Exercise is Good, Actually
Yesterday I wrote about how dressing nice is a good idea. This post is written similarly, but the topic is exercise. This is again somewhat casual writing that’s in the spirit of what I wish someone had told me when I was 15.
Until about 10 years ago I didn’t care about exercise. I figured I could get on just fine in life without really being in shape. Sure, I knew that exercise was supposed to be good for me and I’d make half hearted attempts to include some activity in my life, but I never went to the gym or intentionally tried to get stronger or fitter.
I was carrying around a story in my head like this one:
I care about doing important intellectual and professional work that depends on my mind.
Physical exercise doesn’t much impact my ability to do that type of work.
Additionally, only muscle-heads go to the gym all the time. Regular people just get enough exercise from living their lives.
And besides, smart people in movies are usually weak anyway. Their power comes from being smart, not strong.
I’m smarter than average, so why do I need to be strong?
Conclusion: I don’t need to work out or go to the gym or even care about physical fitness.
I think a lot of this story can be traced back to how characters in stories work. They’re created like D&D characters: they get a certain number of points and the author distributes those points around to different attributes. Some characters have more points than others to work with, but at the end of the day you have to make tradeoffs. Want to be really smart? Gonna have to take that out of something else. What to be really, really, really smart? You’re going to have to have to put basically all of your points into intelligence and give up everything else.
Authors do this because it helps make characters more relatable. When someone is too good at too many things the story gets boring because they don’t face any real challenges, and we might even envy and hate a character that’s too capable because they make us feel inadequate. But this isn’t how real people work. In fact, positive traits tend to correlate in people. Yes, you find some jocks with tiny brains, politicians with terrible looks, and geniuses with major health problems, but most positive traits correlate in real humans so that it’s not unreasonable for someone to be strong, smart, and good looking.
Dismissing the need for exercise is a kind of coping mechanism for not being above average in physical ability. This is certainly how I coped. I have asthma. My peak flow is like 30% below normal (this means I can exchange less air with each breath). Even with significant training I can’t do things lots of people do, like go jogging or ride a bike and hold a conversation; instead, I’m breathing heavily after 30 seconds. My best performance at physical activities, even after significant training, is just up to the level of what the average fit person can do with zero conditioning. So to protect my self-esteem it was important to think that exercise was for dumb people who weren’t smart enough to do smart things like me.
But this is just nonsense. I actually like doing things with my body. I like hiking and kayaking and mountain climbing and dancing. I’m just not very good at them, even with significant work (e.g. I’ve never managed to send a bouldering problem past V3 despite climbing 1-3 times a week for 7 years and getting training). That doesn’t mean I can’t still enjoy them. I just have limits to how much I can achieve.
Knowing those limits, it’s okay to accept the conventional wisdom that exercise is good. We live in our bodies. Even if you mostly care about your mind, your mind lives in your brain, and your brain lives in your body, so you do well to take care of your body to take care of your brain to take care of your mind. Exercise also helps you build general physical capacity, and as you get older you will lose physical capacity due to aging, so building up more now means it will take you longer to reach a state of disability. So even if you don’t care about being strong or physically fit, greater physical ability allows you to maintain quality of life longer.
It’s also not so bad to go to the gym. You can listen to audio books or podcasts while you work out. And some forms of exercise are actively fun! Once you stop worrying about not being the strongest or fastest and just accept what you’re capable of, you can work within the frame to enjoy physical movement as best you can.
I was recently persuaded to go to the gym in large part thanks to this article. Excerpt:
Probably the biggest impact on me was the idea that I could just do an exercise program for a few months, then stop and keep the gains. Going with the D&D metaphor, if I was playing a game and I got the chance for a relatively minor one-time investment that gave me a permanent +4 STR for the rest of the game, I’d most likely take it! Probably I’d take it even if I was playing a spellcaster with no particular use for STR, because hey a permanent +4, I’m sure there will still be some situations where it comes in handy.
Now it still took me quite a while to get to it, because I had a bunch of shame of “being bad at this kind of thing” from school physical ed classes, and I knew I’d need to get a personal trainer to look at my form and those are expensive and paying for those felt icky. But then I had the fortune that a gym rat friend of mine volunteered to act as my personal trainer for free, and after that things have been going great.
I can confirm that it does wonders for my mood and helps boost my self-esteem, and I’m very happy that I started. At times it has felt sufficiently pleasant that I’ve felt slightly addicted to going to the gym. (I haven’t yet noticed clear differences in daily activities or things like how easy it feels to get out of the bed, though.)
What I can confirm about that article is that doubling my strenght would matter absolutely nothing in my daily routine; I can’t remember the last time I had to lift something heavier than a pack of water bottles. Also I am not overweight and I don’t suffer from any physical pain in particular (yet), so my brain ended up framing that article as “you’ll feel miserable for an hour thrice a week, but at least you’ll solve problems that you mostly don’t have”. Which is not exactly great for motivation.
This is a massive misread of the article. The benefit of lifting is the feeling of joy in the merely material, and of transforming the feeling of being embodied from a feeling of trappedness to a feeling of capabilities being granted to you.
The first time I moved apartments after I started seriously lifting, I enjoyed it. I had always suffered while moving before lifting, ending up sore and tired and cranky, but after lifting, I didn’t feel any negatives.
I’ve heard that often, when someone who says, I don’t care about strength, what’s it good for, I’ve no use for it, etc. actually gives weight training a try and gets the noob gains, then funnily enough, you don’t hear that from them again.
I don’t care about strength and have no use for it; several years of lifting later, I have gotten my noob gains and still have no use for strength (with the exception of possibly helping with some occasional back pains I used to have). Nothing in my daily life hinges on my deadlift doubling—not even carrying in the groceries.
Chapin is describing a range of gains—“Until I’d gained some muscle, I didn’t know that getting out of bed shouldn’t actually feel like much, physically, or that walking up a bunch of stairs shouldn’t tire you out, or that carrying groceries around shouldn’t be onerous. I felt cursed.” If you can remove a general feeling of being cursed and get a license to live in the material world, wow! If you can solve chronic pain with strength training, great! If you can climb stairs without getting tired, a lot of people already can, but good! If you can carry groceries, like most people can, okay!
Since most normal people’s gains will fall in the last two types (for real, what percent of the people feel they “need some special justification for existing” because they’re physically not-that-bad-kinda-on-the-weak-side?), you have a point that for a lot of people who already can do things without bother, this won’t move the needle. Yet, for many who can do these things, doing them without bother may be nice (and prospectively under-appreciated) - feeling less exhaustion in your life generally and having more energy to do things you really want to do are quite good benefits.
But even if the benefits are more trivial than Chapin characterizes, I think your characterizing the costs as “feel[ing] miserable” is a bit much (though obviously everything is subjective here). Again, for some, sure, it’s misery. For most, it’s challenging and uplifting and potentially even energizing (especially after the first couple workouts).
So, we have Chapin claiming (BB−c), and I suggest it’s probably more like (B−c) or at worst (b−c), either of which should be more motivating than your (b−C). But I agree the benefits seem trumped up by Chapin.
One additional point worth noting is that physical health has an enormous impact on mental health. Exercise (along with good sleeping and eating habits) is valuable even if it didn’t make you stronger.
This alone trumps any other argument mentioned in the post. None of the other arguments seem universal and can be argued with on an individual basis.
As some other commenters noted, what if you just don’t?
I think it would be valuable if someone made a post just focused on collecting all the evidence for the positive cognitive effects of exercise. If the evidence is indeed strong, no other argument in favor of exercise should really matter.
Well, I’ve always been quite skeptical about the supposed huge mental benefits of exercising. I surely don’t feel immediate mental benefits while exercising, and the first time I heard someone else claiming this I seriously thought it was a joke (it must be one of those universal human experiences that I am missing).
Anyway, I can offer one reference digged up from SSC:
To me, this makes a lot of sense. If you are lucky enough to actually enjoy exercising, I have no problem believing it might as well lead to some mental benefits (for the same reason that having fun is generally better than doing nothing). What I find quite difficult to believe is the claim that exercising will improve your mood and mental health even if you exercise Because You Have To and hate every minute of it.
It was actually this post about nootropics that got me curious about this. Apparently (based on self reported data) weightlifting is just straight up better than most other nootropics?
Anyway, thank you for referencing some opposing evidence on the topic as well, I might try to look into it more at some point.
(Unfortunately, the thing that I actually care about—whether it has cognitive benefits for me—seems hard to test, since you can’t blind yourself to whether you exercised.)
For me, an important motivation for regular exercise is a desire for a long Healthspan—that is, I want to live long and be fully functional into my “marginal decade”, the last decade of my life.
Dr. Peter Attia, a physician who focuses on longevity, on his Drive podcast talks about a centenarian decathlon. He encourages us to ask, what things do you want to be able to do with your body when you are 80 or 90? And what do you need to do now, to be able to do those things, knowing that at least after age 40, most physical capabilities decrease noticeable each decade (strength, endurance etc.).
Here’s a short podcast excerpt that discusses this concept:
https://peterattiamd.com/how-to-train-for-the-centenarian-decathlon/
He splits out exercise into four component outcomes you want to work toward:
“-> Four components of exercise:
Stability
Strength
Aerobic performance
Anaerobic output”
Dr. Attia also in other podcast episodes talks about studies that show correlation between these factors and longevity (e.g., VO2 max (aerobic performance). See this podcast note, where he comments on a study that compared all-cause mortality for quintiles of aerobic fitness as measured by VO2 max, and which concluded that improving VO2 max even just from low to average or above average can have a huge impact:
https://peterattiamd.com/how-does-vo2-max-correlate-with-longevity/
” Important stats
Going from just being low to being below average is a 50% reduction in mortality over a decade
If you then go from low to above average, it’s about a 60% or 70% reduction in mortality”
As I’m in my early 50s and I want to live a productive, fulfilled life with work and activities for many more decades, thinking about exercise not just as “what makes me feel good now?” but also as an investment in the value of my future decades is quite meaningful.
Some random things that helped me exercise:
it is easier to overcome the stereotype “only dumb people go to gym” if you know a specific smart person who exercises;
for me, it is much easier to exercise while listening to music; note that the music best for exercise can be quite different from the music you listen when you want to relax; keep a separate playlist;
advantages of exercising at the gym: many machines and weights, all distractions removed;
advantages of exercising at home: you can listen to your favorite music, you can do something useful during the breaks (so you take longer breaks between the sets without wasting too much time);
sometimes it is better to exercise using your body weight (you do not need to buy lots of stuff), but sometimes the weights are great, too;
if you watch a movie and interrupt it every five minutes to do one set, at the end it will feel like “I spent the afternoon watching movies” rather than “I spent the afternoon exercising”´; by the way, you can do some exercises while watching the movie.
If there are such things as actively fun forms of exercise, I don’t know them. I have tried several different forms of sport and exercise, but I am still stuck in the “Thou Shalt Suffer To Stay Healthy” paradigm. Finding an actually enjoyable physical activity would be greatly helpful, but at the present time I am basically incapable of exercising with something other than guilt-based motivations.
The fact that I’ve sucked at every form of physical activity ever since I can remember surely doesn’t help; my mother swears that even at age 2 I strongly preferred to sit and read rather than running around like toddlers are supposed to do. At this point, whenever someone claims that exercise is funny or relaxing or immediately beneficial, my gut reaction is just “no it isn’t”.
This is the key insight. What would you suggest to someone who plain doesn’t like to do things with their body?
Maybe an obvious question, but have you tried to find out if there could be some medical issue involved? An aversion towards all forms exercise going back to at least age 2 makes me think that there’s probably some physiological cause.
Why should people with “power saving mode” be sick?
If you were farmer in Northern climate and you had low crop yield it could mean starving whole winter with little food. Would exercising help then?
If you were in Southern climate and worked in heat all the time, and burned out all your calories would you call it smart? What if a flood came on the Nile and took your crop.
So I would argue laziness is a good survival strategy. Helps people stop from killing themselves by overworking.
On flip side body builds equilibrium. If person exercises since childhood exercise becomes the norm.
Stop exercising and in few months “power saving mode” kicks in and you won’t lift a finger.
Start exercising and the body will resist until exercise becomes the new norm.
For person who hates exercising this could take months before exercising becomes new norm.
For someone who exercises all the time a bit of lazy time does not stop them from exercising next time.
Body wants balance, but it integrates balance from the environment.
Not do things with your body?
Ok, that’s not a real answer. You’re asking the question (I am surmising) because you do want to do things with your body, but none of the things that you can think of are appealing.
I don’t know you, so I can’t recommend anything for you specifically. In another comment here I mentioned several teachers who all go beyond the idea of “exercise” as a duty or chore.
Here are a few physical activities that I do or have done that I have found rewarding: fencing, tai chi, playing taiko, and English-style change-ringing on church bells. All of these engage both the mind and the body. I also do long-distance bicycle rides, but if you’re not keen on “exercise”, that probably won’t appeal.
ETA: From Eliezer’s “Twelve Virtues of Rationality”: “The Art must have a purpose other than itself.” This applies also to physical things. The practice needs a purpose beyond itself, something beyond a vague desire to “be fit” or “look good”.
Maximize gains per unit of subjective effort! Turns out you can get a ton of benefit with very little time expended- like going from ‘nigh-bedridden arthritic old lady’ to ‘able to do deadlifts’ with 2 sets a day.
Strength training with progressive overload is probably the best for this kind of effort optimization. You won’t be running any marathons with this strategy, but you might find after a year that going up steps no longer hurts your knees, and that it’s been a while since your back felt weird.
Having a home “gym” helps a lot with sticking to this, because driving to an external gym to do <10 sets really doesn’t make much sense.
Equipment free bodyweight exercises can work for this, but they tend to be complicated and difficult to progress compared to ‘move progressively heavier thing’. It’s probably worth getting a decent adjustable bench (probably the kind that can roll, and that you can just stand up in a corner out of the way, like this one) and some adjustable dumbbells. Consider some padding for the floor too. This combo gives you a ton of options in very little space. Maybe add a pullup bar if you can manage it, but horizontal pulls (like bent over rows) with dumbbells will give you okay-ish transfer to vertical pulls.
If you pick a decent selection of motions that hit a wide range of muscle groups, and if you do just one set each time you come from the bathroom or kitchen, you’ll be able to do enough sets over time to get some serious strength increases.
(Just don’t hurt yourself; that is very anti-Gains.)
For me football (not with the egg-shaped ball) and running are the exercises I actually enjoy. I regularly strength-train, but I suffer through it even though that is a classic example of an activity people claim to be actually enjoying.
It is very important (and you don’t mention it in your comment) that while you are trying an activity out, you stick with it for at least a month, because the absolute beggining (when you have no idea what you are doing) will obviously suck.
Furthermore, I think It would help others in recommending you exercises if you wrote down the ones you’ve already tried.
Best of luck in finding sth you enjoy!
> What would you suggest to someone who plain doesn’t like to do things with their body?
I’d suggest doing a small number of pushups every day. That small number could be 1, or it could be 2, or it could be 10. The point isn’t to enjoy it, at least not when you start doing it, but just doing it and getting used to the feeling of it. If it sucks, well, you’re just doing a small number, the suckiness won’t last for long. And after a month or two or so, you’ll begin to find that it’s starting to get easy, and maybe even fun.
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This is a key aspect. If “exercise” conjures up a picture of dutifully grinding out 3 x 10 x 50kg on the bench press three times a week, or sweating away on the exercise bike longing to get it over with, that may be the wrong frame of mind. There are others worth exploring.
One is exemplified by Ido Portal and Rafe Kelley. I think it is one or other of them that observed that when children exercise they don’t call it “exercise”. They call it “fun”.
A rather different frame, also valuable, is that of Mark Twight, retired extreme mountain climber and trainer for the military and films like “300”. He said, “It doesn’t have to be fun, to be fun.”
ETA: Another name: Cyberyoga (Lamont Goode). I cannot come within a country mile of what he does, but I find him inspiring to watch.
Have you considered Inspiratory Muscle Training (IMT)?
No I’ve never heard of this.
Possibly relevant study: https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/8696 Not sure how good that one is, but there are other studies on the general topic. Abstract:
I can only agree with this, regular exercise makes me sleep better, helps me focus, and make me think better. Ignoring all the benefits to yard work or looks and confidence, some exercise is still worth it.
>I care about doing important intellectual and professional work that depends on my mind.
>Physical exercise doesn’t much impact my ability to do that type of work.
Do you not feel an immediate post-exercise mental benefit? A day where I get a good sweaty run in the morning is a day where I +3 on all my D20 INT skill checks. Even more than +3 on rolls specifically to maintain concentration and resist distractions. This is my primary motivation for cardio and I felt an improvement even when wildly out of shape and barely able to run, feels like relative effort level (amount of sweat, anyway) is what matters.
Even as a child I had this effect. But it was impossible to exercise before school because it started so early.
I suspect this is one of those universal human experiences that isn’t.
My best mental outcome after exercise is “no change,” and if I push myself too far, I can pretty much ruin myself for 2 days. And sometimes end up on the ground, unable to move, barely staying conscious due to something that looks an awful lot like hypoglycemia.
I do still exercise- I have to, because the alternative is worse- but I’ve had to come up with less invasive training routines to compensate. Mostly spreading them over the day, and over the week, never doing too much at any one time.
I do have a nice selection of medical issues that at least partially explain this, but gotta say, getting an INT/proficiency buff from exercise sure sounds like cheating!
Lately I also have changed to very long “zone 2” cardio. Because of specific joint and back problems, some injuries, some congenital. But the exertion itself still feels good mentally if I seperate it from my aching body.
Luckily zone 2 still works for mental effects, it just takes hours to have the same effect. Basically you only exert yourself below the threshold where your body would start building up lactic acid. So if you feel muscle soreness the next day, you’re pushing too hard. Unless you live in a lab you have to use proxies and trial and error to estimate where zone 2 is. Usually people say something like, “You should still be able to have a good conversation at this effort level.”
The time is annoying but my Netflix addiction has never felt so useful.