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Comment by solarmist | Hacker News Reader

I'd suggest splitting your two hour workouts into one hour chucks or even making them separate workouts.

There's been a good amount of research implying if not stating out right that an intense workout of more than an hour does more harm than good.

After about an hour you've burned most of the glycogen in your muscles and are just spinning your wheels (ie overworking your muscles rather than breaking them down to build them up).

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To me, "two-hour long" and "very intense" in the gym is a contradiction, unless antirez means aerobic work. In my experience if you do heavy squats, deadlifts, presses etc. you will be done in maybe 45 minutes, will have not much energy to do anything else for the rest of the day and it will take all the time until the next workout to fully recover. If you are interested in the best fitness results, this is necessary, for keeping the mental performance high as much as possible the intensity has to be much more moderate.

Too true. If I go heavy on squats or deadlifts I can completely exhaust myself to the point of throwing up and light headed-ness in 15 minutes (Then comes upper body :P), so I call bull-shit that you can have a two hour intense workout.

Indeed in those sessions I do both aerobic and weights in the same session. Like 30 minutes aerobic, and then all the big groups of muscles in the remaining time, but of course there are the mandatory pauses, like 60 seconds every repetition, 90 seconds between different exercises, and so forth. The order is: legs, top part, and at the end I do rectus abdominis exercises.

There's been a good amount of research implying if not stating out right that an intense workout of more than an hour does more harm than good.

This is an extremely generalizing statement. Could you please provide citation(s)?

For example the term "hitting the wall" used commonly among marathoners practically means depleting the glycogen. However this generally happens around the 2 hour mark (assuming no replacement during exercise).

Not all exercises are created equally. A walk in the park is a form of exercise and so is endurance running. Shall we just assume these are equally demanding and stop at the 1 hour mark regardless?

He pointed out the gym workouts are very intensive. And I agree with the advice from experience; I have a couple of friends who are really good swimmers and they told me their bodies respond better to short training sessions. Maybe give it a try for six weeks and then compare the results.

It's been a couple years since I dug into the research myself, but doing a quick search it appears to be related to depleted glycogen, depleting bio-available testosterone, a rise in cortisol, plus various immune system changes.

It hard to find specific articles on the internet though, but here's one that's talks in a general way about it, but doens't come out and say one hour. http://chriskresser.com/why-you-may-need-to-exercise-less

Here's another that graphs the cortisol response vs time, but doesn't link to the specific article. http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/drryan6.htm

There are a lot of variables to control for, so of course it isn't that simple.

Intensity is the key. 45-60 minutes of intense (as in you can only have labored conversations during this time) exercise is about all your body can handle at a time though.

I wish I could provide direct citations, but as I said in my other post it's been a while since I was reading the research and it took me weeks of reading to find key nuggets like that directly, mostly it's this article based on that article based on these 10 papers and only one directly comes out and says it.

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