(Caveat: I will refrain from taking any advice that would lead to me starting to significantly exercise until I have a diagnosis and a treatment plan of my apparent heart condition, which doesn’t indicate it would be unsafe or otherwise a medically bad idea. I’d be really surprised if my doctor told me not to exercise, but in case she does I want to wait and make sure that my body is really lying to me when it says “don’t do that, bad things will happen”.)
Reasons (and existing known routes around each):
Sweat is horrible, and I overheat too easily. (Swimming gets around these; outdoor exercise in cold weather, interestingly, does not.)
Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues). (Anything indoors or at night gets around the sunshine thing. Other environmental issues are mostly limited to smelly gyms and excessively humid indoor pool facilities. Anything outdoors and at night and in nice weather gets around this.)
Many forms of it are financially costly (equipment, facility use). (Going for walks does not have this problem.)
It is boring. (When I tried jujitsu, it did not have this particular problem. Merely being able to listen to music does not solve this, although it could combine with another partial solution. If this problem is solved by simultaneously watching a movie, it has to be in a context where I can turn on subtitles, because I will not be able to reliably hear dialogue over any non-perfectly-silent form of exercise.)
Known route around all of these problems: happening to have free access to an outdoor pool which is open at night and a person who will go with me and chat while we both backstroke laps. This would be great but I don’t happen to have access to a free outdoor pool that is open in the dark.
It seems to me as if some bodyweight strength training exercises might not trigger any of these problems. I would suggest very small sets of comparatively high-load exercises, e.g. work your way up to one-legged squats, one-armed pushups, and chinups if you have a suitable thing to hang from or are willing to get a chinup bar (I sometimes do chinups on the metro). If you are interested I can give you some details on how to work your way up to these exercises, since many people are not initially strong enough to do them (I sure wasn’t!).
Sweat: Short sets don’t give you much of an opportunity to overheat or sweat. Also, with bodyweight exercises, you can do them at home and take a cool shower/bath immediately afterwards. (By the way, do you hate sweating, or do you hate being sweaty? I am assuming the latter for now.) You could even do the pushups in a cool bath to get some of the advantages of swimming.
Environmental Issues: You can do this at home and indoors.
Cost: Only the time investment, plus (optionally) the cost of a chinup bar.
Boring: This type of exercise does not take very long, so you won’t have much time to be bored. Not very long means 5-10 minutes total, a few times a week. You don’t even have to do it all in one session, you can take a minute at a time through the day.
As a bonus, strength training can make other sorts of physical activity less unpleasant, since you will be operating at much less than capacity.
If you are interested I can give you some details on how to work your way up to these exercises, since many people are not initially strong enough to do them (I sure wasn’t!).
I am near-certain I do not currently have the strength necessary to do anything you have listed. The working up to it must also meet the criteria, but do tell.
By the way, do you hate sweating, or do you hate being sweaty?
Both. If the sets are as short as you describe and can be broken up into arbitrarily small pieces, I would expect to be able to work around this, though.
I have tried to be reasonably concise here so as not to drown you in intimidating details and caveats, please let me know if anything is unclear and I can expand on it or try to say it another way. I included common names for some of the more unusual exercises, to aid you in Googling, but am happy to try to explain anything that is not obvious to you.
I hope this helps, but please let me know either way, as it will help me give better and more relevant advice in the future. Especially anything that doesn’t work for you.
I am near-certain I do not currently have the strength necessary to do anything you have listed. The working up to it must also meet the criteria, but do tell.
Basically the idea is to do exercises that are less intense versions, and to do negative reps. Try doing the hardest exercise you can do. If at some point in the day you can’t do it anymore then move one notch down. Once you can do 5 sets of 5 repetitions each in a day, try the next level up (no reason you shouldn’t be ambitious and try it earlier if you feel like it).
Less intense versions of the 1-armed pushups
Regular pushups
Regular pushups with 1 leg off the ground
Ab pushups, sometimes called Supermans (like a pushup, but instead of having your hands under your shoulders or chest, put them above your head, keeping your arms mostly straight). Then most of the work of is done by your abs rather than your arms. I found it much easier to work my way up to 1-armed pushups this way, and core strength is important for its own sake too.
Fingertip pushups (push with your fingertips rather than your palms)
If you work your way up to 1-arm pushups and want to challenge yourself a little more, you can always try 1-arm, 1-leg pushups.
You can increase the load on any given pushup by wearing a backpack with heavy stuff in it.
You can also vary the load of a pushup by doing it on an incline. (Hand(s) below feet is harder, hand(s) above feet is easier. Leaning with your hands against a wall is much easier.)
Another way to make it easier is to use your knees instead of your feet.
Another way to add challenge is to elevate your hands (e.g. pushup between two boxes or crates, or even just two books), with your hands on the boxes/crates/books. This would give you a larger range of motion and give your stabilizing muscles more work.
Less intense versions of the one-legged squat (sometimes called the pistol) include:
2-legged squat
Partial 1-legged squat, where you start with your leg only partially bent—walking up stairs is very close to this, as is stepping up onto something like a box or platform. If you can progressively raise the height of the thing you’re stepping onto, eventually you will be going through the whole range of motion.
You can also wear a backpack while doing a partial (or full) squat to increase the load.
Pull-Ups/Chin-Ups
The bean-can curls that pthalo suggested would be a good intermediate exercise for pull-ups. Since the point is to do only a few repetitions to maximize the ratio of muscle use to chance of sweating/overheating, you will want to use the heaviest weight you can lift five times. Once bean cans become too easy (maybe they already are), you can try heavy books, and eventually just putting heavy stuff into a bag and holding it by the handle.
Negative Reps
Negative reps are just doing the motion in reverse. So for the pushups, start with your arm extended, and lower your body slowly to the floor. For the squats, start standing on one leg, squat down slowly. For chin-ups, start in the “up” position (a standing stool would help for this) and slowly lower yourself. If you can’t do some of the intermediate exercises you can do negative reps of those as well.
Some notes on technique
For pushups, try not to arch your back backwards. You get the most out of each repetition if you put your hands next to your chest rather than your shoulders (with the obvious exception of the Supermans).
For pistols, try not to let the bending knee get far in front of your foot. To balance, extend your free leg forward or to the side, and tilt your torso a little forward. Do whatever you want with your hands. Keep your back straight.
For pull-ups, if you are using a proper bar, try varying between palms facing away from you (rock climbing style) and palms facing toward you. I find that when I am not able to do any more of one, I can often still do some of the other.
For curls, make sure your wrist doesn’t bend backwards, or you can get wrist pain like I did.
Note on Sweating
If the sets are as short as you describe and can be broken up into arbitrarily small pieces, I would expect to be able to work around this, though.
I can do sets of 5 at work, feel I’ve got some decent exercise in, and don’t sweat enough to notice. I dislike sweating and being sweaty too, but not as much as it sounds like you seem to do, so I can’t tell you whether it will be under your threshold. As I mentioned earlier, you could always try doing slow pushups in the bath if ordinary ones make you sweat noticeably. Or doing fewer reps in a set.
Other Stuff
If you do 5 sets of 5 repetitions per day (vary between the arm and leg stuff), you should be able to make a lot of progress. You can get away with doing quite a bit less, though my gut feeling is that you will only be making material progress if you do at least 3 sets of 3 repetitions each, a few days per week. Spacing them out is totally okay, you will still get stronger, it just won’t help your endurance as much (but it will still help a little!). In fact I would recommend spacing them out a lot at first, in order to minimize the probability of sweating. You don’t want to start out with bad associations!
By the way, if you are never able to work your way up to the 1-arm pushup and 1-legged squat, the intermediate exercises will still be materially better than nothing. And I specified bodyweight exercises because you mentioned you dislike gym-smell and weights are expensive, but if you find a gym that you can stand and has free weights, or have a friend with heavy weights they will let you borrow, that will accomplish most of the same things.
You recommend doing multiple sets per exercise on multiple days a week. This seems to contradict what Tim Ferriss and others have said, but maybe that doesn’t transfer to bodyweight exercises.
Right now, I’ve been doing exercise similar to what you describe (following Convict Conditioning), but only about 3 sets per exercise per week (as the book recommends for beginners). I feel I stagnated somewhat and don’t really transition to full push-up and pull-ups (legs and abs are doing fine). Do you think it would be beneficial to move to, say 3-5 sets on 3 days a week for those exercises? Or do I just have to wait it out, given that I’m fairly skinny and never had any serious strength?
I’m also trying to be more consistent about my protein intake. Constantly forget to eat enough. I aim at ~150g at 85kg/185cm, but often just get 50-100 because I accidentally skip meals.
The linked Tim Ferriss article mentions one-set-to-failure, and if you’re really truly maxing out you probably only need to do it a few times a week. But it’s harder to max out with bodyweight than with weights. I was also trying to suggest sets that would accommodate Alicorn’s desire not to sweat, which requirement would likely be violated by a true high intensity workout.
For workouts that don’t leave you feeling totally spent, which is generally the case with bodyweight exercises, you should take into account the total load in a day as well, and the brain-training effect of greasing the groove, for which there is substantial anecdotal evidence. It’s a non-trivial skill to be able to be able to use your true maximum strength, we’re designed to hold back in normal situations.
There is also a difference between training for muscle volume and training for strength. Obviously the two are strongly correlated, but they are not entirely the same thing. My understanding is that you want fewer, more intense reps at a time if you’re training for strength.
EDIT: Though to be honest, I only do 1-2 sets of high intensity kettlebells and 1 set of the 1-arm pushups in a week. But I’ve decided that it’s worth my time to maintain, but not to materially improve, my level of fitness at this point.
I also sweat a lot and the best way I’ve found of dealing with the discomfort is a merino wool baselayer. And not just for sports: I will probably never buy another pair of cotton boxers or socks.
Cotton gets wet, then cold and clingy, which can exacerbate blisters (socks). All sorts of high-tech synthetics start to stink real fast (I don’t have much experience with silver-treated fabrics though). Wool wicks very well, will not stink even after a week of wear, it retains 50% heat insulation and does not cling against the body even if it is saturated with sweat + merino wool is too fine to be itchy and it stretches back for longer than most fabrics so cuffs etc can stay tight for years. They used to have wool jerseys at the Tour de France up to the 1980′s since it beat synthetics for cooling up to that point. Couple of downsides though: merino wool (Ibex, Icebreaker etc) is expensive (but hard wearing), needs delicate detergents and does not like aggressive machine drying.
Bottom line: hundreds of millions of years of evolution for keeping warm-blooded animals performing from desert to arctic conditions has not been wasted.
I play DDR at home (all you need is a DDR pad and a computer). It solves all the problems except the sweat. But since it’s at home, I would think you wouldn’t mind that as much (plus you can have a towel nearby). I find this the most convenient exercise ever, since I can do it at home, any time, and for free.
I once owned a DDR pad, but either it or the adapter I used to hook it up to my computer had a delay that made it unplayable. So I don’t have one anymore, and this therefore fails the expense criterion.
But since it’s at home, I would think you wouldn’t mind that as much
Unless you are playing on high difficulty, you can comfortably play on a cheap pad ($16 + $4 adapter).
As for sweat, it seems like there might be two things going on there. One is you overheat, which you can control with a fan or something. Two is the actual sweat, which is annoying, but by no means bad in of itself. If you sincerely dislike it, you can self-modify to find it acceptable (might be worth doing anyway). There are plenty of resource on LW for how to do that.
One is you overheat, which you can control with a fan or something.
Nope. (I overheat strangely. It’s like my interior and my surface area aren’t connected. Aiming a strong fan at me will prevent exterior but not interior overheating. If I just stay under the fan after I stop exercising, I will get too cold on the outside while still being too hot on the inside.)
Two is the actual sweat, which is annoying, but by no means bad in of itself. If you sincerely dislike it, you can self-modify to find it acceptable (might be worth doing anyway). There are plenty of resource on LW for how to do that.
Not helpful.
I may look into the inexpensive pad and adapter, though.
You know, it might. I don’t like water but that’s not among my listed problems, so if I come up with a solution for which overheating (as opposed to sweating, which this wouldn’t affect) is the only problem, I will attempt this patch. Thanks!
If you don’t like water, but like lemonade (or some other drink that can be served chilled and isn’t too expensive), filling a water bottle with it can be nice. If it’s too sweet, it’ll make you thirsty, but watering it down fixes that. I tend to add just enough syrup/juice/whatever to water to make water palatable. (i dont like water either).
i know a person who has a medical condition that gets worse with exercise. they have to avoid it as much as possible because they can feel poorly for weeks afterwards (even moderate amounts of exercise, like walking too much). The condition in question is not a heart condition, but it is possible that there are other conditions that react poorly to exercise for different reasons than the one my friend has. So you should definitely consult with your doctor AND listen to your body. If you feel really crummy after exercise, you should be doing smaller amounts of exercise to build up your strength. If you feel really crummy after a tiny amount of exercise, you probably shouldn’t be exercising. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor.
solution to sweat: deodorant
solution to sunshine: a wide brimmed hat and sunscreen, if the problem is sunburn, or a sensitivity to light, or heat.
other solutions to sunshine, if you are a night owl: rollerblading at night—is safer than walking since you can zip by other people. is also less hot and sweaty. bicycling at night. these sorts of things are best done in well lit areas
another solution to sunshine: if you are in a building with an elevator, take the stairs at least part way up. if you have a washing machine, hang your clothes up on a clothesline to dry (i have a clothesliine over my bathtub. they’re easy to make. i don’t have a dryer, and hanging up heavy, wet clothes can be tiring, especially lifting them up over your head. you can also flush toilets with a heavy bucket of water (you dont have to empty the entire bucket, just a little bit will do. this saves quite a bit on the water bill as well—my water bill has gone down since the flush on my toilet broke. bake bread now and then. kneading bread is also quite a workout. if you take public transportation, get off a stop early when you aren’t in a hurry. little things like these add up and they’re often more interesting than sitting on an exercise bike—getting off early lets you explore on foot a part of town you might not have known as well. and these tips are all good for number 4 as well—they’re cheap. most of them (including the elevator one, since i’m living on the fifth floor and my building doesnt have one) are things i do not really by choice but because i’m that poor.
solution to boring: audio books! i prefer reading a book to listening to one, but listening to one is more interesting than listening to nothing. also, if you like television and are doing something that can be done in front of a television (yoga, stretching, lifting cans of beans and pretending they’re dumbbells...) then television is another option.
I do like lemonade, but I can only water it down a little before it starts tasting like water.
Deodorant does not work well enough and is not properly applied to all relevant locations.
I have textural issues with sunscreen, and don’t like the directed warmth and brightness of the sun even through it. (I walk outside on a sunny day and it’s like I can feel myself crisping up. Or steaming if it’s humid.) Hats worsen the sweat problem on the scalp.
Skating is unkind to my ankles; skates cost money. Bikes cost money and I don’t trust myself to bike safely in traffic. Helmets worsen the sweat problem on the scalp.
I take stairs when they’re handy most of the time.
I don’t like the texture my clothes have when they are hung dry. (I know this because sometimes I get a broken dryer and then strew my clothes around my room to dry rather than spending more quarters.)
I do mean to learn to bake bread, but can’t regularly count on being able to knead it; I routinely have small wounds on my fingers. (Don’t say gloves. No form of glove I am aware of both lacks texture issues for me and would be okay to knead bread with.)
Audio books have been mentioned. Cans of beans: interesting. May try that and see if it generates noticeable amounts of sweat. Yoga is physically painful to me in ways I am fairly sure are not supposed to happen.
Me too… and I’m Australian (where sunscreen is a necessity). I’m currently loving being in the UK and not needing it.
I also don’t wear makeup or use moisturiser for much the same reason (and suffer the social penalty for doing so in a business setting).
I did eventually find one sunscreen that I could actually use—one put out by the Australian Cancer council (their “everyday sunscreen”). Understandably, however, it’s not available anywhere else but Aus… though you might be able to find it (and try it) online if you’re not in Aus yourself.
It is the only sunscreen in the world (and I’ve tried very many) that you can’t actually feel after you put it on… and I’m the sort of person that can feel the moisturisers that are guaranteed to be unfeelable...
I have textural issues too although mine seem to have different triggers than yours. But it influences what foods I can eat (nothing squidgy, which might be a made up word, but it means mushrooms and anything else that feels like i’m eating a condom), what clothes I can wear (i can only wear nylon tights if i wear thick white socks underneath), even what kind of books I can read (smooth textures are the worst for me, my hands break out in sweat and i get a fight or flight response). i’ve used cotton gloves before to soak up some of the sweat from my textural problems, but any other type of glove would exacerbate it. i have to be really careful with what kind of socks i buy as well. -- no i’m not suggesting you knead dough in cotton gloves.
yeah, i had a feeling the deodorant thing wasn’t going to be too helpful—it’s nice for armpits, but you can’t slather it on your face or hands or feets or other places. and deodorant does nothing for the heat rash you get under the bra after sweating.
it’s true, bicycling and rollerblading cost money if you dont already have the equipment (i already have rollerblades, so its cheaper for me to use them than to take a bus—my rollerblades have saved me a lot more money than their initial cost, but that is only the case if you know you are going to be able to use them for transportation).
I think it’s probably best to just avoid the sun as much as possible.
another thing that is potentially exercise, if you like kids, looking after one for a while. true, you can just stand there and watch, but joining in tends to be a bit of a workout.
yoga should not be painful. you may be stretching too far. for example with lotus position (where you twist your legs up like a pretzel), you shouldnt do that until your body is ready to do that. instead, just put your feet together, and try to get the knees as close to the ground as you can without it hurting—if this means your thighs are at a 45° angle compared to your torso and floor, that’s okay. you do it so that it’s a tiny bit of a stretch, but not painful, and over time, you’re able to go farther. but if it’s not for you, it’s not for you. i will probably never be able to touch my toes. i can touch my knees. and i can touch a little farther, and then if i go any farther, it hurts, so i dont. I think stretching and yoga can probably be done safely by most people (definitely not all, though) if they granularise it enough—work on touching the knees before touching the top of the shin, then the middle top, then the middle, etc. but every body works differently and you know yours best—i only elaborate about the yoga because a lot of people seem to try to turn into a pretzel on day 1 and it doesnt work. my body is pretty weird actually. For example, walking (at all) is usually a bit painful for me, but rollerblading is not. something about the stride, or the way my foot is held tightly by the skate, but not too tightly.)
our local ice skating rink sometimes has deals where they let everyone in for free (but you still have to pay to rent skates). Maybe your local public pool (you did mention swimming) has similar specials from time to time.
having cats is also a source of exercise for me: carrying a heavy bag of kitty litter up 5 flights of stairs. then carrying dirty kitty litter down again. phew. and carrying them to the vet when one of them gets sick is exercise. My one cat has been sick , constantly, though something different each time, since October (UTI --> antibiotics --> diarrhea from the antibiotics --> ringworm --> nearly went bald --> eye infection. So for a while I was having to carry her (in my arms, with a leash attached in case she made a break for it) about a km every week or so. Thankfully, she’s much better now.
Seconded. The good kind of stretching is about teaching your muscles to relax (i.e. lengthen) on demand. When you feel pain that means you are putting strain on your connective tissue instead. This can lengthen the tissue over time but that’s not good for most people.
Thinking about the overheating… you might try getting some plastic-coated 5-lb hand weights, using them for arm exercises while watching a movie, and storing them in the refridgerator when not in use. Blood vessels are relatively close to the surface in the palms of the hands and soles of the feet, and I remember an experiment in forced thermoregulation which took advantage of that. Of course, it also involved a special suction-glove to increase blood flow, which is probably out of your price range.
The weights themselves are almost certainly out of my price range. I just don’t care enough about getting this done to work around my monetary neuroses. It turned out that my roommate has some 3lb weights (not covered with anything that would respond interestingly to refrigeration) and I was messing with those; my hands were not excessively warm during this process, so cooling something I hold in my hands would be of minimal help.
The thermoregulation experiment suggested that cooling the hands is a relatively efficient way to cool the whole body. I don’t think many people feel like their hands get too hot while they exercise, but there are apparently gains in endurance when exercisers keep something cold on their hands. These gains are most likely due to the body taking longer to overheat.
You could find out whether this works for you by timing how long something takes to produce noticeable overheating or sweat, then timing the same thing on a later day in very similar conditions, holding ice packs or something like that in your hands.
If you don’t want to induce extra overheating or sweat for the sake of the experiment, you could try holding something cold while doing something you have to do anyway (e.g. sometimes I have to go outside on a hot day). That way the worst likely outcome is not much worse than before unless you really hate holding cold things.
The weights only need to be made of something with reasonably high thermal mass, and the coating only needs to have thermal conductivity in a range that will allow the transfer of heat from your hands to the weights quickly enough to be useful but not quickly enough to be painful.
My theory here is that your core is well-insulated under most of your skin, but that the soles of your feet and palms of your hands are effectively gaps in this insulation. Under this theory, I would not expect your hands to feel hot when you’re exercising, since they contain no major heat source and have ready access to a major heat sink (the outside world). Cooling your hands just makes them a better heat sink for the rest of the body, reducing the need to sweat.
I also overheat, then get too cold after exercise.
For the overheating, I find that if I drink more water, I feel a bit better. I also run cold water over my wrists to cool down quickly after a workout.
Cooling down quickly causes me to overshoot, so I need to have a clean, dry shirt to put on, and a sweater or sweatshirt, handy to cope with the chills.
I don’t like the sweating either, but I try not interpret it in a negative way. “No one cares if look like I’m sweating.” “Sweating is a good way of removing toxins in the body. ” That sort of thing.
I do the Five Tibetans every morning, and they may meet these requirements.
They don’t raise a sweat on me, except for the 5th. I can’t say whether they will for you.
I do them indoors.
They are free.
They only take 10 minutes—much less if you’re not doing the full 21 reps of each exercise. How long does it take for you to be bored?
This isn’t the only thing I do for fitness, but it does seem to have a significant effect for me. The other things I do probably don’t meet your requirements: using a bicycle for transport whenever practical (sweat and sunshine), running (ditto), taiko drumming (sweat, sweat, and more sweat), lifting weights (my own, bought with money), and taking the stairs, not the lift (sweat?).
These do not seem to violate any of my listed requirements (possible exception being sweat, but I would have to determine that empirically). So, in accordance with the exercise, I will at least try them once I know what’s up with my heart problem. However, I suspect that they will be physically painful (several components of the series look like they will cause or exacerbate the sort of headache I tend to get, and forms of yoga in general that I have tried in the past were distinctly unpleasant).
I have only an ostensive definition, not an intensional one. The bits that stuck out to me were the spinning (this would worsen an existing headache but probably not cause one), the leg raises (which would not directly cause a headache but would lead to a sort of strain that might), the leaning in the third rite and the head-dangling in the fourth and fifth (it sounds like I’d wind up with my head upside-down or close to it, which could worsen or cause a headache). Sudden sharp head movements (voluntary or otherwise) also do this, and this is one reason, along with worsened kinetosis, that I can no longer ride roller coasters.
If you’re learning the Tibetans, you start with three repetitions of each move, and only add one or two repetitions per week until you’re up to 21 reps. If you need to do them slowly, they might require more strength, and that might mean you’d add more repetitions more gradually.
I don’t know whether your concern with spinning is related to dizziness. If so, I’ll note that I’ve got some evidence that Feldenkrais’ theory that dizziness is caused by holding one’s breath has something going for it, and the Tibetans are a good way to work on breathing while turning.
The fourth involves keeping your head level with the ground. T5T offers leaving your head vertical through the move as an option, or leaving your head and shoulders on the ground.
The fifth does involve having your head at about a 45 degree angle facing down, but not dangling.
You can do the movements slowly and get the benefits from them.
BTW, I’d advise caution with no.2, the straight leg raise, as it demands quite a lot of the abdominals. It can be substantially eased by letting the legs bend at the knees.
That’s interesting. I’ve never had any problems with #2, and my abdominals aren’t in in great shape—I’ve never been able to do an unassisted sit-up. Even when I was a kid, I needed to put my feet under something.
The fourth Tibetan is the big challenge for me—my chest and shoulders are very tight, and it took me a while to even realize that was the problem rather than the universe being out to get me. I’ve managed one rep of #4 that felt right—like a coherent stretch across the front of my body.
One of the good things about T5T was realizing that I didn’t have all the possible problems with the Tibetans. Another was one of the warm-ups (hands behind head, circle upper body) which improved my awareness enough that I could realize I was pulling against tightness in #4 rather than just having unspecified difficulty.
Some of the material about breathing in that book gave me some sense (no doubt incomplete) of how much I hold my breath.
I was going to start the second paragraph with ‘#4’, and that paragraph appeared in large boldface. Markdown, stop helping so much!
I do the Five Tibetans, too, though not with utter reliability.
Notable effects: they get rid of lower back pain for me. They strengthen the muscles around my knees. I believe they’re the reason I was able to fall safely when I slipped on some ice the winter before last. (Previously, when I fell on ice, I’d twist something and sprain it.)
Normally, I can do at least one of them better than usual. This cheers me up.
I’m inclined to think that by doing them slowly and/or doing fewer of them, you could avoid working up a sweat.
Even fairly restrained dancing over an extended period can elevate your heart-rate and trigger many of the benefits of exercise.
If you have a shower and live in an area where cold water is provided for free, then there is no cost. Additionally, this should address your sweat issue much like swimming in a pool.
It is indoors which eliminates sunlight.
Vis-a-vie the boredom constraint. Dancing to music by itself may be a varied enough activity to keep you mentally engaged. If this is insufficient you might consider audiobooks or talk radio.
Complications:
Safety. If you dance too vigorously then you may slip or injure yourself. You will know better whether this is a very likely issue. If it is, you may be able to mitigate with protective clothing (either purchased such as no slip water-shoes/socks or made from household objects; feasibility depending on your particular budget constraint and safety concerns).
You may not have a sufficiently strong set of external speakers to overcome the noise of the shower. If so, you might mitigate by (1) reducing the water flow for your shower, (2) purchasing or building louder speaks (for example, build a cone out of cardboard to amplify and direct the volume.)
Just cold water may be too cold for you. To mitigate either (1) add hot water (and possible add cost), (2) exercise outside the shower first to raise your body temperature, (3) acclimate yourself to colder water (this has been done by many people in the past either by necessity or due to a specific purpose such as Channel swimming).
I doubt I could hear anything with content over the shower itself no matter how good my speakers were, and I have pretty terrible balance in general. (I rarely actually fall, but I have to touch walls a lot to make that not happen.)
For entertainment—try different levels of water flow with your existing speaker setup and see if there’s any overlap between the range of “audible entertainment” and “acceptable cooling.” The experiment is fast and cheap. Edit: You may not be able to find the right level of cooling without first doing some exercise nearby to heat yourself up.
For safety—Assuming you’ve found an optimal level of water flow, try dancing at various levels of intensity with a friend present in the bathroom to catch-you/call-an-ambulance/help in case of severe accident. Not quite as fast as the first experiment, but contingent on it and still free and relatively easy—plus amusing for a friend
Dancing in the shower with someone to catch me? Okay, to be fair, I didn’t mention modesty issues in my original post, but I didn’t really think anybody was going to suggest something that involved immodesty...
Sweating is going to happen. Exercise hard, take a cool down lap and a cool to cold shower.
Sunshine is (and I’m saying this as someone who spent over a decade in the Goth scene, and still is into the music) absolutely critical. It does wonderful things for your body’s chemistry.
Life costs. You may not always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get.
Now, before you can build yourself a workout you have to have a reason for doing it. There are many combinations, but they boil down to:
1) Rehab of injuries. if this is the case you need to consult a therapist and work out exactly your regime, but I doubt it.
2) Body re-composition—commonly called “losing weight”, but is more accurately called “reshaping this mess”.
3) Getting stronger
4) Building Endurance (you could argue that this is a subset of 3, but in practice it’s different enough)
There are some others, but they are usually either a subset (body building is really an extreme of 2 and some of 3 for example).
Once you have your goals clearly defined some of your other objections can be worked around, except possibly for the sweat thing. The one thing “we” can do is keep the workouts of high intensity (meaning short and hard (get your mind out of the gutter)) so that you don’t have time to get bored, and you minimize the length of time you sweat.
One suggestion—and this WILL involve sweat—is to find a 25 or (better) 35 pound kettle bell and do kettle bell swings 3 mornings a week when you first get up. Do as many as you can in 5 minutes, then take a walk around the block to cool down. Shower and go to work. This will work your legs, lower back, shoulders and abs. It won’t turn you into super$GENDER but if you currently do nothing, it’ll help. As you do these try to do longer and longer sets with fewer breaks. At first you’ll probably do 10-20 at a time, but it’s 15 minutes a week. If that’s too boring for you, then you’ve lost anyway.
He’s barely started sweating, but it’ll come in a few minutes. Oh, and he’s already (clearly) in shape—either that’s a 50 pound bell, or he’s really short :)
Sweating is going to happen. Exercise hard, take a cool down lap and a cool to cold shower.
Not helpful.
Sunshine is (and I’m saying this as someone who spent over a decade in the Goth scene, and still is into the music) absolutely critical. It does wonderful things for your body’s chemistry.
You don’t have to believe me, I guess, if you think I’m lying about what things are and are not horrible for me, but if you’re going to disbelieve me, maybe don’t give me advice?
You don’t have to believe me, I guess, if you think I’m lying about what things are and are not horrible for me
Is it completely unthinkable that your aversions to sweat and (especially) sunshine are related to phobias or some other neurological/physiological problems that should perhaps be addressed at some point? Sunshine really is good for you. My wife used to hate it, made nutritional and cognitive-behavioral changes, and now likes it.
I know that’s not helpful short-term. But long-term, it seems like there’s some other problem going on that is causing your surface aversions that you should at least not completely dismiss off-hand.
The sweat thing is probably autism-related. The sunshine thing is some combination of that and me being ridiculously pale. I take vitamin D, have a family history of skin cancer, and do not experience depression, so I probably shouldn’t be working too hard on learning to like sun. Sweat would be more beneficial to learn to like, and if you know of an actual disease that has hating sweat as a symptom, do let me know. But the vague concern that it might be something other than a very strong sensory preference like my other very strong sensory preferences is not actionable.
It’s not a question of belief, it’s an issue of presentation.
Here is what you wrote: “Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues).” That is not saying “I have medical issues”, it’s saying (wrist to forehead) I don’t LIKE going out in the SUN!
There are lots of things in life that just flat out suck. There is no way to make worthwhile gains without struggle, effort and dealing with stuff you don’t like.
To put my earlier statement a completely different way, you have a choice. On one side is exercise and sweat, on the other side is where you are now. If you are happy the way you are now there is no need to exercise. Otherwise you’re going to need to sweat, the choice you then get to make is then a matter of intensity and duration.
Physical exercise causes muscles to use either blood sugar or fat to get the muscles to contract. This is an exothermic reaction causing the muscles to heat up. Exercise sufficient to cause physiological changes causes the muscles to heat up enough to cause sweat. You don’t notice this when swimming because it’s constantly being washed away.
There is no big red fucking easy button that gets you magic results. There are shorter paths to a solution, depending on your goals (for example if you PURELY want to lose weight you can do things like intermittent fasting, low carb diets and ice baths), but you asked about exercise.
If you have physical issues with sun then the appropriate thing to say is “I have $DISEASE” which prevents me from spending lots of time outside”. Being light skinned with a family propensity to Melanoma is not a reason to avoid the sun, being light skinned with a family propensity to Squamous Cell cancer IS a reason to take precautions, especially if that family tendency is towards the cancer going metastatic.
Now that we have more information we can work with something. You don’t have to completely avoid the sun, you just have to limit your exposure (duration, clothing) to it and do things to minimize the effects of it (cartinoid consumption, vitamin A with the D etc.). Yes, it takes mountain biking in the Australian Outback off the table, but the sweating issue and your location take that off the table anyway. However the cheapest form of exercise is walking, and if we can somehow dispose of your sweating issues there are walking protocalls that will get you SOME gains, if they’re the sort of gains you’re looking for (again you haven’t stated any goals other than “to exercise”, which is vague enough to be meaningless).
There are some diseases that have sweating as a symptom, but it’s unlikely you have those. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about and investigating exercise and diet, but very little on the sweat side of things, mostly because I just accepted that I sweat a lot more than most people given a particular workload. I have a cow-orker who runs ultra-marathons. He is COLD when the temperatures hit ~70 degrees. I wear shorts down into the upper 30s (with a sweater and a hat). He can run in 90-95 degree heat with minimal sweat—he intends to run the badwater at some point—I used to ride a bicycle to work in 0 (f) weather and SWEAT on the way in. This is a normal part of human variability.
Again the issue is how you deal with it. UnderArmour’s “Heat Gear” fits close to the body, provides some UV protection and does a decent job of moving the sweat out from your skin. Two or three of these shirts in conjunction with some sweatbands to keep the sweat down on your face and hands and for what is called a “High Intensity Training” or “High Intensity Interval Training” can go a long way towards meeting your goals, whatever they may be.
Realistically though just “man up” and be uncomfortable for 20 minutes 3 times a week. Just going doing that will be a gain in your life.
The Austism thing (I presume from your writing you’re down on the functional aspergers end of things) provides a mostly psychological stumbling block. Austists generally have a degree of anxiety about change beyond what normal people face. Examine your feelings about changing your routine, stepping out of your comfort zone and fixing what you may find to be broken.
I wish to make the world a place where “Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I’m not taking your advice” elicits the same reaction as “Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I’m not taking your advice”, rather than being told to man up and being psychanalyzed by strangers.
I’m going to start with the subset of the world named Less Wrong.
Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight is a very interesting book about sensory defensiveness—having trouble, sometimes serious trouble, with sensory experiences that don’t bother most people. It’s correlated with autism, but isn’t the same thing, and is sometime misdiagnosed as autism, neuroticism, or lack of willpower.
There are people who specialize in helping with sensory defensiveness. They are cleverly camouflaged as occupational therapists, so they are unlikely to be found.
Exercise can be fun if your brain is wired in a certain way, but needing to basically pointless busywork for physical maintenance is still stupid. There might be some entertaining flareups of cognitive dissonance from people who like to view being a diligent exerciser as a terminal value once there’s technology for keeping the body in excellent working order without doing pointless stuff that makes you sweat. For instance.
Also, how come no-one talks about different people probably having quite a bit different endorphin reactions to exercise? It’s pretty likely that they exist, but people still act like they are good exercisers because they make better choices as rational actors, not because it gets their brain pumped full of happy juice.
Very good idea which we need to test a lot. I’m very afraid it might do bad things later on, build muscle mass but not do anything about fat or many other problems, build too much of a type of muscle and not enough of another, eat something that shouldn’t be eaten to build muscle from it, or create weird dietary needs. But let’s go test it!
Downvoted because it is a general argument against any claimed rational action. Why do people who work at existential risk act like they make better rational choices when really they just get a different neurochemical responses? (Hint: Everything we do is for some neurochemical response)
For an action to be rational in your mind, does it need to obey some Kantian-esque imperative where the actor can’t gain pleasure from it? Are people who loathe exercise but do it anyways more rational?
Was wondering why people don’t look into differences in neurochemical responses at all, when they seem to be a pretty big factor in this case, different thing than arguing against any rational deliberation on it at all.
″ I wish to make the world a place where “Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I’m not taking your advice” elicits the same reaction as “Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I’m not taking your advice” ”
This would be nice. Now when I undertake this rejection challenge and come up with a reason for why I’m are not doing x-action, I can compare that reason to a hardwired physiological reaction. I will then feel satisfied that I am not doing (x-activity) for a good reason that I cannot change, because one surely cannot be expected to put their hand on a hot stove. In this way I will feel satisfied that I am in my current position for a good reason, and can happily fall back into acceptance.
And Alicorn, I don’t know the particular nature of your aversion to sunshine, and maybe it is deeply hardwired like most people’s aversion to a hot stove, so I am not speaking to you in particular. All I am saying is that reasons to not do something come in different strengths and in with different amounts of permanence. There are some dislikes that are able to be overcome through repeated effort, such as talking to strangers or eating vegetables. There are dislikes that can be overcome through mindfulness, (I will start this essay because of how it fits into my long term goals), or through environment (I will start this essay at a quiet Starbucks) or, my personal favorite, through chemical means ( I will start this essay once I finish this bottle of Laphroaig.) Maybe I misread MixedNuts statement and he/she was merely saying that for some people, sunshine and pain aversion are essentially the same, which I could buy. All I’m saying is I think there is a need to iterate this exercise through each of your reasons for not doing activity-x in the hope you can either find fundamental issues (putting your hand on a hot stove) or issues that can be resolved (working out in a walk in refrigerator.)
I think this conversation could use a dose of alternate perspective, and this seems like as good of a spot to drop it as any; zaogao, this is not directed at you personally.
LessWrong as a community makes a point, a lot of the time, of accepting a rather large amount of variance in its members’ values. Except, some of us seem to be better than others at noticing when values-variance is relevant to the conversation at hand. It seems to me that a failure to notice that that’s relevant is the bulk of the problem, here.
Alicorn has made it pretty clear, as far as I can see: Given the choice between a lifestyle in which she sweats regularly, and a lifestyle where she’s less fit and more prone to health problems, she really does prefer the latter—that’s what her values specify. She’s not in denial about it, she’s not complaining about having to make the choice, she’s not making drama. All she’s doing is describing the situation, pointing out the options she knows about, and asking if anyone knows of options that she’s missed. This shouldn’t be a problem, as far as I can tell: Looking for third (or fourth, or fifth) options is a very LessWrong kind of thing to do. But even if we collectively decide that we don’t want to devote resources to this kind of concrete discussion of specific cases, the respectful-of-values-differences thing to do is to say that, not try to shame her for having the values she does.
It might also be worth noting that this kind of thing contributes to LW turning into an echo chamber. If we can’t trust each other to stay respectful and on-topic about values differences that don’t significantly affect anything beyond a single user’s life, how can we trust each other with values differences that do affect other things?
Known route around all of these problems: happening to have free access to an outdoor pool which is open at night and a person who will go with me and chat while we both backstroke laps. This would be great but I don’t happen to have access to a free outdoor pool that is open in the dark.
Make friends with someone who has a backyard pool and invite yourself to swim laps with them. I don’t actually know where you live and what the climate is like there, but even if it’s colder, you can at least swim for part of the year. Ask everyone you know if they know anyone who has a backyard pool, and invite yourself.
Ideal long-term solution: build your own backyard pool. Probably not financially feasible right now, though.
I live in North Carolina at the moment and the weather would be fine for swimming. I don’t think I know anyone with a pool or have a good way to filter potential new friends for pool ownership (and I live in an apartment complex, so I can’t just stroll around the block looking for a pool-having house to turn up at with a plate of cookies). Suggestions?
ETA: I fail. I didn’t even think of asking the local meetup group if anybody in it has a pool before I posted this. (That said, since I don’t drive and I don’t think any of them live really close, it’d be more of an imposition than just allowing me to let myself into their backyard, but it’s worth a try.)
You don’t need to buy a special balance board or exercise ball for it. You can just use any board on a pivot of some sort...say a plywood board on a solid rubber ball (depends on your weight).
Balance will protect you well into old age and practicing it should strengthen your leg joints, abdominals, and lower back, as well as forcing you to be more aware of your body’s position, movement, breathing, etc.
For entertainment, you can listen to music or an audiobook.
As for sweating/comfort it is definitely on the less strenuous side of things and can be done indoors with air conditioning (though this may be an expense you don’t want to incur).
Board: Old skateboard (I’ve found these on the street, should be easy to find in a few yard sales), cutting board (if you’ve a side you don’t use for food preparation and are good about cleaning or use a towel to insulate), cut off part of a 2x4
Pivot: Rolling pin, small rocks (though not pebbles)
Taking evening walks while listening to audiobooks seems to deal with all of those issues, assuming you aren’t like one of my friends who can’t stand audiobooks. Audiobooks aren’t free, but if you take 3 30 minute walks a week it will take you months to get through a single book.
Another source of free audiobooks is LibriVox which is building (i.e. recording) a catalog of free & public domain audiobooks. It is all volunteer work so I’m sure there is varying quality, but the few I have listened to have been quite good. However, the catalog is limited to works out of copyright (or under an appropriately permissive license), so newer material is rare, but many of the “classics” are there.
My existing iPod does not have any battery life (expense of equipment). Walking is not immune to the sweat problem. I also might not be able to reliably hear the contents of an audiobook over the sound of my own footsteps, nearby traffic, etc., but this part would be worth empirical testing.
I probably have an mp3 player around somewhere that you can use. (Check in the electronics bin, if you like.) If you don’t mind being functionally deaf to anything else, using earplugs and turning the player’s volume all the way up will likely solve the problem of hearing it over things. There is still the sweat issue, though.
I share many of the problems with exercise that you have, especially the overheating and the boredom.
My solution to the sweating problem is to pick out clothes that are ‘okay to sweat in’, go for a run, then wash the clothes and have a shower immediately. I experience being sweaty as being very unpleasant, but with the attitude of “in these clothes, that doesn’t matter”, I can get around that.
I find that podcasts are much better than audiobooks for exercise—they give variety and a breadth of topics in the event that I’m not in the mood for a particular audiobook. I subscribe to some news podcasts, anime/movie review, comedy, philosophy, sociology, hacking and short-story podcasts, and if I grow tired of one, I always have something else to distract me.
Really bare-bones mp3 players can be bought here for 15 units of local currency, so with rechargable batteries, that isn’t a good reason. Most phones can play mp3s, and come with free headsets.
My solution to the sweating problem is to pick out clothes that are ‘okay to sweat in’, go for a run, then wash the clothes and have a shower immediately. I experience being sweaty as being very unpleasant, but with the attitude of “in these clothes, that doesn’t matter”, I can get around that.
It’s a textural issue, not an attitudinal one.
Really bare-bones mp3 players can be bought here for 15 units of local currency, so with rechargable batteries, that isn’t a good reason. Most phones can play mp3s, and come with free headsets.
The object is to get around my reasons, not dismiss them as bad reasons. Also, I don’t have a phone.
The object is to get around my reasons, not dismiss them as bad reasons.
I understand that that’s the object, but I hope you aren’t excluding the possibility that some of your reasons—or anyone’s reasons—might actually be bad reasons. That’s a concern I have with this whole post: it could be a net rationality loss if you let your attitude shift from “I will do X if objections W, Y and Z are overcome,” to “I will do X if and only if etc.”
It is certainly possible that some reasons are bad. When people have presented options as partial solutions, I am in some cases willing to meet those partial solutions halfway. But “It only costs $X and it’s a functionality that comes with $OBJECT so that can’t be too much even though I know nothing about your finances or why you want free options” is not a responsive answer to my complaint that things cost money. X ≠ 0 and I don’t have $OBJECT already.
Sorry if it sounded like I hadn’t read the post carefully. I know it annoys me a lot when I have to repeat myself because people don’t seem to be listening. But I did in fact notice that and had a possibly incorrect but not actually crazy reason for asking that specific question.
where f() is continuous and monotonically positive in ambient_temperature, exercise_intensity, and time. In other words, a small increase in any of the three inputs yields a small increase in the output.
This implies that for a sufficiently small increase in exercise_intensity, there would be some finite decrease in ambient_temperature that would offset it. I interpreted “does not [get around the sweat problem]” as meaning that for a fixed value of exercise_intensity, as ambient_temperature decreases, expected_amount_of_sweat approaches a lower asymptotic bound. It’s possible for that to happen (e.g. if you’re doing intense enough exercise you will sweat even in a walk-in freezer), but for there still to be an offsetting effect (e.g. carrying something heavy or running will make me sweat sooner on a hot summer day than on a cold winter day).
It seems as though either my model is wrong, or my model is right but the transition from resting to walking is not a sufficiently small increase in exercise_intensity. Is one of those the case, or am I missing something else?
Your model is close to correct, but “ambient temperature” is local to parts of the body, and in some locations cannot normally drop below my actual core body temperature. I’d have to wear ice packs in some mighty weird and highly uncomfortable places to make reality function like a naive version of your model.
OK, though I’m quite surprised if you’re saying that the general outside temperature has no effect whatsoever.
I’m slightly less surprised if you’re saying it has some effect, but that due to localization of heat and the insulation of even light clothing, walking is intense enough to overcome even a chilly autumn or winter night sweatwise.
General outside temperature has an effect on parts of me that are exposed to air. This doesn’t typically include, say, armpits, my scalp under my hair, or certain less G-rated locations—not because of clothes (or rather not entirely because of clothes; they certainly have an effect), but because of other body parts being in the way.
Ah. I was thinking in terms of core body temperature being affected by the external temperature, which seems like it has to happen at least in extreme cases as a simple matter of physics (e.g. if it’s so hot or so cold that it overcomes the body’s ability to self-regulate temperature), but it might not happen in the majority of less extreme cases for some people. I should just take your word for it that you’re one of those people, or close enough for practical purposes.
And it’s probably a bad idea to induce hypothermia in order to go for a run without sweating, so I withdraw my suggestion.
I recently have been trying to exercise more as well, I bought a door hang pullup bar for 20$ and so far in terms of exercising its quite relaxing. You can do assisted chair pullups if your tired, you can do just a few and be done fast, you can do extended sets if you feel like it. All infront of the tv/computer movie of your choice.
Going for walks at night would seem to solve everything except for possibly “boring.” You could try to get a friend to walk with you, or call a friend on the phone, or listen to an audiobook.
Yeah um no, being refrigerated is a) not something I currently have free access to and b) falls into the same category as exercising outdoors in the cold. Minus one reading comprehension point.
You will receive only one negative reading comprehension point for this mistake if you choose not to turn this into a thread in which you say abusive things about me or contradict me on the subject of myself and how I work. Yaaaay.
My suggestion is that you learn to get over your fear of sweating. There’s nothing objectively harmful about it, so it’s merely a preference that can (and probably should) be changed through gradual exposure. Start slowly and work your way up. If you refuse to change your behavior in any substantial way I don’t know why you’re asking for advice.
ShardPhoenix, I believe that Alicorn has a form of autism (please correct me if I’m wrong, Alicorn.) Being sensitive to sensory stimuli and having aversions to some of them is common for people who suffer from autism, and I don’t think these aversions are particularly easy to overcome. I’m guessing that Alicorn’s aversion to sweating is in this category. She isn’t just ‘being lazy’ and refusing to attempt to change a preference.
Note to Alicorn: have you ever succeeded in getting rid of a textural or other sensory aversion through gradual exposure?
Note to Alicorn: have you ever succeeded in getting rid of a textural or other sensory aversion through gradual exposure?
My sensory issues do morph over time, but largely outside my control. The closest thing I can think of is that when I was little, I couldn’t stand denim, but then I had a pair of very soft stonewashed jeans that I did like, and thereafter I was able to touch all varieties of denim comfortably. Trying to figure out how to not be bothered by such a thing on purpose would be a little like trying to rewire myself to not mind pain: surely a worthy ultimate goal, but not currently within reach for any practical purpose. It’s too base-level.
That’s what I thought. It’s not a simple matter of habituation, although the fact that your liking the one pair of jeans generalized to all denim suggests it might have to do with what category your mind places different textures into, rather than just how they feel.
Has this ever happened in reverse: there was a texture/other stimulus that didn’t bother you until you encountered a particularly nasty instance of it, and it generalized to all instances?
The reverse hasn’t happened quite that way, no. In general I become more, not less, tolerant over time; sometimes I have temporary episodes where something that’s normally neutral is suddenly abhorrent for no obvious reason, but that passes.
I don’t agree that we should tiptoe around someone’s irrationality (and bend over backwards to try to accommodate it!) just because it has a biological cause, or because it’s something associated with “our kind of people”. If someone with schizophrenia came here and started posting about conspiracy theories, I don’t think the schizophrenia would be a good excuse to put up with that either.
I think we should recognize real differences in feasibility/difficulty/painfulness of actions and actionability of advice when they exist, for biological reasons or any reasons. (Sort of like how you wouldn’t expect basic epistemic rationality advice to make someone with schizophrenia sane.)
We should also recognize the predictable effects of our words on people as they are, predicted using empathy and models based on people’s actual behavior, rather than what we think people should be or non-truthseeking, habitually-used, constantly-surprised models of people. (Noticing when you’re using the latter sort of models is a lot of work, but possible.) This might feel like abandoning all ideas of what people should be and letting them get away with any amount of laziness, and there are potential gains that could be lost that way, but the hard-ass approach loses at least as much (while making you less likable); far better to step back, recognize and (at least temporarily) let go of affective judgments and game-theoretic impulses, and semi-honestly try to figure out what’s actually going on and what gains are possible.
The question I would ask is, does it help Alicorn to phrase your comment the way you did: “If you refuse to change your behavior in any substantial way I don’t know why you’re asking for advice.” That would antagonize anyone, rationalist or not. If you said that to someone with schizophrenia, the last thing it would do is cure their disease. There are medications for that...and unfortunately, I don’t think there are any medications for autism yet. And if anyone is bending backwards to accommodate it, it’s Alicorn herself; this is something that must be extremely annoying on a day-to-day basis. You, on the other hand, don’t have to change your day-to-day life at all.
That being said, I think your original suggestion (gradual habituation) was a good one. I don’t know if Alicorn’s tried exactly that strategy before, and there’s a possibility it might work.
As near as I can tell from the fact that I am sometimes forced into situations where I have to deal with sweat, gradual habituation does… drumroll… nothing.
I am no psychologist. I thought one of the benefits of gradual habituation was that it was in a controlled setting that subject could end at any time with essentially no consequences. This contrasts “sometimes forced in to situations”, I also have the impression that these forced situations there is no sequential order of events from the least discomfort to the most, in other words no gradualness(Also perhaps these events start at too high of a stimulus level.)
Finding someone capable of setting up a gradual habituation regiem and having the time to follow through with it are the biggest obstacles to experimenting with habituation regiems in my experience.
Your suggestion is not helpful. It relies on false assumptions, doesn’t pay attention to the nature of my complaint, violates the spirit of the exercise, and is dismissive of my level of self-knowledge, and that I would respond this way was predictable based on other commenting that has happened in this thread. If you’re not going to pay attention to what kind of advice I’m asking for I don’t know why you’re trying to give me any. (Others’ recommendations have already fared better than yours, and not just because that isn’t difficult to manage, so my request for advice wasn’t fruitless, although it does seem to result in uninformed noise production as a side effect.)
If you want to get fit it’s going to take effort and doing things that you don’t really want to to. Also, it’s a good idea to get over harmful and unnecessary aversions regardless. Also, don’t ask for advice if you can’t take it.
edit: The real issue here is that you don’t have strong enough motivation in the first place. If you can increase that (for example, by visualizing the benefits of being fit vs. the costs of being unfit in the long run), you’ll find it a lot easier to get started without a bunch of borderline-crazy restrictions.
Your advice was not what I asked for. Here are other examples of things that are technically advice, but which are not what I asked for and which am not obliged to accept cheerfully, that share a reference class with what you said:
“If you want to lose weight, you’re going about it the wrong way and putting too many constraints on what you’ll do to achieve it; exercise won’t help, just stop shoving food into your face.”
“You get bored by exercise? That means your brain is defective. Try ten years of therapy and some psychiatric drugs!”
“You’ll stop being bothered by sunshine if you just sit out in it for a couple of hours every day until you tan darker. Also, getting exposure to sunshine is a good idea regardless.”
“If you don’t have enough money to spend on exercise equipment but you’re able to get on the Internet you’re a crap financial planner. Come back when you have your priorities straight. If you want to get fit you’ll have to give up some of your luxuries.”
Much more importantly, though… do you not see the connotation of unpleasant, uncareful other-optimizing, and frequently contempt, in all those statements and what you’ve said to Alicorn, or do you think it’s correct to use that connotation, or that it doesn’t matter and people are wrong to care, or what?
The world is not obligated to be convenient for you.
I assume you state this because you are under the impression that Alicorn believes/acted like/implied the world is obligated to be convenient for Alicorn.
That is not the impression I have obtained by reading the posts in this discussion. What specifically gave you that impression?
Maybe that was slightly misphrased, but she seems to be assuming that if there isn’t a convenient, relatively effortless way to do something, then it’s not worth doing.
Effort is hard enough to judge in person and pretty much impossible over the internet. I have observed more then once in my life people judged as lazy, or many other negative traits, only to have the person years latter discover a perviously unknown medical condition causing the underlying problems. Once it is diagnosed as organ failure, a growth putting pressure in an odd place society stops judging them as lazy or any number of other negative traits.
The initial label of laziness(or other negative trait) was a logical misstep, coming to a conclusion without sufficient evidence.
I didn’t suggest a starvation diet, and sunscreen exists. Besides, my general point is that sometimes you need to try harder instead of giving up due to things that aren’t even harmful, and also realize that irrational psychological flaws are things that should and in many cases can be overcome (I know, I’ve done it), not taken as unshakeable premises.
I understood/understand that was/is your point. I was referring to “select people”, meaning people who are more sensitive to reduced food intake or photo sensitive. People not near the mean of the bell curve.
realize that irrational psychological flaws are things that should and in many cases can be overcome (I know, I’ve done it), not taken as unshakeable premises.
I know I have done it too. However I can not put “psychological flaws” in the right context to understand exactly what you mean by it, since it is not always possible to just try harder to change some physical structures that cause said psychological flaws.
It is awesome when trying harder fixes the problem. The problem is not always not trying hard enough or lack of motivation, it can because an organ is slowly dying in your body, or you produce proteins in a different as of yet unmeasurable way due to a quirk of genetics, or one of many other hard to diagnoses and solve problems.
If you want to engage Alicorn on her level or lack thereof of effort your should be asking for a detailed description of what she has tried and for how long, but I have not observed you doing that.
I do not exercise.
(Caveat: I will refrain from taking any advice that would lead to me starting to significantly exercise until I have a diagnosis and a treatment plan of my apparent heart condition, which doesn’t indicate it would be unsafe or otherwise a medically bad idea. I’d be really surprised if my doctor told me not to exercise, but in case she does I want to wait and make sure that my body is really lying to me when it says “don’t do that, bad things will happen”.)
Reasons (and existing known routes around each):
Sweat is horrible, and I overheat too easily. (Swimming gets around these; outdoor exercise in cold weather, interestingly, does not.)
Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues). (Anything indoors or at night gets around the sunshine thing. Other environmental issues are mostly limited to smelly gyms and excessively humid indoor pool facilities. Anything outdoors and at night and in nice weather gets around this.)
Many forms of it are financially costly (equipment, facility use). (Going for walks does not have this problem.)
It is boring. (When I tried jujitsu, it did not have this particular problem. Merely being able to listen to music does not solve this, although it could combine with another partial solution. If this problem is solved by simultaneously watching a movie, it has to be in a context where I can turn on subtitles, because I will not be able to reliably hear dialogue over any non-perfectly-silent form of exercise.)
Known route around all of these problems: happening to have free access to an outdoor pool which is open at night and a person who will go with me and chat while we both backstroke laps. This would be great but I don’t happen to have access to a free outdoor pool that is open in the dark.
It seems to me as if some bodyweight strength training exercises might not trigger any of these problems. I would suggest very small sets of comparatively high-load exercises, e.g. work your way up to one-legged squats, one-armed pushups, and chinups if you have a suitable thing to hang from or are willing to get a chinup bar (I sometimes do chinups on the metro). If you are interested I can give you some details on how to work your way up to these exercises, since many people are not initially strong enough to do them (I sure wasn’t!).
Sweat: Short sets don’t give you much of an opportunity to overheat or sweat. Also, with bodyweight exercises, you can do them at home and take a cool shower/bath immediately afterwards. (By the way, do you hate sweating, or do you hate being sweaty? I am assuming the latter for now.) You could even do the pushups in a cool bath to get some of the advantages of swimming.
Environmental Issues: You can do this at home and indoors.
Cost: Only the time investment, plus (optionally) the cost of a chinup bar.
Boring: This type of exercise does not take very long, so you won’t have much time to be bored. Not very long means 5-10 minutes total, a few times a week. You don’t even have to do it all in one session, you can take a minute at a time through the day.
As a bonus, strength training can make other sorts of physical activity less unpleasant, since you will be operating at much less than capacity.
I would also be interested in learning to work up to effective bodyweight exercises.
I am near-certain I do not currently have the strength necessary to do anything you have listed. The working up to it must also meet the criteria, but do tell.
Both. If the sets are as short as you describe and can be broken up into arbitrarily small pieces, I would expect to be able to work around this, though.
I have tried to be reasonably concise here so as not to drown you in intimidating details and caveats, please let me know if anything is unclear and I can expand on it or try to say it another way. I included common names for some of the more unusual exercises, to aid you in Googling, but am happy to try to explain anything that is not obvious to you.
I hope this helps, but please let me know either way, as it will help me give better and more relevant advice in the future. Especially anything that doesn’t work for you.
Basically the idea is to do exercises that are less intense versions, and to do negative reps. Try doing the hardest exercise you can do. If at some point in the day you can’t do it anymore then move one notch down. Once you can do 5 sets of 5 repetitions each in a day, try the next level up (no reason you shouldn’t be ambitious and try it earlier if you feel like it).
Less intense versions of the 1-armed pushups
Regular pushups
Regular pushups with 1 leg off the ground
Ab pushups, sometimes called Supermans (like a pushup, but instead of having your hands under your shoulders or chest, put them above your head, keeping your arms mostly straight). Then most of the work of is done by your abs rather than your arms. I found it much easier to work my way up to 1-armed pushups this way, and core strength is important for its own sake too.
Fingertip pushups (push with your fingertips rather than your palms)
If you work your way up to 1-arm pushups and want to challenge yourself a little more, you can always try 1-arm, 1-leg pushups.
You can increase the load on any given pushup by wearing a backpack with heavy stuff in it.
You can also vary the load of a pushup by doing it on an incline. (Hand(s) below feet is harder, hand(s) above feet is easier. Leaning with your hands against a wall is much easier.)
Another way to make it easier is to use your knees instead of your feet.
Another way to add challenge is to elevate your hands (e.g. pushup between two boxes or crates, or even just two books), with your hands on the boxes/crates/books. This would give you a larger range of motion and give your stabilizing muscles more work.
Less intense versions of the one-legged squat (sometimes called the pistol) include:
2-legged squat
Partial 1-legged squat, where you start with your leg only partially bent—walking up stairs is very close to this, as is stepping up onto something like a box or platform. If you can progressively raise the height of the thing you’re stepping onto, eventually you will be going through the whole range of motion.
You can also wear a backpack while doing a partial (or full) squat to increase the load.
Pull-Ups/Chin-Ups
The bean-can curls that pthalo suggested would be a good intermediate exercise for pull-ups. Since the point is to do only a few repetitions to maximize the ratio of muscle use to chance of sweating/overheating, you will want to use the heaviest weight you can lift five times. Once bean cans become too easy (maybe they already are), you can try heavy books, and eventually just putting heavy stuff into a bag and holding it by the handle.
Negative Reps
Negative reps are just doing the motion in reverse. So for the pushups, start with your arm extended, and lower your body slowly to the floor. For the squats, start standing on one leg, squat down slowly. For chin-ups, start in the “up” position (a standing stool would help for this) and slowly lower yourself. If you can’t do some of the intermediate exercises you can do negative reps of those as well.
Some notes on technique
For pushups, try not to arch your back backwards. You get the most out of each repetition if you put your hands next to your chest rather than your shoulders (with the obvious exception of the Supermans).
For pistols, try not to let the bending knee get far in front of your foot. To balance, extend your free leg forward or to the side, and tilt your torso a little forward. Do whatever you want with your hands. Keep your back straight.
For pull-ups, if you are using a proper bar, try varying between palms facing away from you (rock climbing style) and palms facing toward you. I find that when I am not able to do any more of one, I can often still do some of the other.
For curls, make sure your wrist doesn’t bend backwards, or you can get wrist pain like I did.
Note on Sweating
I can do sets of 5 at work, feel I’ve got some decent exercise in, and don’t sweat enough to notice. I dislike sweating and being sweaty too, but not as much as it sounds like you seem to do, so I can’t tell you whether it will be under your threshold. As I mentioned earlier, you could always try doing slow pushups in the bath if ordinary ones make you sweat noticeably. Or doing fewer reps in a set.
Other Stuff
If you do 5 sets of 5 repetitions per day (vary between the arm and leg stuff), you should be able to make a lot of progress. You can get away with doing quite a bit less, though my gut feeling is that you will only be making material progress if you do at least 3 sets of 3 repetitions each, a few days per week. Spacing them out is totally okay, you will still get stronger, it just won’t help your endurance as much (but it will still help a little!). In fact I would recommend spacing them out a lot at first, in order to minimize the probability of sweating. You don’t want to start out with bad associations!
By the way, if you are never able to work your way up to the 1-arm pushup and 1-legged squat, the intermediate exercises will still be materially better than nothing. And I specified bodyweight exercises because you mentioned you dislike gym-smell and weights are expensive, but if you find a gym that you can stand and has free weights, or have a friend with heavy weights they will let you borrow, that will accomplish most of the same things.
I wasn’t aware there were so many difficulty-altering parameters to mess with. That alone might stave off boredom for a few sets. Thanks!
I was worried that adding that much detail would be intimidating or confusing; I’m glad it was encouraging instead.
You recommend doing multiple sets per exercise on multiple days a week. This seems to contradict what Tim Ferriss and others have said, but maybe that doesn’t transfer to bodyweight exercises.
Right now, I’ve been doing exercise similar to what you describe (following Convict Conditioning), but only about 3 sets per exercise per week (as the book recommends for beginners). I feel I stagnated somewhat and don’t really transition to full push-up and pull-ups (legs and abs are doing fine). Do you think it would be beneficial to move to, say 3-5 sets on 3 days a week for those exercises? Or do I just have to wait it out, given that I’m fairly skinny and never had any serious strength?
I’m also trying to be more consistent about my protein intake. Constantly forget to eat enough. I aim at ~150g at 85kg/185cm, but often just get 50-100 because I accidentally skip meals.
The linked Tim Ferriss article mentions one-set-to-failure, and if you’re really truly maxing out you probably only need to do it a few times a week. But it’s harder to max out with bodyweight than with weights. I was also trying to suggest sets that would accommodate Alicorn’s desire not to sweat, which requirement would likely be violated by a true high intensity workout.
For workouts that don’t leave you feeling totally spent, which is generally the case with bodyweight exercises, you should take into account the total load in a day as well, and the brain-training effect of greasing the groove, for which there is substantial anecdotal evidence. It’s a non-trivial skill to be able to be able to use your true maximum strength, we’re designed to hold back in normal situations.
There is also a difference between training for muscle volume and training for strength. Obviously the two are strongly correlated, but they are not entirely the same thing. My understanding is that you want fewer, more intense reps at a time if you’re training for strength.
EDIT: Though to be honest, I only do 1-2 sets of high intensity kettlebells and 1 set of the 1-arm pushups in a week. But I’ve decided that it’s worth my time to maintain, but not to materially improve, my level of fitness at this point.
I also sweat a lot and the best way I’ve found of dealing with the discomfort is a merino wool baselayer. And not just for sports: I will probably never buy another pair of cotton boxers or socks.
Cotton gets wet, then cold and clingy, which can exacerbate blisters (socks). All sorts of high-tech synthetics start to stink real fast (I don’t have much experience with silver-treated fabrics though). Wool wicks very well, will not stink even after a week of wear, it retains 50% heat insulation and does not cling against the body even if it is saturated with sweat + merino wool is too fine to be itchy and it stretches back for longer than most fabrics so cuffs etc can stay tight for years. They used to have wool jerseys at the Tour de France up to the 1980′s since it beat synthetics for cooling up to that point. Couple of downsides though: merino wool (Ibex, Icebreaker etc) is expensive (but hard wearing), needs delicate detergents and does not like aggressive machine drying.
Bottom line: hundreds of millions of years of evolution for keeping warm-blooded animals performing from desert to arctic conditions has not been wasted.
Wool is itchy. And my dislike of sweat has little if anything to do with what I’m wearing when it happens.
I play DDR at home (all you need is a DDR pad and a computer). It solves all the problems except the sweat. But since it’s at home, I would think you wouldn’t mind that as much (plus you can have a towel nearby). I find this the most convenient exercise ever, since I can do it at home, any time, and for free.
I once owned a DDR pad, but either it or the adapter I used to hook it up to my computer had a delay that made it unplayable. So I don’t have one anymore, and this therefore fails the expense criterion.
You presume incorrectly.
Unless you are playing on high difficulty, you can comfortably play on a cheap pad ($16 + $4 adapter).
As for sweat, it seems like there might be two things going on there. One is you overheat, which you can control with a fan or something. Two is the actual sweat, which is annoying, but by no means bad in of itself. If you sincerely dislike it, you can self-modify to find it acceptable (might be worth doing anyway). There are plenty of resource on LW for how to do that.
Nope. (I overheat strangely. It’s like my interior and my surface area aren’t connected. Aiming a strong fan at me will prevent exterior but not interior overheating. If I just stay under the fan after I stop exercising, I will get too cold on the outside while still being too hot on the inside.)
Not helpful.
I may look into the inexpensive pad and adapter, though.
I can’t be sure, but drinking cold water throughout might help.
You know, it might. I don’t like water but that’s not among my listed problems, so if I come up with a solution for which overheating (as opposed to sweating, which this wouldn’t affect) is the only problem, I will attempt this patch. Thanks!
If you don’t like water, but like lemonade (or some other drink that can be served chilled and isn’t too expensive), filling a water bottle with it can be nice. If it’s too sweet, it’ll make you thirsty, but watering it down fixes that. I tend to add just enough syrup/juice/whatever to water to make water palatable. (i dont like water either).
i know a person who has a medical condition that gets worse with exercise. they have to avoid it as much as possible because they can feel poorly for weeks afterwards (even moderate amounts of exercise, like walking too much). The condition in question is not a heart condition, but it is possible that there are other conditions that react poorly to exercise for different reasons than the one my friend has. So you should definitely consult with your doctor AND listen to your body. If you feel really crummy after exercise, you should be doing smaller amounts of exercise to build up your strength. If you feel really crummy after a tiny amount of exercise, you probably shouldn’t be exercising. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor.
solution to sweat: deodorant
solution to sunshine: a wide brimmed hat and sunscreen, if the problem is sunburn, or a sensitivity to light, or heat.
other solutions to sunshine, if you are a night owl: rollerblading at night—is safer than walking since you can zip by other people. is also less hot and sweaty. bicycling at night. these sorts of things are best done in well lit areas
another solution to sunshine: if you are in a building with an elevator, take the stairs at least part way up. if you have a washing machine, hang your clothes up on a clothesline to dry (i have a clothesliine over my bathtub. they’re easy to make. i don’t have a dryer, and hanging up heavy, wet clothes can be tiring, especially lifting them up over your head. you can also flush toilets with a heavy bucket of water (you dont have to empty the entire bucket, just a little bit will do. this saves quite a bit on the water bill as well—my water bill has gone down since the flush on my toilet broke. bake bread now and then. kneading bread is also quite a workout. if you take public transportation, get off a stop early when you aren’t in a hurry. little things like these add up and they’re often more interesting than sitting on an exercise bike—getting off early lets you explore on foot a part of town you might not have known as well. and these tips are all good for number 4 as well—they’re cheap. most of them (including the elevator one, since i’m living on the fifth floor and my building doesnt have one) are things i do not really by choice but because i’m that poor.
solution to boring: audio books! i prefer reading a book to listening to one, but listening to one is more interesting than listening to nothing. also, if you like television and are doing something that can be done in front of a television (yoga, stretching, lifting cans of beans and pretending they’re dumbbells...) then television is another option.
I do like lemonade, but I can only water it down a little before it starts tasting like water.
Deodorant does not work well enough and is not properly applied to all relevant locations.
I have textural issues with sunscreen, and don’t like the directed warmth and brightness of the sun even through it. (I walk outside on a sunny day and it’s like I can feel myself crisping up. Or steaming if it’s humid.) Hats worsen the sweat problem on the scalp.
Skating is unkind to my ankles; skates cost money. Bikes cost money and I don’t trust myself to bike safely in traffic. Helmets worsen the sweat problem on the scalp.
I take stairs when they’re handy most of the time.
I don’t like the texture my clothes have when they are hung dry. (I know this because sometimes I get a broken dryer and then strew my clothes around my room to dry rather than spending more quarters.)
I do mean to learn to bake bread, but can’t regularly count on being able to knead it; I routinely have small wounds on my fingers. (Don’t say gloves. No form of glove I am aware of both lacks texture issues for me and would be okay to knead bread with.)
Audio books have been mentioned. Cans of beans: interesting. May try that and see if it generates noticeable amounts of sweat. Yoga is physically painful to me in ways I am fairly sure are not supposed to happen.
Me too… and I’m Australian (where sunscreen is a necessity). I’m currently loving being in the UK and not needing it.
I also don’t wear makeup or use moisturiser for much the same reason (and suffer the social penalty for doing so in a business setting).
I did eventually find one sunscreen that I could actually use—one put out by the Australian Cancer council (their “everyday sunscreen”). Understandably, however, it’s not available anywhere else but Aus… though you might be able to find it (and try it) online if you’re not in Aus yourself.
It is the only sunscreen in the world (and I’ve tried very many) that you can’t actually feel after you put it on… and I’m the sort of person that can feel the moisturisers that are guaranteed to be unfeelable...
Fair enough.
I have textural issues too although mine seem to have different triggers than yours. But it influences what foods I can eat (nothing squidgy, which might be a made up word, but it means mushrooms and anything else that feels like i’m eating a condom), what clothes I can wear (i can only wear nylon tights if i wear thick white socks underneath), even what kind of books I can read (smooth textures are the worst for me, my hands break out in sweat and i get a fight or flight response). i’ve used cotton gloves before to soak up some of the sweat from my textural problems, but any other type of glove would exacerbate it. i have to be really careful with what kind of socks i buy as well. -- no i’m not suggesting you knead dough in cotton gloves.
yeah, i had a feeling the deodorant thing wasn’t going to be too helpful—it’s nice for armpits, but you can’t slather it on your face or hands or feets or other places. and deodorant does nothing for the heat rash you get under the bra after sweating.
it’s true, bicycling and rollerblading cost money if you dont already have the equipment (i already have rollerblades, so its cheaper for me to use them than to take a bus—my rollerblades have saved me a lot more money than their initial cost, but that is only the case if you know you are going to be able to use them for transportation).
I think it’s probably best to just avoid the sun as much as possible.
another thing that is potentially exercise, if you like kids, looking after one for a while. true, you can just stand there and watch, but joining in tends to be a bit of a workout.
yoga should not be painful. you may be stretching too far. for example with lotus position (where you twist your legs up like a pretzel), you shouldnt do that until your body is ready to do that. instead, just put your feet together, and try to get the knees as close to the ground as you can without it hurting—if this means your thighs are at a 45° angle compared to your torso and floor, that’s okay. you do it so that it’s a tiny bit of a stretch, but not painful, and over time, you’re able to go farther. but if it’s not for you, it’s not for you. i will probably never be able to touch my toes. i can touch my knees. and i can touch a little farther, and then if i go any farther, it hurts, so i dont. I think stretching and yoga can probably be done safely by most people (definitely not all, though) if they granularise it enough—work on touching the knees before touching the top of the shin, then the middle top, then the middle, etc. but every body works differently and you know yours best—i only elaborate about the yoga because a lot of people seem to try to turn into a pretzel on day 1 and it doesnt work. my body is pretty weird actually. For example, walking (at all) is usually a bit painful for me, but rollerblading is not. something about the stride, or the way my foot is held tightly by the skate, but not too tightly.)
our local ice skating rink sometimes has deals where they let everyone in for free (but you still have to pay to rent skates). Maybe your local public pool (you did mention swimming) has similar specials from time to time.
having cats is also a source of exercise for me: carrying a heavy bag of kitty litter up 5 flights of stairs. then carrying dirty kitty litter down again. phew. and carrying them to the vet when one of them gets sick is exercise. My one cat has been sick , constantly, though something different each time, since October (UTI --> antibiotics --> diarrhea from the antibiotics --> ringworm --> nearly went bald --> eye infection. So for a while I was having to carry her (in my arms, with a leash attached in case she made a break for it) about a km every week or so. Thankfully, she’s much better now.
Seconded. The good kind of stretching is about teaching your muscles to relax (i.e. lengthen) on demand. When you feel pain that means you are putting strain on your connective tissue instead. This can lengthen the tissue over time but that’s not good for most people.
Thinking about the overheating… you might try getting some plastic-coated 5-lb hand weights, using them for arm exercises while watching a movie, and storing them in the refridgerator when not in use. Blood vessels are relatively close to the surface in the palms of the hands and soles of the feet, and I remember an experiment in forced thermoregulation which took advantage of that. Of course, it also involved a special suction-glove to increase blood flow, which is probably out of your price range.
The weights themselves are almost certainly out of my price range. I just don’t care enough about getting this done to work around my monetary neuroses. It turned out that my roommate has some 3lb weights (not covered with anything that would respond interestingly to refrigeration) and I was messing with those; my hands were not excessively warm during this process, so cooling something I hold in my hands would be of minimal help.
The thermoregulation experiment suggested that cooling the hands is a relatively efficient way to cool the whole body. I don’t think many people feel like their hands get too hot while they exercise, but there are apparently gains in endurance when exercisers keep something cold on their hands. These gains are most likely due to the body taking longer to overheat.
You could find out whether this works for you by timing how long something takes to produce noticeable overheating or sweat, then timing the same thing on a later day in very similar conditions, holding ice packs or something like that in your hands.
If you don’t want to induce extra overheating or sweat for the sake of the experiment, you could try holding something cold while doing something you have to do anyway (e.g. sometimes I have to go outside on a hot day). That way the worst likely outcome is not much worse than before unless you really hate holding cold things.
The weights only need to be made of something with reasonably high thermal mass, and the coating only needs to have thermal conductivity in a range that will allow the transfer of heat from your hands to the weights quickly enough to be useful but not quickly enough to be painful.
My theory here is that your core is well-insulated under most of your skin, but that the soles of your feet and palms of your hands are effectively gaps in this insulation. Under this theory, I would not expect your hands to feel hot when you’re exercising, since they contain no major heat source and have ready access to a major heat sink (the outside world). Cooling your hands just makes them a better heat sink for the rest of the body, reducing the need to sweat.
I suppose I’ll pop the weights in the fridge and see what happens; couldn’t hurt.
I also overheat, then get too cold after exercise.
For the overheating, I find that if I drink more water, I feel a bit better. I also run cold water over my wrists to cool down quickly after a workout.
Cooling down quickly causes me to overshoot, so I need to have a clean, dry shirt to put on, and a sweater or sweatshirt, handy to cope with the chills.
I don’t like the sweating either, but I try not interpret it in a negative way. “No one cares if look like I’m sweating.” “Sweating is a good way of removing toxins in the body. ” That sort of thing.
I do the Five Tibetans every morning, and they may meet these requirements.
They don’t raise a sweat on me, except for the 5th. I can’t say whether they will for you.
I do them indoors.
They are free.
They only take 10 minutes—much less if you’re not doing the full 21 reps of each exercise. How long does it take for you to be bored?
This isn’t the only thing I do for fitness, but it does seem to have a significant effect for me. The other things I do probably don’t meet your requirements: using a bicycle for transport whenever practical (sweat and sunshine), running (ditto), taiko drumming (sweat, sweat, and more sweat), lifting weights (my own, bought with money), and taking the stairs, not the lift (sweat?).
These do not seem to violate any of my listed requirements (possible exception being sweat, but I would have to determine that empirically). So, in accordance with the exercise, I will at least try them once I know what’s up with my heart problem. However, I suspect that they will be physically painful (several components of the series look like they will cause or exacerbate the sort of headache I tend to get, and forms of yoga in general that I have tried in the past were distinctly unpleasant).
Can you go into more detail about what sort of movements are apt to give you headaches?
I have only an ostensive definition, not an intensional one. The bits that stuck out to me were the spinning (this would worsen an existing headache but probably not cause one), the leg raises (which would not directly cause a headache but would lead to a sort of strain that might), the leaning in the third rite and the head-dangling in the fourth and fifth (it sounds like I’d wind up with my head upside-down or close to it, which could worsen or cause a headache). Sudden sharp head movements (voluntary or otherwise) also do this, and this is one reason, along with worsened kinetosis, that I can no longer ride roller coasters.
If you’re learning the Tibetans, you start with three repetitions of each move, and only add one or two repetitions per week until you’re up to 21 reps. If you need to do them slowly, they might require more strength, and that might mean you’d add more repetitions more gradually.
I don’t know whether your concern with spinning is related to dizziness. If so, I’ll note that I’ve got some evidence that Feldenkrais’ theory that dizziness is caused by holding one’s breath has something going for it, and the Tibetans are a good way to work on breathing while turning.
The fourth involves keeping your head level with the ground. T5T offers leaving your head vertical through the move as an option, or leaving your head and shoulders on the ground.
The fifth does involve having your head at about a 45 degree angle facing down, but not dangling.
You can do the movements slowly and get the benefits from them.
BTW, I’d advise caution with no.2, the straight leg raise, as it demands quite a lot of the abdominals. It can be substantially eased by letting the legs bend at the knees.
That’s interesting. I’ve never had any problems with #2, and my abdominals aren’t in in great shape—I’ve never been able to do an unassisted sit-up. Even when I was a kid, I needed to put my feet under something.
The fourth Tibetan is the big challenge for me—my chest and shoulders are very tight, and it took me a while to even realize that was the problem rather than the universe being out to get me. I’ve managed one rep of #4 that felt right—like a coherent stretch across the front of my body.
One of the good things about T5T was realizing that I didn’t have all the possible problems with the Tibetans. Another was one of the warm-ups (hands behind head, circle upper body) which improved my awareness enough that I could realize I was pulling against tightness in #4 rather than just having unspecified difficulty.
Some of the material about breathing in that book gave me some sense (no doubt incomplete) of how much I hold my breath.
I was going to start the second paragraph with ‘#4’, and that paragraph appeared in large boldface. Markdown, stop helping so much!
I do the Five Tibetans, too, though not with utter reliability.
Notable effects: they get rid of lower back pain for me. They strengthen the muscles around my knees. I believe they’re the reason I was able to fall safely when I slipped on some ice the winter before last. (Previously, when I fell on ice, I’d twist something and sprain it.)
Normally, I can do at least one of them better than usual. This cheers me up.
I’m inclined to think that by doing them slowly and/or doing fewer of them, you could avoid working up a sweat.
There’s free information about the Tibetans online, but I strongly recommend The 10-Minute Rejuvenation Plan: T5T: The Revolutionary Exercise Program That Restores Your Body and Mind—it’s by a teacher who’s taught 700 students, and has a good warm-up set and a lot of advice on modifying the Tibetans if you find them difficult.
Dance in the shower?
Even fairly restrained dancing over an extended period can elevate your heart-rate and trigger many of the benefits of exercise.
If you have a shower and live in an area where cold water is provided for free, then there is no cost. Additionally, this should address your sweat issue much like swimming in a pool.
It is indoors which eliminates sunlight.
Vis-a-vie the boredom constraint. Dancing to music by itself may be a varied enough activity to keep you mentally engaged. If this is insufficient you might consider audiobooks or talk radio.
Complications:
Safety. If you dance too vigorously then you may slip or injure yourself. You will know better whether this is a very likely issue. If it is, you may be able to mitigate with protective clothing (either purchased such as no slip water-shoes/socks or made from household objects; feasibility depending on your particular budget constraint and safety concerns).
You may not have a sufficiently strong set of external speakers to overcome the noise of the shower. If so, you might mitigate by (1) reducing the water flow for your shower, (2) purchasing or building louder speaks (for example, build a cone out of cardboard to amplify and direct the volume.)
Just cold water may be too cold for you. To mitigate either (1) add hot water (and possible add cost), (2) exercise outside the shower first to raise your body temperature, (3) acclimate yourself to colder water (this has been done by many people in the past either by necessity or due to a specific purpose such as Channel swimming).
I doubt I could hear anything with content over the shower itself no matter how good my speakers were, and I have pretty terrible balance in general. (I rarely actually fall, but I have to touch walls a lot to make that not happen.)
Run the experiment:
For entertainment—try different levels of water flow with your existing speaker setup and see if there’s any overlap between the range of “audible entertainment” and “acceptable cooling.” The experiment is fast and cheap. Edit: You may not be able to find the right level of cooling without first doing some exercise nearby to heat yourself up.
For safety—Assuming you’ve found an optimal level of water flow, try dancing at various levels of intensity with a friend present in the bathroom to catch-you/call-an-ambulance/help in case of severe accident. Not quite as fast as the first experiment, but contingent on it and still free and relatively easy—plus amusing for a friend
Dancing in the shower with someone to catch me? Okay, to be fair, I didn’t mention modesty issues in my original post, but I didn’t really think anybody was going to suggest something that involved immodesty...
(The shower curtain in my home is transparent.)
Ha. Here you go just piling on additional constraints!
Could you wear a bathing suit that’d provide sufficient modesty?
I could indeed do that. Hmm. (Not sure if Ade wants to watch me dance in the shower, though.)
Sweating is going to happen. Exercise hard, take a cool down lap and a cool to cold shower.
Sunshine is (and I’m saying this as someone who spent over a decade in the Goth scene, and still is into the music) absolutely critical. It does wonderful things for your body’s chemistry.
Life costs. You may not always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get.
Now, before you can build yourself a workout you have to have a reason for doing it. There are many combinations, but they boil down to:
1) Rehab of injuries. if this is the case you need to consult a therapist and work out exactly your regime, but I doubt it. 2) Body re-composition—commonly called “losing weight”, but is more accurately called “reshaping this mess”. 3) Getting stronger 4) Building Endurance (you could argue that this is a subset of 3, but in practice it’s different enough)
There are some others, but they are usually either a subset (body building is really an extreme of 2 and some of 3 for example).
Once you have your goals clearly defined some of your other objections can be worked around, except possibly for the sweat thing. The one thing “we” can do is keep the workouts of high intensity (meaning short and hard (get your mind out of the gutter)) so that you don’t have time to get bored, and you minimize the length of time you sweat.
This won’t work if your goal is to do the Leadville 100 (http://www.leadvilleraceseries.com/page/show/309879-run-series), but if you just want nicer hips and a little thinner belly, it isn’t that hard.
One suggestion—and this WILL involve sweat—is to find a 25 or (better) 35 pound kettle bell and do kettle bell swings 3 mornings a week when you first get up. Do as many as you can in 5 minutes, then take a walk around the block to cool down. Shower and go to work. This will work your legs, lower back, shoulders and abs. It won’t turn you into super$GENDER but if you currently do nothing, it’ll help. As you do these try to do longer and longer sets with fewer breaks. At first you’ll probably do 10-20 at a time, but it’s 15 minutes a week. If that’s too boring for you, then you’ve lost anyway.
Edited to add: Here’s a three minute workout: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOYpU9gg1yc&
He’s barely started sweating, but it’ll come in a few minutes. Oh, and he’s already (clearly) in shape—either that’s a 50 pound bell, or he’s really short :)
Not helpful.
You don’t have to believe me, I guess, if you think I’m lying about what things are and are not horrible for me, but if you’re going to disbelieve me, maybe don’t give me advice?
Is it completely unthinkable that your aversions to sweat and (especially) sunshine are related to phobias or some other neurological/physiological problems that should perhaps be addressed at some point? Sunshine really is good for you. My wife used to hate it, made nutritional and cognitive-behavioral changes, and now likes it.
I know that’s not helpful short-term. But long-term, it seems like there’s some other problem going on that is causing your surface aversions that you should at least not completely dismiss off-hand.
The sweat thing is probably autism-related. The sunshine thing is some combination of that and me being ridiculously pale. I take vitamin D, have a family history of skin cancer, and do not experience depression, so I probably shouldn’t be working too hard on learning to like sun. Sweat would be more beneficial to learn to like, and if you know of an actual disease that has hating sweat as a symptom, do let me know. But the vague concern that it might be something other than a very strong sensory preference like my other very strong sensory preferences is not actionable.
It’s not a question of belief, it’s an issue of presentation.
Here is what you wrote: “Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues).” That is not saying “I have medical issues”, it’s saying (wrist to forehead) I don’t LIKE going out in the SUN!
There are lots of things in life that just flat out suck. There is no way to make worthwhile gains without struggle, effort and dealing with stuff you don’t like.
To put my earlier statement a completely different way, you have a choice. On one side is exercise and sweat, on the other side is where you are now. If you are happy the way you are now there is no need to exercise. Otherwise you’re going to need to sweat, the choice you then get to make is then a matter of intensity and duration.
Physical exercise causes muscles to use either blood sugar or fat to get the muscles to contract. This is an exothermic reaction causing the muscles to heat up. Exercise sufficient to cause physiological changes causes the muscles to heat up enough to cause sweat. You don’t notice this when swimming because it’s constantly being washed away.
There is no big red fucking easy button that gets you magic results. There are shorter paths to a solution, depending on your goals (for example if you PURELY want to lose weight you can do things like intermittent fasting, low carb diets and ice baths), but you asked about exercise.
If you have physical issues with sun then the appropriate thing to say is “I have $DISEASE” which prevents me from spending lots of time outside”. Being light skinned with a family propensity to Melanoma is not a reason to avoid the sun, being light skinned with a family propensity to Squamous Cell cancer IS a reason to take precautions, especially if that family tendency is towards the cancer going metastatic.
Now that we have more information we can work with something. You don’t have to completely avoid the sun, you just have to limit your exposure (duration, clothing) to it and do things to minimize the effects of it (cartinoid consumption, vitamin A with the D etc.). Yes, it takes mountain biking in the Australian Outback off the table, but the sweating issue and your location take that off the table anyway. However the cheapest form of exercise is walking, and if we can somehow dispose of your sweating issues there are walking protocalls that will get you SOME gains, if they’re the sort of gains you’re looking for (again you haven’t stated any goals other than “to exercise”, which is vague enough to be meaningless).
There are some diseases that have sweating as a symptom, but it’s unlikely you have those. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about and investigating exercise and diet, but very little on the sweat side of things, mostly because I just accepted that I sweat a lot more than most people given a particular workload. I have a cow-orker who runs ultra-marathons. He is COLD when the temperatures hit ~70 degrees. I wear shorts down into the upper 30s (with a sweater and a hat). He can run in 90-95 degree heat with minimal sweat—he intends to run the badwater at some point—I used to ride a bicycle to work in 0 (f) weather and SWEAT on the way in. This is a normal part of human variability.
Again the issue is how you deal with it. UnderArmour’s “Heat Gear” fits close to the body, provides some UV protection and does a decent job of moving the sweat out from your skin. Two or three of these shirts in conjunction with some sweatbands to keep the sweat down on your face and hands and for what is called a “High Intensity Training” or “High Intensity Interval Training” can go a long way towards meeting your goals, whatever they may be.
Realistically though just “man up” and be uncomfortable for 20 minutes 3 times a week. Just going doing that will be a gain in your life.
The Austism thing (I presume from your writing you’re down on the functional aspergers end of things) provides a mostly psychological stumbling block. Austists generally have a degree of anxiety about change beyond what normal people face. Examine your feelings about changing your routine, stepping out of your comfort zone and fixing what you may find to be broken.
I wish to make the world a place where “Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I’m not taking your advice” elicits the same reaction as “Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I’m not taking your advice”, rather than being told to man up and being psychanalyzed by strangers.
I’m going to start with the subset of the world named Less Wrong.
Well put!
Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight is a very interesting book about sensory defensiveness—having trouble, sometimes serious trouble, with sensory experiences that don’t bother most people. It’s correlated with autism, but isn’t the same thing, and is sometime misdiagnosed as autism, neuroticism, or lack of willpower.
There are people who specialize in helping with sensory defensiveness. They are cleverly camouflaged as occupational therapists, so they are unlikely to be found.
Exercise can be fun if your brain is wired in a certain way, but needing to basically pointless busywork for physical maintenance is still stupid. There might be some entertaining flareups of cognitive dissonance from people who like to view being a diligent exerciser as a terminal value once there’s technology for keeping the body in excellent working order without doing pointless stuff that makes you sweat. For instance.
Also, how come no-one talks about different people probably having quite a bit different endorphin reactions to exercise? It’s pretty likely that they exist, but people still act like they are good exercisers because they make better choices as rational actors, not because it gets their brain pumped full of happy juice.
Very good idea which we need to test a lot. I’m very afraid it might do bad things later on, build muscle mass but not do anything about fat or many other problems, build too much of a type of muscle and not enough of another, eat something that shouldn’t be eaten to build muscle from it, or create weird dietary needs. But let’s go test it!
Downvoted because it is a general argument against any claimed rational action. Why do people who work at existential risk act like they make better rational choices when really they just get a different neurochemical responses? (Hint: Everything we do is for some neurochemical response)
For an action to be rational in your mind, does it need to obey some Kantian-esque imperative where the actor can’t gain pleasure from it? Are people who loathe exercise but do it anyways more rational?
Was wondering why people don’t look into differences in neurochemical responses at all, when they seem to be a pretty big factor in this case, different thing than arguing against any rational deliberation on it at all.
″ I wish to make the world a place where “Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I’m not taking your advice” elicits the same reaction as “Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I’m not taking your advice” ”
This would be nice. Now when I undertake this rejection challenge and come up with a reason for why I’m are not doing x-action, I can compare that reason to a hardwired physiological reaction. I will then feel satisfied that I am not doing (x-activity) for a good reason that I cannot change, because one surely cannot be expected to put their hand on a hot stove. In this way I will feel satisfied that I am in my current position for a good reason, and can happily fall back into acceptance.
And Alicorn, I don’t know the particular nature of your aversion to sunshine, and maybe it is deeply hardwired like most people’s aversion to a hot stove, so I am not speaking to you in particular. All I am saying is that reasons to not do something come in different strengths and in with different amounts of permanence. There are some dislikes that are able to be overcome through repeated effort, such as talking to strangers or eating vegetables. There are dislikes that can be overcome through mindfulness, (I will start this essay because of how it fits into my long term goals), or through environment (I will start this essay at a quiet Starbucks) or, my personal favorite, through chemical means ( I will start this essay once I finish this bottle of Laphroaig.) Maybe I misread MixedNuts statement and he/she was merely saying that for some people, sunshine and pain aversion are essentially the same, which I could buy. All I’m saying is I think there is a need to iterate this exercise through each of your reasons for not doing activity-x in the hope you can either find fundamental issues (putting your hand on a hot stove) or issues that can be resolved (working out in a walk in refrigerator.)
I think this conversation could use a dose of alternate perspective, and this seems like as good of a spot to drop it as any; zaogao, this is not directed at you personally.
LessWrong as a community makes a point, a lot of the time, of accepting a rather large amount of variance in its members’ values. Except, some of us seem to be better than others at noticing when values-variance is relevant to the conversation at hand. It seems to me that a failure to notice that that’s relevant is the bulk of the problem, here.
Alicorn has made it pretty clear, as far as I can see: Given the choice between a lifestyle in which she sweats regularly, and a lifestyle where she’s less fit and more prone to health problems, she really does prefer the latter—that’s what her values specify. She’s not in denial about it, she’s not complaining about having to make the choice, she’s not making drama. All she’s doing is describing the situation, pointing out the options she knows about, and asking if anyone knows of options that she’s missed. This shouldn’t be a problem, as far as I can tell: Looking for third (or fourth, or fifth) options is a very LessWrong kind of thing to do. But even if we collectively decide that we don’t want to devote resources to this kind of concrete discussion of specific cases, the respectful-of-values-differences thing to do is to say that, not try to shame her for having the values she does.
It might also be worth noting that this kind of thing contributes to LW turning into an echo chamber. If we can’t trust each other to stay respectful and on-topic about values differences that don’t significantly affect anything beyond a single user’s life, how can we trust each other with values differences that do affect other things?
How difficult would it be for you to learn how to be gently encouraging? Could it be worth the trouble?
Make friends with someone who has a backyard pool and invite yourself to swim laps with them. I don’t actually know where you live and what the climate is like there, but even if it’s colder, you can at least swim for part of the year. Ask everyone you know if they know anyone who has a backyard pool, and invite yourself.
Ideal long-term solution: build your own backyard pool. Probably not financially feasible right now, though.
I live in North Carolina at the moment and the weather would be fine for swimming. I don’t think I know anyone with a pool or have a good way to filter potential new friends for pool ownership (and I live in an apartment complex, so I can’t just stroll around the block looking for a pool-having house to turn up at with a plate of cookies). Suggestions?
ETA: I fail. I didn’t even think of asking the local meetup group if anybody in it has a pool before I posted this. (That said, since I don’t drive and I don’t think any of them live really close, it’d be more of an imposition than just allowing me to let myself into their backyard, but it’s worth a try.)
What about practicing balance?
You don’t need to buy a special balance board or exercise ball for it. You can just use any board on a pivot of some sort...say a plywood board on a solid rubber ball (depends on your weight).
Balance will protect you well into old age and practicing it should strengthen your leg joints, abdominals, and lower back, as well as forcing you to be more aware of your body’s position, movement, breathing, etc.
For entertainment, you can listen to music or an audiobook.
As for sweating/comfort it is definitely on the less strenuous side of things and can be done indoors with air conditioning (though this may be an expense you don’t want to incur).
Alternative balance activity:
Just stand on one foot and try twisting your torso from one side to the other or from from to back.
If this is too easy, carry a heavy object like a thick book. If this is unwieldy, try soup cans.
Vary your angular momentum by practicing torso twists with your arms out or your arms in or with varying weights.
Try the same while standing on the ball of your foot.
Try while reaching above your head, to the side, et cetera.
Interesting prospect. I don’t think I’ve got any boards or rubber balls lying around, but will keep an eye out for something to jury-rig.
Other options:
Board: Old skateboard (I’ve found these on the street, should be easy to find in a few yard sales), cutting board (if you’ve a side you don’t use for food preparation and are good about cleaning or use a towel to insulate), cut off part of a 2x4
Pivot: Rolling pin, small rocks (though not pebbles)
Taking evening walks while listening to audiobooks seems to deal with all of those issues, assuming you aren’t like one of my friends who can’t stand audiobooks. Audiobooks aren’t free, but if you take 3 30 minute walks a week it will take you months to get through a single book.
Audiobooks can be free if you get CDs from a library. (Then if you want, burn them onto your computer.) Also they may be available online as torrents.
Another source of free audiobooks is LibriVox which is building (i.e. recording) a catalog of free & public domain audiobooks. It is all volunteer work so I’m sure there is varying quality, but the few I have listened to have been quite good. However, the catalog is limited to works out of copyright (or under an appropriately permissive license), so newer material is rare, but many of the “classics” are there.
My existing iPod does not have any battery life (expense of equipment). Walking is not immune to the sweat problem. I also might not be able to reliably hear the contents of an audiobook over the sound of my own footsteps, nearby traffic, etc., but this part would be worth empirical testing.
I probably have an mp3 player around somewhere that you can use. (Check in the electronics bin, if you like.) If you don’t mind being functionally deaf to anything else, using earplugs and turning the player’s volume all the way up will likely solve the problem of hearing it over things. There is still the sweat issue, though.
Noted, thanks.
I share many of the problems with exercise that you have, especially the overheating and the boredom.
My solution to the sweating problem is to pick out clothes that are ‘okay to sweat in’, go for a run, then wash the clothes and have a shower immediately. I experience being sweaty as being very unpleasant, but with the attitude of “in these clothes, that doesn’t matter”, I can get around that.
I find that podcasts are much better than audiobooks for exercise—they give variety and a breadth of topics in the event that I’m not in the mood for a particular audiobook. I subscribe to some news podcasts, anime/movie review, comedy, philosophy, sociology, hacking and short-story podcasts, and if I grow tired of one, I always have something else to distract me.
Really bare-bones mp3 players can be bought here for 15 units of local currency, so with rechargable batteries, that isn’t a good reason. Most phones can play mp3s, and come with free headsets.
It’s a textural issue, not an attitudinal one.
The object is to get around my reasons, not dismiss them as bad reasons. Also, I don’t have a phone.
I understand that that’s the object, but I hope you aren’t excluding the possibility that some of your reasons—or anyone’s reasons—might actually be bad reasons. That’s a concern I have with this whole post: it could be a net rationality loss if you let your attitude shift from “I will do X if objections W, Y and Z are overcome,” to “I will do X if and only if etc.”
It is certainly possible that some reasons are bad. When people have presented options as partial solutions, I am in some cases willing to meet those partial solutions halfway. But “It only costs $X and it’s a functionality that comes with $OBJECT so that can’t be too much even though I know nothing about your finances or why you want free options” is not a responsive answer to my complaint that things cost money. X ≠ 0 and I don’t have $OBJECT already.
You know that wasn’t me, right?
Didn’t say it was.
Even when it’s dark out? I would expect this would be OK at least at some times of year.
Other things you could do to fight the boredom problem would be to try to get a friend to walk with you, or have a phone conversation.
From the original comment:
Sorry if it sounded like I hadn’t read the post carefully. I know it annoys me a lot when I have to repeat myself because people don’t seem to be listening. But I did in fact notice that and had a possibly incorrect but not actually crazy reason for asking that specific question.
My model looked something like this:
expected_amount_of_sweat = f(ambient_temperature,exercise_intensity,time)
where f() is continuous and monotonically positive in ambient_temperature, exercise_intensity, and time. In other words, a small increase in any of the three inputs yields a small increase in the output.
This implies that for a sufficiently small increase in exercise_intensity, there would be some finite decrease in ambient_temperature that would offset it. I interpreted “does not [get around the sweat problem]” as meaning that for a fixed value of exercise_intensity, as ambient_temperature decreases, expected_amount_of_sweat approaches a lower asymptotic bound. It’s possible for that to happen (e.g. if you’re doing intense enough exercise you will sweat even in a walk-in freezer), but for there still to be an offsetting effect (e.g. carrying something heavy or running will make me sweat sooner on a hot summer day than on a cold winter day).
It seems as though either my model is wrong, or my model is right but the transition from resting to walking is not a sufficiently small increase in exercise_intensity. Is one of those the case, or am I missing something else?
Your model is close to correct, but “ambient temperature” is local to parts of the body, and in some locations cannot normally drop below my actual core body temperature. I’d have to wear ice packs in some mighty weird and highly uncomfortable places to make reality function like a naive version of your model.
OK, though I’m quite surprised if you’re saying that the general outside temperature has no effect whatsoever.
I’m slightly less surprised if you’re saying it has some effect, but that due to localization of heat and the insulation of even light clothing, walking is intense enough to overcome even a chilly autumn or winter night sweatwise.
General outside temperature has an effect on parts of me that are exposed to air. This doesn’t typically include, say, armpits, my scalp under my hair, or certain less G-rated locations—not because of clothes (or rather not entirely because of clothes; they certainly have an effect), but because of other body parts being in the way.
Ah. I was thinking in terms of core body temperature being affected by the external temperature, which seems like it has to happen at least in extreme cases as a simple matter of physics (e.g. if it’s so hot or so cold that it overcomes the body’s ability to self-regulate temperature), but it might not happen in the majority of less extreme cases for some people. I should just take your word for it that you’re one of those people, or close enough for practical purposes.
And it’s probably a bad idea to induce hypothermia in order to go for a run without sweating, so I withdraw my suggestion.
Why do you think you should, or wish you did?
Health professionals keep telling me to.
I recently have been trying to exercise more as well, I bought a door hang pullup bar for 20$ and so far in terms of exercising its quite relaxing. You can do assisted chair pullups if your tired, you can do just a few and be done fast, you can do extended sets if you feel like it. All infront of the tv/computer movie of your choice.
Going for walks at night would seem to solve everything except for possibly “boring.” You could try to get a friend to walk with you, or call a friend on the phone, or listen to an audiobook.
The obvious answer: http://movieclips.com/jCdx-rocky-movie-the-meat-locker/
Yeah um no, being refrigerated is a) not something I currently have free access to and b) falls into the same category as exercising outdoors in the cold. Minus one reading comprehension point.
You will receive only one negative reading comprehension point for this mistake if you choose not to turn this into a thread in which you say abusive things about me or contradict me on the subject of myself and how I work. Yaaaay.
My mistake, I thought the suggestion of slugging slabs of beef in a meat locker would not be taken seriously. To clarify, not a real suggestion.
My suggestion is that you learn to get over your fear of sweating. There’s nothing objectively harmful about it, so it’s merely a preference that can (and probably should) be changed through gradual exposure. Start slowly and work your way up. If you refuse to change your behavior in any substantial way I don’t know why you’re asking for advice.
ShardPhoenix, I believe that Alicorn has a form of autism (please correct me if I’m wrong, Alicorn.) Being sensitive to sensory stimuli and having aversions to some of them is common for people who suffer from autism, and I don’t think these aversions are particularly easy to overcome. I’m guessing that Alicorn’s aversion to sweating is in this category. She isn’t just ‘being lazy’ and refusing to attempt to change a preference.
Note to Alicorn: have you ever succeeded in getting rid of a textural or other sensory aversion through gradual exposure?
My sensory issues do morph over time, but largely outside my control. The closest thing I can think of is that when I was little, I couldn’t stand denim, but then I had a pair of very soft stonewashed jeans that I did like, and thereafter I was able to touch all varieties of denim comfortably. Trying to figure out how to not be bothered by such a thing on purpose would be a little like trying to rewire myself to not mind pain: surely a worthy ultimate goal, but not currently within reach for any practical purpose. It’s too base-level.
That’s what I thought. It’s not a simple matter of habituation, although the fact that your liking the one pair of jeans generalized to all denim suggests it might have to do with what category your mind places different textures into, rather than just how they feel.
Has this ever happened in reverse: there was a texture/other stimulus that didn’t bother you until you encountered a particularly nasty instance of it, and it generalized to all instances?
The reverse hasn’t happened quite that way, no. In general I become more, not less, tolerant over time; sometimes I have temporary episodes where something that’s normally neutral is suddenly abhorrent for no obvious reason, but that passes.
I don’t agree that we should tiptoe around someone’s irrationality (and bend over backwards to try to accommodate it!) just because it has a biological cause, or because it’s something associated with “our kind of people”. If someone with schizophrenia came here and started posting about conspiracy theories, I don’t think the schizophrenia would be a good excuse to put up with that either.
I think we should recognize real differences in feasibility/difficulty/painfulness of actions and actionability of advice when they exist, for biological reasons or any reasons. (Sort of like how you wouldn’t expect basic epistemic rationality advice to make someone with schizophrenia sane.)
We should also recognize the predictable effects of our words on people as they are, predicted using empathy and models based on people’s actual behavior, rather than what we think people should be or non-truthseeking, habitually-used, constantly-surprised models of people. (Noticing when you’re using the latter sort of models is a lot of work, but possible.) This might feel like abandoning all ideas of what people should be and letting them get away with any amount of laziness, and there are potential gains that could be lost that way, but the hard-ass approach loses at least as much (while making you less likable); far better to step back, recognize and (at least temporarily) let go of affective judgments and game-theoretic impulses, and semi-honestly try to figure out what’s actually going on and what gains are possible.
The question I would ask is, does it help Alicorn to phrase your comment the way you did: “If you refuse to change your behavior in any substantial way I don’t know why you’re asking for advice.” That would antagonize anyone, rationalist or not. If you said that to someone with schizophrenia, the last thing it would do is cure their disease. There are medications for that...and unfortunately, I don’t think there are any medications for autism yet. And if anyone is bending backwards to accommodate it, it’s Alicorn herself; this is something that must be extremely annoying on a day-to-day basis. You, on the other hand, don’t have to change your day-to-day life at all.
That being said, I think your original suggestion (gradual habituation) was a good one. I don’t know if Alicorn’s tried exactly that strategy before, and there’s a possibility it might work.
As near as I can tell from the fact that I am sometimes forced into situations where I have to deal with sweat, gradual habituation does… drumroll… nothing.
I am no psychologist. I thought one of the benefits of gradual habituation was that it was in a controlled setting that subject could end at any time with essentially no consequences. This contrasts “sometimes forced in to situations”, I also have the impression that these forced situations there is no sequential order of events from the least discomfort to the most, in other words no gradualness(Also perhaps these events start at too high of a stimulus level.)
Finding someone capable of setting up a gradual habituation regiem and having the time to follow through with it are the biggest obstacles to experimenting with habituation regiems in my experience.
I did not submit “help me figure out how to deal with sweat” as a True Rejection Challenge, so this line of advice is neither on-topic nor welcome.
Your suggestion is not helpful. It relies on false assumptions, doesn’t pay attention to the nature of my complaint, violates the spirit of the exercise, and is dismissive of my level of self-knowledge, and that I would respond this way was predictable based on other commenting that has happened in this thread. If you’re not going to pay attention to what kind of advice I’m asking for I don’t know why you’re trying to give me any. (Others’ recommendations have already fared better than yours, and not just because that isn’t difficult to manage, so my request for advice wasn’t fruitless, although it does seem to result in uninformed noise production as a side effect.)
If you want to get fit it’s going to take effort and doing things that you don’t really want to to. Also, it’s a good idea to get over harmful and unnecessary aversions regardless. Also, don’t ask for advice if you can’t take it.
edit: The real issue here is that you don’t have strong enough motivation in the first place. If you can increase that (for example, by visualizing the benefits of being fit vs. the costs of being unfit in the long run), you’ll find it a lot easier to get started without a bunch of borderline-crazy restrictions.
Your advice was not what I asked for. Here are other examples of things that are technically advice, but which are not what I asked for and which am not obliged to accept cheerfully, that share a reference class with what you said:
“If you want to lose weight, you’re going about it the wrong way and putting too many constraints on what you’ll do to achieve it; exercise won’t help, just stop shoving food into your face.”
“You get bored by exercise? That means your brain is defective. Try ten years of therapy and some psychiatric drugs!”
“You’ll stop being bothered by sunshine if you just sit out in it for a couple of hours every day until you tan darker. Also, getting exposure to sunshine is a good idea regardless.”
“If you don’t have enough money to spend on exercise equipment but you’re able to get on the Internet you’re a crap financial planner. Come back when you have your priorities straight. If you want to get fit you’ll have to give up some of your luxuries.”
So, to sum up, go away.
and 3. there are essentially true to first order. The world is not obligated to be convenient for you.
Taken as a purely factual statement, (1) appears to be simply false for some people.
Much more importantly, though… do you not see the connotation of unpleasant, uncareful other-optimizing, and frequently contempt, in all those statements and what you’ve said to Alicorn, or do you think it’s correct to use that connotation, or that it doesn’t matter and people are wrong to care, or what?
My reply to the edited post:
I assume you state this because you are under the impression that Alicorn believes/acted like/implied the world is obligated to be convenient for Alicorn.
That is not the impression I have obtained by reading the posts in this discussion. What specifically gave you that impression?
Maybe that was slightly misphrased, but she seems to be assuming that if there isn’t a convenient, relatively effortless way to do something, then it’s not worth doing.
Effort is hard enough to judge in person and pretty much impossible over the internet. I have observed more then once in my life people judged as lazy, or many other negative traits, only to have the person years latter discover a perviously unknown medical condition causing the underlying problems. Once it is diagnosed as organ failure, a growth putting pressure in an odd place society stops judging them as lazy or any number of other negative traits.
The initial label of laziness(or other negative trait) was a logical misstep, coming to a conclusion without sufficient evidence.
edit: The whole post I responded to was:
The negative consequence of following through with 1 or 3 can be so high for select people that they are not worth doing.
Following through with 1 may cause weight loss but may also cause diminished intelligence, diminished energy, malnutrition, again with select people.
Following through on 3 may cause cancer or increase the risk of cancer to high levels, again with select people.
This statement is true, however the cost may be too high with known methods. Hence this exercise to produce new methods to experiment with.
I didn’t suggest a starvation diet, and sunscreen exists. Besides, my general point is that sometimes you need to try harder instead of giving up due to things that aren’t even harmful, and also realize that irrational psychological flaws are things that should and in many cases can be overcome (I know, I’ve done it), not taken as unshakeable premises.
I understood/understand that was/is your point. I was referring to “select people”, meaning people who are more sensitive to reduced food intake or photo sensitive. People not near the mean of the bell curve.
I know I have done it too. However I can not put “psychological flaws” in the right context to understand exactly what you mean by it, since it is not always possible to just try harder to change some physical structures that cause said psychological flaws.
It is awesome when trying harder fixes the problem. The problem is not always not trying hard enough or lack of motivation, it can because an organ is slowly dying in your body, or you produce proteins in a different as of yet unmeasurable way due to a quirk of genetics, or one of many other hard to diagnoses and solve problems.
If you want to engage Alicorn on her level or lack thereof of effort your should be asking for a detailed description of what she has tried and for how long, but I have not observed you doing that.
As a borderline crazyperson, I take offense to this.