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Comment by vladharbuz | Hacker News Reader

The article's title is somewhat misleading. The study emphasises the level of fitness rather than the regularity of exercise. [0]

> Question: What is the association between cardiorespiratory fitness and long-term mortality?

> Findings: In this cohort study of 122 007 consecutive patients undergoing exercise treadmill testing, cardiorespiratory fitness was inversely associated with all-cause mortality without an observed upper limit of benefit. Extreme cardiorespiratory fitness (≥2 SDs above the mean for age and sex) was associated with the lowest risk-adjusted all-cause mortality compared with all other performance groups.

> Meaning: Cardiorespiratory fitness is a modifiable indicator of long-term mortality, and health care professionals should encourage patients to achieve and maintain high levels of fitness.

[0]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

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I wonder how they know it is modifiable? Without splitting the population into “folks we told to exercise” and those who we did not, you can’t really know how successful such a program is.

People that feel good and aren’t sick will be likely to exercise more, so there are confounding factors.

That's a little pedantic, even for HN, don't you think? "Oh, it's not the exercise that's important, it's the stuff that happens BECAUSE you exercise."

It's not pedantic, it's a real point. It's not clear at all that the relationship between exercise and fitness is as simple as you claim.

Clearly, if a given person exercises more, they will be more fit. But there are also many other factors, including genetics, influencing fitness.

Also if you're body starts to fail due to diabetes or kidney disease your cardiorespiratory fitness drops as well.

Unhealthy people in general will do poorly at those tests. Even if you don’t exercise, but are active, you will do better than a sick person.

The study’s benefit is that folks should get tested and if their fitness level is poor, figure out why.

The conclusion isn’t, “I exercise and therefor i will live longer”

It's not pedantic at all. I'm ~40 and don't exercise at all, yet I'm still perfectly fit. I presume it's due to doing groceries by foot several times per week, having a standup desk, and carrying the kid around. Perhaps genes help too. But the point I'd like to get across is: going to the gym isn't the sine qua non of making you fit. You can get enough "exercise" by simply living without a car, standing, and walking.

I think you need to define perfectly fit. Can you do 10 pullups?

99% of the population can’t do 1 pull-up, let alone 10. Most of the people I go to the gym with would struggle with more than a few.

Hell, even marines and rangers have lower fitness standards (3 and 6 dead hang chin ups respectively).

That's a gtoss misrepresentation of the marines' standards. The tables are here: https://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publications/MCBUL%206100...

3 is for men over 51. And that's the bare minimum, not get kicked out of the marines threshold.

To reach top rank scoring is more like 15-17 for most ages. Mid rank is about 11 or up.

Maybe 99% of the population can't do a pullup, but I feel that's an overestimate. In any case, that says more about our overall societal weakness than anything else.

What are your gym friends doing if they couldn't do more than a few? Are they strength training or just doing cardio? Serious question, I'm curious. With a few months training ar age 26 I was able to do 5 reps of my bodyweight + about 40 pounds IIRC. And now, even when I periodically stop strength training, I am rarely below 8-10 when I start again.

Chin-ups are hard, but they're not that hard if you train them or do any activity that works those muscles.

I can’t do 10 pull ups but I run 50 miles a week.

Pullups are more of a gymnastic activity that just requires your nervous system is trained to recruit the right muscles very intensely at the right time. I can do maybe 12-15 and am borderline overweight, just because I do them habitually.

If you check, you will find it is incredibly rare for health and fitness books and articles to define "health", "fitness" or "exercise". Body by Science[0][1] gets right to it on pages 2 and 3 to define all three:

Health: A physiological state in which there is an absence of disease or pathology and that maintains the necessary biologic balance between the catabolic and anabolic states.

Fitness: The bodily state of being physiologically capable of handling challenges that exist above a resting threshold of activity.

Exercise: A specific activity that stimulates a positive physiological adaptation that serves to enhance fitness and health and does not undermine the latter in the process of enhancing the former.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Body-Science-Research-Strength-Traini...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PdJFbjWHEU

Not the person you replied to, but I know well a person who

* does zero exercise, other than a few short walks every workday * has done very little exercise at any time in the last 20+ years * is as sedentary as life allows him to be * can do 10 pullups no problem * has a "normal" BMI

Is that fit? Who knows, I certainly don't. Also maybe he's not very healthy despite some favourable metrics, I dunno. Could be a lot worse, though.

My point here was only to substantiate that exercise and fitness are not perfectly correlated, and thus support vladharbuz's top-level comment.

Now we've just traded one form of pedantry for another.

Some would say your activity is exercise. Or you could say exercise is only stuff done for no other reason than fitness, but your activity substitutes for exercise.

In any case, the first paragraph of the CNN article makes it clear the distinction is "a sedentary lifestyle". Clearly if you are active, you aren't sedentary.

Anyway, what the researchers studied is not self-reported fitness but treadmill testing as a measure of cardiovascular fitness. If your grocery- and kid-carrying habits allow you to do well on a treadmill test, then you "exercise" according to the parameters of what was studied.

> I'm ~40 and don't exercise at all, yet I'm still perfectly fit.

You should really get a CPX test to verify this.

I'm with you, I've learned that "I'm perfectly fit" is one of those lies we convince ourselves is true to feel better about ourselves.

We might have even mostly convinced ourselves that "fit" means "not obese, and doesn't get winded on two flights of stairs"

Some kind of at-home standard benchmark would be handy.

As someone who exercises, I didn't think the comment was pedantic at all. I thought yours was actually.

A lot of people define exercise as either some sort of rigorous structured activity, or something that makes you sweat, or something that makes you huff and puff.

A lot of resistance training my do none of those things, but still result in a high level of fitness, including cardiovascular. So, it was helpful to see what exactly the study was referring to.

Conversely, a lot of people "exercise" regularly, but aren't particularly fit when measured against objective metrics.

Grip strength is also an excellent marker of longevity/imminent death - but this is probably not a result of exercise, and certainly not grip-strength exercise. Science is not assuming that what seems like a very reasonable guess is true, and questioning such assumptions must be "pedantic." Instead, we do the experiments and know one way or another.

PS - one of the things that happens when most people exercise is more UV exposure as they walk, run or cycle: and previous studies have shown UV exposure to be more important for longevity than exercise per se.

Here’s another reason it isn’t pedantic. Without being precise, you get headlines like not exercising is worse for you than smoking: https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/12511EDC-D4E7-11E...

“Smoking is bad, but sitting around doing nothing is even more deadly, study shows”

That study didn’t show anything like that!

How do you propose that someone attain a high degree of fitness without regular exercise?

Would it be insufficient for a study to tell people to drink more water even though we know it's not the action of drinking water that helps us, but the cellular interaction with it once it's inside us? And even though people could connect saline bags directly to their nervous system?

So, I'm wondering what you're clarifying.

I think it's more that regular exercise isn't sufficient to actually have a high degree of fitness. If you exercise regularly but still over eat with a terrible diet then you're likely not going to actually get fit.

It’s true that the positive effects would be lessened, possibly. Anecdotally, however, I’ve seen several dozen professional athletes eat like trash while maintaining an elite level of fitness. Turns out the body is fairly good at efficient nutrient synthesis, having done it for millions of years in sub-optimal conditions.

> How do you propose that someone attain a high degree of fitness without regular exercise?

There are some personal factors involved, two people performing on equal level on the treadmill test does not imply they exercise with the same regularity.

For example, I use my mountain bike for exercise, but on the treadmill I'll probably be beaten by the person that exercises by jogging even if we exercise with the same regularity.

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