Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Protein
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Maybe the extra energetic investment in brain health is only justified when there is an energetic surplus, and doing exercise correlates with having extra energy available? (As opposed to starving and thus needing to conserve energy.) But that doesn't actually make sense, since the extra metabolic expenditure of these processes can't possibly be all that high, and doesn't the brain use almost the same (huge) amount of resources whether it's at rest or very cognitively active?
Like what I've heard about automatic transmissions. Supposedly, some automatic transmissions do not lubricate themselves when coasting in neutral (the pump is driven engine-side), and for this reason you shouldn't regularly coast long distances at freeway speeds in neutral on an affected automatic. Why is it this way? Simply because it's easy to slave the pump off the engine-side, and at 65mph, you generally have your engine engaged! So why NOT?
Evolution is all about selective pressures, but equally important are the absence of those pressures.
Maybe you should be asking the opposite question like why should evolution reward sedentary life? Human history involves daily exercise in some form that is more strenuous than a long walk and that's clearly connected to our general health and well-being both mentally and physically (why should these be separate to evolution?). What we're doing today is the exception, we shouldn't expect everything to work out as before.
I imagine we're in a temporary lull. Either modern society will collapse and we'll go back to farming or hunting and gathering, or we'll invent a exercise pill. There is effort in this direction:
http://qz.com/516757/scientists-are-working-on-an-exercise-p...
If you can live a sedentary lifestyle and still produce children, then evolution doesn't care. In fact, an indoors lifestyle is much more fit in the longterm than a life of hard labor.
Evolution isn't trying to create the Platonic Ideal of a human. It just is a thoughtless mechanism to efficiently reproduce DNA.
Hunter/gatherer humanity did not have the luxury of a sedentary lifestyle, so it did have a negative impact on your ability to produce children for a long time.
> In fact, an indoors lifestyle is much more fit in the longterm than a life of hard labor.
I think "hard labor" is a bit extreme, but even so, working a physically demanding job is still better for your overall health than a sedentary lifestyle of office job + sitting on the couch watching Netflix.
Again, evolution does not care. As long as you can survive to about 40 (long enough to raise children), it makes no difference.
Or maybe people will just learn to exercise regularly and stay healthy? That seems more likely than the collapse of society.
I recorded a video conversation with the pioneer of the lactate shuttle theory behind this mechanism which may interest you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lThFQM503EU
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactate_shuttle_hypothesis
http://www.runnersworld.com/running-tips/how-to-achieve-a-ru...
>The endogenous opioids seem likely to be assigned a significant role in the integrated hormonal and metabolic response to exercise. This article reviews the present evidence on exercise and the endogenous opioids, and examines their involvement in a number of widely disparate physiological processes
My memory is telling me that studies of exercise show the longest living are those that do anything from endurance to what the article below calls "mixed" sports. Powerlifting and high intensity training may offer some benefit, but it is not as much as endurance training.
What I found in a quick Google search to attempt to refresh my memory, is in agreement: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/live-as-long-as-an-...
It's also been proven that HIIT is much more beneficial for your system than LISS.
It might "seem" more beneficial to you, but likely is not more beneficial than the alternatives. However, something is definitely better than nothing, and do what works for you and makes you happy.
Source? What is your definition of 'better?' The context is in longevity, and my link offers some evidence against your statement, so I think you should provide some source for your claim that HIIT is consistent with living longer than LISS because that's not what I've seen published in the last 10 years.
I've competed now in three separate strength sports (powerlifting, strongman, olympic lifting). There isn't a single person on any competitive circuit that only lifts weights once every 8 days. You might be getting strong for you. You started in March, so you are on the ultra-beginner slope that means you can basically do any training in existence and make gains. That will steadily slow.
Regarding a definition of "strong", there are many, but the one most people in the strength industry agree on is:
* 2.5x bodyweight dead lift
* 2x bodyweight full squat
* 1.5x bodyweight bench
* 1x bodyweight standing strict overhead press
No offense to the one person you read, but hundreds of years of strength athletes are on the side of lifting weights multiple times per week.
I have actually read more than one "person". McGuff actually has some credibility, and cites many scholarly articles in his book. However his method is not aimed at competitive weightlifters, which suits me as I don't have hours to spend at the gym every week, or a desire to get huge. I do expect to be stronger than approximately 99% of my peers by the end of the year though, which in my book is a bit better than "strong for me".
Yes, but you said a workout every 8 days was optimum. I'm saying that's completely bad information. You don't have to compete to learn from people who compete.
You wouldn't learn an optimal golf swing from someone who only plays mini-golf at an arcade would you? No, you'd look at the true greats in the game.
Here are just a few people to read instead of McGuff, all of who have some actual strength credentials.
* Wendler
* Coan
* Rippetoe
* Dan John
* Pavel
* Abadjiev
* KilgoreHow much do people consider body shape when looking at those numbers?
The big criticisms of this kind of training would be:
1.) athleticism (he recommends machines, but free weights and calisthenics--replacing lat pulls with pull ups, muscle ups, etc is much better for athleticism)
2.) strength (he recommends machines, no momentum in movements, long recovery periods... this is basically how bodybuilders train to build the most muscle, but power lifters and athletes will optimize for maximum power, which includes momentum in their movements, and more endurance in their muscles)
3.) cardio/weight loss (you will burn more calories and build better cardio with higher volume, repitions)
4.) Injury (machines, low reps, high weights, all increase risk of injury)
Strength is highly correlated with reduced all cause mortality. Which direction the relationship goes is debatable, but being strong is pretty sweet in and of itself.
Anyways I've run marathons in the past, but I mostly do strength training now, actually mostly callisthenics. It's less dedication, gives me more of an adrenaline rush and easier to do than endurance training. I don't deny, though, that most of what I've read says that cardio is better if you just simply want to live as long as possible.
If you only watch TV or read while walking at an incline on the treadmill, it's easy to rack up the miles without inconveniencing yourself. I probably hit about 24 miles a week doing this.
reddit post with main study, also comments have HN posts about it and good critiques. interesting stuff.
I've seen the cardio U curve study before too but do not have it saved like I did the strength one.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/93/web/2015/10/Exploring-Molecul...
With long term phenotypes like brain health, there probably isn't enough selective pressure to create or maintain this relationship.
Rather this result is likely the result of coincidence, and that coincidence was not deleterious enough to be removed by selection. Ex :
Exercise stimulates repair enzymes > Excess Repair Enzymes Filter Into Blood Stream > Excess Repair Enzymes Also Fix Brain Cells.
during all this the brain experiences a surge in blood levels, oxygen, metabolic exchanges happen faster and so your brain is more effective.
add into that, the body breaks down fats to power you, those fats have omega fatty acids that are released into the blood stream and go to the brain to provide nutrients.
this is why drinking coffee wakes you up.
what I really want is a pair of those leg pumps that assist the heart, so I can sit on my ass longer and code whilst getting the benefits of exercise on my brain :)
Unless it's explicitly linked to surviving natural selection before reproduction, it's more likely that this finding is just a pointless by-product of another biomolecular pathway, even though it may have some discernible benefits.
It's like trying to puzzle out why there are nipples on male mammals - it usually devolves to some creative stories and hand waving.
That is, they're useful for the female and not particularly harmful for the male, so they live on.
It's also an instance of DRY (don't repeat yourself) "coding" in our DNA: basically males and females carry the same instructions, with a bunch of randomly interspersed if/else conditions that hinge on the presence of testosterone (coded for in the small Y chromosome)
Physical activity levels were also within a standard deviation of one another (between western and h/g populations).
The brain evolved in similar conditions to modern man. I would argue current conditions are far better for the brain in terms of good nutrition and low disease.
The effect in the OP was not selected for, it is likely a serendipitous biochemical interaction. Repair enzymes from one part of they also effecting another.
As far as exercise goes, maybe one standard deviation is enough to produce a brain effect. And maybe there is a lot of variation within modern populations, with many far enough below the average to have a significant effect.
I find it really hard to believe that any healthy Hunter/Gatherers sit around all day like so many moderns do.
That's an even more fascinating idea; so what other things could create the conditions for other repair systems to be activated. Maybe meditation, maybe different drugs, plants, ketosis etc...
And, of course, we know nutrients like Zinc and Vitamin C are essential for tissue repair via being essential for DNA replication.
That is speculation, and is unintuitive. Why would the brain "work hardest" when running? Why would modern humans not exert the same forces during sport? Why would humans, the top group-oriented predator, run from a lion?
The data linked above shows that observed Physical Activity Levels and caloric use are comparable to modern day. Stop inserting your own assumptions into the data.
I'd sure run from a lion if it was coming at me.
Ghost & The Darkness aside, lions generally don't hunt humans. But humans did spend a bunch of time pursuing game over long distances.
As expected, physical activity level, PAL, was greater among Hadza foragers than among Westerners.
Within a standard deviation. Higher on average, but not much, and not significantly.
No where near enough to exert selection pressure.
PAL is 2.26 +- 0.48 for Hadza male and 1.81 +- 0.21 for Western Male. That's an average 25% difference in activity. I'm not a biologist but it seems like that could surely be significant.
Especially if the protein being talked about is generated by strenuous activity above some level. 25% total difference in activity could be a very large difference in activity above a threshold, since both groups are going to spend a lot of the day sitting around, sleeping or walking slowly.
Minute changes are actually a huge part of evolution. Evolution is much more about minute changes than it is about huge (standard-deviation-level) changes.
The two work in concert because fast prey escapes line of sight and gets mixed up with each other easily, so human endurance becomes much less useful if you can't follow & wear down the appropriate target.
"Born to Run" is a fun summary/story about some of this science but there's more hard science out there too if you're interested.
You need to see the connection of systems. Neuromuscular connection of basal ganglia: central part of brain - neural pathway - muscle - and then feeling of movement going back to the brain through hypothalamus and to other areas - from hypothalamus it goes to brain like a shotgun fire.
The more you do the same movement the more you fire up the same lines. In order to get faster and more effective movement you add additional channels for signal transport in neuronal connections {this happens through release of BDNF, which induces insertion of new channels, for faster transmission}. This molecule happen to influence formation of memory, survival of neurons and supress your desire to eat.
There has been an article from 1998 about reduced cathepsin, which happens to reduce this BDNF. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9514826)
Sooo, again, I dont know, but this seems a bit like a side effect of firing up those circuits, because more or less the same way works memory formation (long-term memory potentiation). I would guess here plays a role effect of neigborhood - niche influencing neurons sitting next to those active pathways.
BTW. Also movement should increase your bloodflow, waste created by neurons is now removed much faster, this should go the same for neurotrasmitters - molecules transmitting signal which just flow around and act as signal interference, thus removing part of interference and now you can fire clear signal.
When you are not active, you don't need to be doing those things as much.
If you have an elevated heart rate and exercising in the past that might mean going after food where you have to outwit, thus the brain needed to fuel/prepare for that.
Additionally, exercise could be fighting, you might also need elevated brain performance during a battle for survival.
It might also mean you are doing some work to get a system in place for food and providing that for others in the group.
Exercising is probably tied to survival, nourishment and providing. The brain probably has a reward system because it can expend more energy if there is more to be had soon.
Evolutionary speaking, those animals whose brains go into "extra learning mode" during exercise likely had a huge advantage over their peers whose brains didn't. Their brains picked up on skills related to hunting and survival and didn't waste energy building neural connections while they're sitting around not doing anything.
The fact is that none of this greatly influences reproductive fitness, so it is unlikely to be acted on by evolution.
The effect is likely just biochemical coincidence. Repair enzymes in one part of the body effecting another.
2. You are assuming fights exert the same effect as exercise.
3. You are assuming the selection pressure is great enough to effect allele frequency.
4. You are assuming humans fight alone.
5. You are assuming humans have extra knowledge to be gained in a split second of a fight.
6. You are assuming said extra knowledge would be overwhelmingly adaptive in a physical fight.
Breaking down adaptation is all about understanding your assumptions. It is easy to speculate, but it is hard measure evolution. However, given rigorous study we can measure adaptation mathematically and quantify it's impacts.
> The fact is that none of this greatly influences reproductive fitness, so it is unlikely to be acted on by evolution.
It absolutely does, in fact, it's probably a key influence of reproductive fitness in predatory species. The species that can gather more energy or more efficiently use that energy is going to out-grow their peers more each successive generation. And it's easy to see the relationship between more efficient learning and gathering more food.
A group of hunting animals that learn 10% faster during and after exercising than a control group would have a huge resource advantage because they increases both the pool of available prey and the likelihood of catching prey. Acquiring just 7% more calories (and translating that into 7% more offspring) would result in a population that is double the control group in 10 generations.
Both physical activity and brain-health improve survival and a small group of people whose brain became healtheir with physical activity survived at a faster rate than others.
Isn't it obvious ? I would assume exercise for early humans did not mean spending 30 minutes running for no reason. They probably spent that time running after a rabbit or running way with someone else's wife on his shoulder etc or tribes that kept well trained armies probably survived at a higher rate than tribes that relied on the Shaman to summon the dead.
Your question assumes that bodily health and brain health are separate and distinct things - as if we are mental beings that just happen to have bodies.
Perhaps we should read the headline as "exercise releases body healthy protein" ... I doubt we'd consider that an evolutionary paradox.
Probably these results should be considered ipso facto.
_"Wealthy people with quirks are called eccentric. Poor people are called crazy"_
"Brain health," as it's used in this article, would also contribute to coordination, muscle control, and various other things that would benefit athletes in ways that are totally opaque to you or me.
The article doesn't say exercise makes you smarter, and even if it did, "smarter" is an awfully vague term.
Also - it's a very small sample size. And if I look more broadly... 2 of the seemingly "dumbest jocks" I knew in college went on to become doctors, one at the Mayo clinic. So perhaps their intelligence was showing in other areas until they got out of school.
This can happen for a variety of reasons: poverty, nutrition, "misaligned" interests, etc.
Intelligence plays a role in that someone with an IQ of 80 probably isn't going to Stanford, but there are ostensibly plenty of people with IQs far above your average Stanford student who will never set foot in a university.
If artistic ability has a strong influence on intelligence compared to athleticism, then P(intelligent | artistic) >= P(intelligent | athletic). We know that P(athletic) > P(artistic) from the data.
By Bayes' theorem:
P(intelligent | artistic) = P(artistic | intelligent) * P(intelligent) / P(artistic).
P(intelligent | athletic) = P(athletic | intelligent) * P(intelligent) / P(athletic).
Ignoring P(intelligent) for a sec, we find
P(intelligent | artistic) ~ P(artistic | intelligent) / P(artistic)
P(intelligent | athletic) ~ P(athletic | intelligent) / P(athletic)
If we accept the assumption that artistic ability is a bigger influence, then
P(artistic | intelligent) / P(artistic) > P(athletic | intelligent) / P(athletic)
Because P(athletic) > P(artistic),
P(artistic | intelligent) > P(artistic) * P(athletic | intelligent) / P(athletic)
P(artistic)/P(athletic) must be less than 1, so we get
P(artistic | intelligent) > P(athletic | intelligent)
I'm not really sure where I was headed with this, but it was neat to think about. If anyone spots an error please just correct me.
Which types help lower cholestrol?
Which types are best for the heart?
There are other beneficial side effects like: endorphins, high quality night sleep, bigger amount of oxygen reaches the entire body and the brain.
http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/HealthyLiving/PhysicalActivity...
Honestly, considering the overweight and obese population is growing we have a problem with systemic overeating that needs to be corrected first. It doesn't matter how much exercise you do if you eat more than you need.
Everyone can exercise, no matter what condition: bad heart, missing lung, missing limbs, etc. There is some form of exercise that can be done. You name a condition, I'm sure I can find someone on youtube with that condition absolutely crushing a work out.
One example would be Resveratrol, that mimics caloric restriction. For exercise, the challenge seems to be quite hard (http://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2015/10/02/exercise-i...), but there can be seen some progress in animal models (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/0...).
https://gyrosco.pe/myusuf3/2016/6/27/
As you can see, me there playing sports that evening, super exciting and really keeps me focused. Granted hard to take me seriously, but we have some users like Tatiana have done some amazing stuff
I do HIIT, with running uphill on treadmill (1 min sprint, 2 mins slow pace, increase inclination, repeat), but it's only one type of running I do (others are slowly increasing speed and inclination every 5 mins, and just circles in hilly park nearby). It's very effective, 'different' type than others (heart rate takes very long to come down for example).
Definitely I feel my knees more after usual running on concrete in proper shoes rather than these treadmill sprints.
If you don't challenge your body and put some pressure on muscles/joints/ligaments/cardiovascular system etc. it will never reach its potential. Would I do this if 60 years old? No. But I don't consider such blank statements true. If you don't want to do HIIT for whatever reason, that's your choice
Edit: Got back to my laptop and did some research myself.
Aerobic Exercise Training Increases Brain Volume in Aging Humans (and nonaerobic doesn't) -http://biomedgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/61/11/11...
Findings show that although the more intense, motorized running exercise induced a rapid increase in BDNF, the elevation was more short-lived than with voluntary running. Suggests that longer, easier exercises might be more beneficial. - http://202.120.143.134/download/20090702135031_277199777813....
Exercise effects on executive function are not doseresponsive, meaning that better fitness does not necessarily lead to larger cognitive gains... physical activity levels that benefit cognition may not necessarily be as intense as those levels required to increase cardiovascular fitness. - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michelle_Ploughman/publ...
neither duration (20 vs. 40 min) nor intensity (60 vs. 80% HR reserve) significantly affects the benefits of exercise if only the sBDNF increase at a single post-exercise time point is considered... -http://www.jssm.org/research.php?id=jssm-12-502.xml
High intensity interval training evokes (slightly) larger serum BDNF levels compared to intense continuous exercise. - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicole_Wenderoth/public...
This meta-analysis provides reliable evidence that both acute and regular exercise have a significant impact on BDNF levels. (but animal models show that these can be gone soon after you stop training) - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4314337/
The effects of acute exercise on cognitive performance: A meta-analysis - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yu_Kai_Chang/publicatio...
I can recommend the meta-analysis (last link), data is unfortunately somewhat inconclusive. There are basically two theories, the inverted-U theory, stating that moderate exercise is most beneficial and the drive theory, stating that the largest effects will be achieved with the largest intensity. Chang et. al., however, conclude that: The size of the benefit is dependent upon a number of factors, but results indicate that benefits are larger for more fit individuals who perform the physical activity for 20 min or longer. The appropriate intensity depends upon the time of measurement — any intensity benefits cognitive performance during exercise, but lower intensities provide more benefit when the tests are performed immediately after exercise and higher intensities have more durable effects that can be observed even following a delay.
TL;DR: Long distance running or other sustained aerobic exercise is best. Several meta-analyses also have shown that the mood and cognitive benefits increase with aerobic exercise duration and intensity.
"Regular exercise changes the brain to improve memory, thinking skills"
http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/regular-exercise-changes-...
Spark details how high-intensity cardio (like sprints or interval training) put your brain chemicals in balance in part by generating BDNF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-derived_neurotrophic_fact...), which as Ratey describes, it's like "Miracle-gro" for the brain.
Last year my stress levels were getting out of control from working too much. At the time I was running at least two miles every day so it's not like I wasn't exercising. But then one day I changed from running a couple miles to running 50-yard sprints, as fast and as hard as I could push myself. The first day I only ran four sprints, but I felt euphoric the rest of the day -- the best I had felt in years. So I tried it again a couple days later, and sure enough it worked again -- I felt amazing.
So then I had to find out why this worked -- why a few sprints were so much more effective than running several miles. I started Googling and eventually found Ratey's book -- it explains the entire biochemical process of what's going on and why sprinting works.
It's an eye-opening read. Each chapter covers how high-intensity cardio affects things like stress, anxiety, depression, ADHD. I have ADHD but haven't taken anything for it in years (since I was in college), and I can attest that sprints not only fixed by stress levels, but my ADHD symptoms were almost non existent.
Here's a key point that Ratey makes throughout the book that completely changed my perspective on things -- he says that instead of thinking of exercise as something you should do to look good and build a healthy body, you should instead think of exercise as the key to building a healthy brain:
"We all know that exercise makes us feel better, but most of us have no idea why. We assume its because we're burning off stress or reducing muscle tension or boosting endorphins, and we leave it at that. But the real reason we feel so good when we get our blood pumping is that it makes the brain function at its best" (http://www.sparkinglife.org).
In the book's introduction he goes on to say, "Building muscles and conditioning the heart and lungs are essentially side effects. I often tell my patients that the point of exercise is to build and condition the brain."
In fact the brain exercise routine he recommends is similar to a weight workout routine, in that you have to push yourself hard one day, and then take a day off to let your brain recover, just like in weight training. Another key is when you sprint, always put everything you have into it. Run as fast and as hard as you can so you are constantly pushing your body and your brain past their limitations -- this is the key to growth.
Reposted from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5323019 (2013)
Also see: "How exercise boosts brain health" (http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-exercise-boosts-brain-health)
Also, Ivy League schools recruit heavily based on athletics, but they still hold their recruits to high academic standards.
I get it, and I think everyone here has, exercise is good for you, in many ways, don't sit on your ass all day.
I guess it's sad to see this becoming the "Good Morning America" of tech (not that we didn't have those ones already) or the ultra localized we-only-care-about-the-bay-area medium.
More seriously though, I really find no pleasure in exercise and would like to approach it in the most cost-effective way (i.e. maximum benefit for minimum time used). Any hints on exercise regime optimised for that? I heard weightlifting is good.
I don't think anyone who has done weightlifting would say you can do it quickly or that it takes minimal time or effort.
For many, doing a 10 minute mile for 30 minutes can be quite challenging.
If I recall correctly, it monitored ~20000 people over ~19 years, and provided bell curves of the best benefit.
I used to jog every day for an hour, and it was bliss. I miss it. Any day I don't get up and go for a run, I feel like I am worse off for it. But I'm trying to migrate to the above.
3 days/week. Takes about 30-45 minutes. Alternate A/B each week. So week 1 is ABA, week 2 is BAB, repeating.
A: Squats, Overhead Press, Deadlifts
B: Squats, Brench Press, Barbell Row
Ignore the marketing speak: http://stronglifts.com/5x5/ - has all the info you'd need and a free app to track your exercises. I highly recommend it.
Still tiring. Not painful unless you have bad form, and 3 hours/week isn't that time consuming (IMO).
You might not necessarily lose a ton of weight - but you will feel stronger. And you'll notice when you go from struggling with light weights to effortlessly lifting triple that.
I've been very a active exerciser my whole adult life. It's part of my identity.
Last year I started suffering from chronic fatigue. Exercise began to hurt. It hurt when I did it. It hurt afterward. I was tired all the time. I was gaining weight. I stopped exercising. It brought me no relief. Only resting did.
I knew something was wrong. Went to Doctor. Treated me like I'm a lazy ass who doesn't know how to care for myself. Fuck that dr.
I was on my own to figure this. I finally found out a treatment that works. Salt supplements and licorice root to address adrenal insufficiency. Day and night difference.
I feel bad for anyone who goes through something like that. It's not fair. And many people are dismissed by the medical establishment when they need help and compassion. It's awful how people get treated when they are sick but don't have the standard common diseases. The whole system sucks.
If it weren't for a long history of excellent health and fitness, I might thought I just don't like exercise. And never have the motivation to figure out how to get better.
But it could also just be that I never started to like exercising in the first place. I have myopia since early childhood - so from the first years in school, glasses gave me logistical problems on PE lessons. It was especially problematic during team games - when I took the glass off, I was the worst player in class. When I left them on, I could play somewhat well, but I was risking breaking them when hit by a ball (it actually happened). So I ended up avoiding team sports as much as I could, and there a negative feedback loop starts (not playing made me only suck more and be less willing to play).
Anyway, thanks for the advice :).
But not painful. Afterward you should feel alert and relaxed. And in reasonable amounts it should feel like it is increasing what you can get done. Usually anyway.
If not, something is wrong. Hopefully something that can be treated.
Good luck to you! Health can be very tricky. In so many ways health and wellness is still in the dark ages. So many incomplete models and misinformation. I've been there and feel bad for anyone else bewildered because they don't fit into mainstream ideas of how their bodies are supposed to work.
How did you find out this is what you needed?
Thought maybe I had mold in my house. Tested that. Maybe I'm allergic to my bedding. Got s new mattress and beefing.
Thought it might be kidney related since I had back pain in my flanks. Thought it might be my gallbladder. Thought it might be my liver. Tried various foods and supplements. Nothing helped.
Thought it might be thyroid related perhaps due to iodine deficiency. So I started taking table salt that has iodine in it. Started feeling less muscle pain immediately. Then started iodine tablet supplements. Pain returned. Then tried just salt tablets. Found relief. Then researched and found adrenals regulate sodium. Then found out licorice root blocks an enzyme that metabolizes cortisol, which is produced by your adrenal glands. Tried that. Fatigue disappeared. Sleep improved. Pain gone. Started losing weight.
So basically trial and error over many months. I'm only mentioning a small number of things I tried. Doctor was no help. But a better Doctor probably would have suggested better tests and things to try. But how would a normal person know their doctor is letting them down? Shit is hard.
It then focuses on deadlifts being one of the exercises that engage about 80% of the body's muscles and focuses on a short deadlift workout on a consistent basis.
As far as exercise related pain goes, the general rule is that sharp pains are bad (e.g. go see a doctor and get an xray/mri/scan) and dull throbbing pains are okay. Weight lifting can bring out dormant injuries as inactive muscles become activated and the body recomposes itself. These usually are treated with stretching, trigger point therapy, cupping and with time diminish significantly.
The Wendler 5/3/1 Program is very time efficient. There's an explanation of the program here in an interview with body builder by the name of Matt Ogus. http://www.simplyshredded.com/rising-star-natural-bodybuilde...
There's thousands of variations of exercise "programs" out there but the fundamentals are the same.
1. show up consistently 2. move weight at high intensities (>60%) to induce muscle hypertrophy 3. eat a lot (to gain muscle) || eat a little less (to lose fat) || eat adequately to maintain. (caloric surplus/deficit/maintenance)
Intensity refers to a percentage of your maximal weight that can be moved once. There are some calculators that can also calculate your 1-repetition-max based on the maximum.
One other piece of advice for myself is that I have very dry skin and using any type of soap on a daily basis dries out my skin pretty badly. As an Asian that lacks the specific type of sweat glands with BO, I've made showers that are time efficient by merely washing with water only. Soap is used sporadically, but 98% of daily showers are with water only. Anecdotally, other nationalities on reddit have reported success with water-only showering.
I can drive to the gym in 5 minutes, do several sets in 20-45 minutes depending on which compounds I am targeting, then be back home and spend another 5-10 minutes on a shower. Time is further made efficient by standardizing my tops with black t-shirts, so very little time is spent on choosing clothing.
Home versions of this is possible has well with a set of dumbbells, but if you have any strength, it is quite possible to outgrow the dumbbells in relatively short amount of time.
Glasses also don't get in the way of weights, other than wiping sweat underneath them between sets, but there aren't swift fast movements that jerk the face such that glasses are flying off of the face or a ball will knock one's glasses off.
For chronic conditions that inhibit intense activity, it may be worth looking at the concepts introduced by Terry Wahls in her Ted talk: http://terrywahls.com/minding-your-mitochondria-dr-terry-wah...
I got her book and it is repetitive, but the basic premise from this MD is that the body is a chemical environment and chemical deficiencies lead to malfunctions. As it is obvious that plants won't thrive without fertilizer and water, the same goes for human nutrition. Her solution is consuming food sources with 2-3 cups each of greens, 2-3 cups of sulfur (broccoli, cabbage, etc), 2-3 cups of color (blueberries, tomatoes, blackberries) & 4-6 oz of nutrient dense meat on a daily basis.
I found a tremendous amount of quality of life improvement by adding the greens/sulfur/color just several times a week as well.
"Body by Science", easily. No need to read the book, just the chapter on the protocol. The protocol is 12 minutes all-out effort, ONCE a week.
Anyone who likes exercise is already doing it. The constant drumbeat of "living healthy" that pervades the media and now the workplace is getting monotonous and annoying.
As long as we have largely employer-based healthcare, the pre-existing conditions exemption is asinine.
Maybe once we have an actual market, we can talk about re-introducing it.
And anyway, speaking for myself, I can see people being on the fence. Reading about articles or even comments online can be a tipping point to get (back) into a good habit.
Shutting down discussion of "living healthy" is kind of counter intuitive to fostering a community of smart people. You can be smart without exercising, but exercising does seem to help the process. It's crazy to see something that makes you smarter and hear someone say "please stop talking about that, it bores me". Maybe you always hear people talking about it because it really is that useful of a tool?
It is interesting to ask why, though.
Are people still interested because a lot don't know and are hearing about it? There's often secondary posts and discussions by different groups of people a day or two later, I suspect there are different demographics reading at different times. (This new thing sounds cool, let's discuss!)
Are they interested because they heard about it recently and thinks it needs more exposure? (This new thing seems cool, let's spread the word more!)
Are they interested because it has spurred them to action, and they had or have currently changed some aspect of their life for better or worse, and they feel they need to share? (This new thing is/was cool/sucked, let me tell you why!)
These are all different stages in the life cycle of a trend. I think it's interesting to identify the stages, as there can be different benefits and drawbacks to getting on board (if that's your wish) depending on the stage.
Also, this is a newly discovered mechanism for exercise being healthy, so it's not exactly "the same thing." I've been checking the comments regularly to get HN's "take."
Furthermore, health-related articles are extra beneficial for the HN community, since most people here probably have very sedentary jobs.
The potential context shift I have to offer here is that I perceive that what might be happening is that you see an article saying, "exercise is healthy for you brain!" - and you seem to see that all the time here and are bored of it, and that's reasonable. But what I, as a biologist, see, is an article saying, "The mechanism by which exercise assists the brain is cathepsin B!" That's new to me, I haven't heard it ever before, but I can see how a non-specialist might not be so interested in it -
Which then leads me to the context shift proper: it isn't that the same stuff is coming every single week, it's that you're not specialized enough in this area to understand the critical differences each time it comes across your radar here (and that biology should be having a larger and larger impact isn't surprising - bioinformatics is growing a lot, and health startups are downright ubiquitous - I'm a part of one, myself! :) ).
It's rather like a businessperson who doesn't care to understand the difference between Docker and Virtual Machines - they may justifiably not care when Docker puts out some new feature, but that doesn't mean that the new feature from Docker isn't important. I'm afraid that in a similar manner to the tech news seeping into the businessperson's business news, biology news may be seeping into your tech news, but I think it's justified in both cases.
All that said, you may be totally conversant with the nuances of protein interactions and pathway chemistry, and this same headline may just have escaped me the past few weeks that it has been posted, or something, regardless, I hope I don't offend, it just sounds like/seems like this may be the case- that something outside of your specialty looks like tons of the same old crap, when really it's all critically different, even if the advice arising from it is similar. It's of deep interest to us biotech folks, and we're becoming a larger and larger population on Hacker News, so, there it is. :)