The basic idea that lifting twice a week and doing cardio twice a week add up to a calorie expenditure that get you the vast majority of exercise benefits compared to extreme athletes holds up, especially when you take reverse causality adjustments into effect (survivorship bias on the genetic gifts of the extreme). Nothing I’ve encountered since has cast much doubt on this main takeaway.
Any exercise, even trivial amounts like walking 20 minutes or doing two sets of exercise a day, can yield dramatic improvements in quality of life. Young-ish healthy-ish people don’t tend to notice this because they’re already above the “life isn’t constantly painful and difficult” bar, but aging combined with a highly sedentary lifestyle can sneak up on some people. It can sometimes take very little to fix or avoid.
Maintaining muscle mass that you’ve already built is much easier than building it in the first place. Some people find the thought of progressively overloading for eternity to be daunting- and if you don’t want to, you don’t have to! If you achieve a level of strength that satisfies your requirements, you can maintain it with relatively little effort. And if you do lose it, getting strong a second time will be easier.
In other words: when it comes to exercise, doing anything really does help! (Just don’t hurt yourself.)
I’d like to offer further reinforcement on this point:
Any exercise, even trivial amounts like walking 20 minutes or doing two sets of exercise a day, can yield dramatic improvements in quality of life. Young-ish healthy-ish people don’t tend to notice this because they’re already above the “life isn’t constantly painful and difficult” bar, but aging combined with a highly sedentary lifestyle can sneak up on some people. It can sometimes take very little to fix or avoid.
Maintaining muscle mass that you’ve already built is much easier than building it in the first place. Some people find the thought of progressively overloading for eternity to be daunting- and if you don’t want to, you don’t have to! If you achieve a level of strength that satisfies your requirements, you can maintain it with relatively little effort. And if you do lose it, getting strong a second time will be easier.
In other words: when it comes to exercise, doing anything really does help! (Just don’t hurt yourself.)
it seems to be extremely valuable to focus on fitness for, say, six months and gain some appreciable LBM that then becomes very easy to maintain.