder that walking offsets bad effects of sitting. For example, bad effects of sitting on our health include things like increased insulin resistance (this happens when you spend a long time not moving after a meal). When you go for a walk after a meal your muscles start consuming way more energy than when you are at your basal metabolic rate, not moving. This additional requirement for energy helps remove sugar from your bloodstream. This for your body is as if it was more sensitive to insulin -- it needs less insulin for a shorter time to achieve the same effect. And in fact muscle working IS more sensitive to insulin as it opens itself up to receive much needed energy sources.
Also training at low intensity (brisk walk for most people) is what athletes use to improve their mitochondria to improve their aerobic capacity. VO2.max has been found to correlate with longevity much more than even diabetes, smoking or even some cancers. It seems if you want to live long and healthy life you should strive to improve your mitochondrial health, aerobic capacity and low intensity aerobic activity that involves large parts of your body that you can do consistently every day, like walking, is the best way to achieve it.
I am now helping couple obese people help lose their weight. I asked them, rather than start running to just spend as much time as they can walking at a brisk pace. It carries much less injury risk. It is much easier to do consistently. It has much less overhead (you just walk out the door, no need to drive to gym). It is much more enjoyable and thus easier to stick to. It does not leave people in pain afterwards. And it has some additional utility -- you can walk places.
These days, I just keep my stable set of weights, which are rather light compared to what I used to do, but I increased repetitions to at least 2x. Didn't have any injury anymore. Also, if you are smart you eventually realize huge muscles are outright stupid for real life, extremely hard o get to and maintain, especially without ruining your body, and completely impractical for any sport. Long term you end up exactly opposite than healthy. Same for climbing, I climb easier routes but have always tremendous fun, I simply love climbing and whole ballet on a vertical rockface, especially on real rock out there in the nature.
Great for health, longevity, happiness, but also attractive to other sex can be a bit of muscle and lean. Your personality, approach to life etc. makes much more impression and gets you stable long term relationships easier if that's the motivation.
Oh and I do similar but a bit shorter walks, earplugs in my ears, walking around wineyards around us in almost complete darkness, just moon and few villages far away. Sometimes stoned :) Since I love them I don't even think about them as a workout, rather head cleanup, connecting with nature.
Just my 2 cents.
Good core muscles will protect against a lot of injuries and will make you much less fragile. Both physically and chemically (for example, by being able to buffer blood sugar).
The stronger the muscle, tendons, joints and bones you start with, the longer you will enjoy not being fragile.
But I do agree you can reach the point of diminishing returns very quickly and focusing on muscle doesn't make sense assuming you spend effort on other healthy activities like low intensity aerobic exercise, high intensity aerobic exercise, flexibility, etc. I do weight lifting and calisthenics session, once a week, to strengthen my muscles, tendons and joints to help with my running and from what I researched it should be enough to greatly reduce my chance of running injuries.
Cycling 2+ hours weekly on top of that was the real bump in fitness. It's still the bare minimum a person should be doing, but it's nice to finally be able to sit comfortably after all these years.
First weeks were rough though - it felt as if I was morphing into something else - something with a higher lung capacity.
Chronic contraction of the upper trapezius.
>[I]s it shown to correlate significantly with inhalation problems?
There’s not much in the medical literature beyond noting that that upper trapezius is an accessory muscle in expanding the lungs. (MDs correct me if this is wrong.)
Physiotherapy research is less rigorous but more expansive on the point. See e.g. Kim et al.
>BACKGROUND: Forward head posture (FHP) causes changes in the strengths and rigidities of cervical muscles.
OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate correlations between FHP and respiratory functions and the muscle activities of respiratory accessory muscles in young adults in their 20s.
METHODS: A volunteer sample of 33 healthy young adults participated in this study. Craniovertebral angle (CVA), cranial rotational angle (CRA), vital capacity (VC), forced vital capacity (FVC), forced expiratory volume at 1 second (FEV1), peak expiratory flow (PEF), maximal voluntary ventilation (MVV), and sternocleidomastoid (SCM) and upper trapezius activity ratios were measured.
RESULTS: Significant positive correlations were found between CVA and VC, FVC, FEV1, PEF, and MVV, and a significant negative correlation was found between CVA and SCM activity ratio. Significant negative correlations existed between CRA and VC and FVC, and significant positive correlations between CRA and SCM and upper trapezius activity ratios.
https://academic.oup.com/ptj/article/86/3/345/2805157
The diaphragm is also a muscle, and can be trained.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17460....
And I thought robots weren't allowed on HN. /s
But seriously how do you do that exactly? Take some olive oil and inject it into your knees?
Olive oil is also potentially beneficial for joint lubrication when combined with exercise according to this study:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09552...
However, you probably shouldn't inject it. A more normal way of getting things like this into your body is to eat them.
I just chug this stuff right from the bottle, but when the price is the same I buy lemon tasting tran, which gives lemon burps instead.
* can't find any special name on the packaging. The info about anti burp system is easy to miss. This is just one of many types of capsules produced by Möllers, anti burps are elongated and slightly cloudy, if it helps.
It is often vizualized as a pyramid you need a good base to be able to keep max going.
So even if you only do a daily commute you have an easier time getting better.
For the most part people know what's healthy, it's somewhere in between being a marathon runner or powerlifter and being obese.
I feel that someone who seeks to optimise their exercise in this way is kind of missing the point. The healthiest older people I know don't metricise everything, they just incorporate things like hikes, generally walking, eating proper food etc into their lives.
Our thought is if we can also build significant posture changes (sit-stand) more easily into the workday it can help a lot, and our first study showed this dramatically.
We just launched on Indiegogo here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/movably-pro-the-freedom-o...
My guess is today's recommendations to move every 30m/45m or so were a compromise between ergonomists and employers given more frequent interruption was not practical in the workplace.
In our study 100% of participants reported no discomfort even compared to high end ergonomic chair. Aside from what our chair does it does show how impactful more frequent posture changes can be. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00036...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kneeling_chair ..
Dedicating even 5 hours of your week for real vigorous activities will absolutely change your life. Is the baseline really "do just enough to not die of an heart attack before 50" ? So much wasted potential...
This wouldn't be much different from any other process. And, of course, could call into question many other things we have fixed times in the day for.
I'm actually struggling to imagine sitting 12 hours a day and also getting real exercise in. Unless they don't count walking around the house to eat and such, that is a crap load of sitting.
Science is built upon a foundation of falsifiability. The pinnacle of understanding in science is an accepted theory which can, of course, be discarded if significant evidence to the contrary comes to light.
Maybe you should walk in a more interesting environment?
Just my $0.02
When I met my wife she would consistently drink a pot of coffee around 8PM and fall asleep an hour later. Different people are wired differently.
I.e. "Some people don't need to walk 22 minutes a day, don't tell them to do so. Different people are wired differently."
Just as there is evidence walking 22 minutes a day improves lifespan for the /majority/ of people, drinking caffeine 6 hours before bed is considered negative for your sleep for the /majority/ of people. It's sound advice, even if it's telling someone what to do.
While I believe suggesting people be more lenient to other's life choices is good - it's a practice in empathy - sometimes people are misguided because the might not realize the impact of their actions, haven't thought about their actions thoroughly, etc. These mentions can be wakeup calls just as often as they can be negative/annoyances. I'd argue OP keep suggesting advice and instead we all try to keep open minds is the safer choice, for the /majority/ at least.
But putting the two together, walking whilst listening to podcasts works very well for me.
So I'm still the target audience, you're wrong, and I'm not right, because I wasn't trying to make a point or win Internet Argument Points.
Why does every comment on HN need to be adversarial? I feel like it's a result of the rules being skewed to only comments that are "useful", and that leading to intellectual competition and constantly trying to "win" some point. Why can't we just share our thoughts without constant corrections?
I used to take walks around the neighborhood during weekly meetings and 1:1s.
Just look at the average desk worker posture and it'll tell you more than half of the story already, it's bad for your back, it's bad for your neck, it's bad for you hips, it's bad for breathing, it's bad for blood circulation, it's bad for lymph circulation, &c.
Then there is the fact that you cannot survive without sleep, if you were to spend another 8 hours in bed you'd likely develop bed sores and all kind of nasty things
That is, it is easy to view some exercising as a substitute for some snacking. And, in that job, it works rather well. Is my hypothesis on why the simple walk around the neighborhood has outsized impact on weight loss.
This is a lot of what I think many studies find that show benefits to coffee and such. Nowadays, that is as often a substitute for sodas. And the amount of calories you get from a soda is just flat out absurd. I'm fairly certain even those of us that know it is bad for you underestimate just how bad it is.
I’d suggest that calorific burn really is but one measure.
https://caloriesburnedhq.com/calories-burned-running/
- Watch what you eat/count calories
- Lift heavy weights
- Do cardio
#3 on its own is rarely ever going to show results. So many people will jog for an hour or more every day and then eat a candy bar as a reward, instantly undoing all the work, then eventually get discouraged when they see no progress.
the way i always think about it is that humans are among the most efficient runners in the entire animal kingdom; some tribes in Africa still practice persistence hunting. so by extension, cardio is going to be the worst choice for weight loss - but the other benefits still make it worth it.
While weight loss is mostly diet, if you did want to use exercise to burn additional calories, cardio would do more than weight training. I burn up to 1000 calories in an hour of very strenuous cycling (from normal weight), which I doubt I could ever do lifting dumbbells and barbells.
I've always used weight training during weight loss to try and tell my body to retain muscle and target fat primarily.
https://peterattiamd.com/ama40/
With the dog, I walk for at least an hour a day, but maybe 20 minutes of that is brisk.
We are best friends, and I can't do our activities without him.
I am currently on a 400+ day runstreak where i run around 20 minutes/day (what my lunch-hour allows).
The psychology behind the streak is that it is somewhat tough the first month, but after that there simply isn't enough reason to stop.
When it comes to health, I am not sure. Possible that I sleep better, at least I get more tired in the evenings.
I think I may get a cold a bit more often. But as someone else noted, my muscles are less tense, and that is throughout the body, not legs in particular.