And exercise helps sleep! It's an unbelievable virtuous cycle.

For those people, any kind of a generalized take on "how much you can get away with in terms of fitness" wouldn't be helpful either. They will need a way more specific advice tailored to their individual needs and physical limitations.

It is pretty obvious the grandparent comment was just attempting to give a generalized advice, without claiming that it would comprehensively apply to every single niche condition out there (and it would be rather silly to expect it to).

If you are in this situation, you should see a physical therapist.

Exercise is even more important if you have a disability, because your muscles will atrophy from disuse and cause even greater disability.

E.g. if you stop moving your leg because you have a bad knee, you will now have a bad knee and a weak leg. If you go to PT and do exercises to strengthen the muscles around the knee, it can take load off the joint and improve function.

And those limitations don't mean people can't exercise as a whole. As the list they provided explains, the goal is to find something you can do relatively consistently that gets you active. Walking even 5 minutes more than normal is an improvement for many, and you can even reach the level of sports like wheelchair rugby.

All the more reason to be more active. Everyone struggles.

There’s even Paralympics in this world. People with disabilities do sports, although obviously it complicates things.

Do these people you mention read a comment on the internet saying people should exercise more and think that comment is referring to them?

I do not understand this type of objection. What is the point of shooting down a reasonable recommendation (in this case exercise and having fun doing so) with a handwavy moral plight such as yours?

It truly is a bizarre spin on whataboutism.

> People will eventually realize it causes cancer. Weight training literally generates inflation.

Inflation? I don't think this comment could have better intentionally illustrated how ill-informed it is if you tried.

Can you provide studies/sources for your claims?

I've read before that tall people get more cancer than short people, if it's relative to how many cells you have then an extra 30 kilograms of muscle might make a difference too!

The studies I've seen point to a reduce risk & mortality of diseases inclusive of cancer, not sure what you've been reading from.

just raise interest rates to counteract, then

perhaps you meant inflammation

resistance training doesn't cause cancer though

Presumably it’s a known amount approximately matching what they do.

What needs to be done is relatively simple. Convincing society to fix what's broken is the hard part.

We need to restructure cities away from being driving focused.

100% agree. The real battle isn't the actual exercise. It's initiating it in the face of endless distractions.

I think what the poster was getting at is that finding a minimum is a negative way to view human health (what is the minimum amount of food a human needs to survive, what is the minimum I need to brush my teeth so they don't fall out of my head, etc.).

Restructuring society in healthy ways (shorter work weeks, bike lanes, green cities, etc.) will allow us to achieve whatever that minimum would have been (had we measured!) and more!

At least I think that's the distinction.

The only time I prefer to sit is after I have done a good deal of exercise. I don't mean that as a jab of any sort, just a differing perspective from someone who gets much more than a minimum of required exercise.

This is where calisthenics comes into play. You can quite easily increase and decrease the leverage on the muscle to workup to the 'main exercise' and even past it. IE, for pull ups, you can hang under a table and do a 'horizontal' pull, you can 'cheat' up the movement (jumping), you can use resistance bands, etc. This is the same for almost every muscle group.

if it's sturdy/you're light then doing eccentrics (jump up, come down unassisted) is a good way of working up to full pull ups.

That's not how any of this works. Exercise causes some oxidative stress but this isn't a problem in practice. There is only a tiny fraction of committed athletes who over train to the point where it becomes detrimental; most people simply don't have the time or discipline to get anywhere close to that point.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jshs.2020.04.001

As for heart rate, going above threshold is never comfortable. But it's a good pain and you can get used to tolerating it for occasional high-intensity interval workouts. Over time this will decrease your resting heart rate and reduce the risk of a major adverse cardiovascular event (MACE).

You need to ramp up, of course. Given you're training at an appropriate rate, and you're doing sensible things - you should be fine. By sensible things I mean: short and intense weight training, intense cardio sessions, and not-too-long endurance sessions (eg: < 5h). More endurance is fine, but it can be very fatiguing, especially for the older athlete. If you ramp up to those over time, you needn't worry about "free radicals" (that's an oversimplification).

Recent research highlights a number of things, but what sticks out is that it's important to maintaining muscle mass because we lose a bunch as we get older, and loss of muscle is a leading morbidity factor.

I doubt it.

People have all kinds of self-defeating behavior, and those behaviors seem to be on the rise since smartphones became popular. It's likely that people enjoy it and won't do it anyway.

Gotta fuckin love hn. Can't say the simplest thing without getting thrown into a well, actually.

I wasn't claiming to have run a damned study. Just making an observation. The thing is, people who don't enjoy exercising but start exercising anyway tend to find they enjoy it after a while. Saying people enjoy exercise is like saying "ice cream tastes good". There's a bit of activation energy required, but it's not a huge stretch to notice that something that is good for our bodies gives us pleasure.