Exercise is Good, Actually

I was recently persuaded to go to the gym in large part thanks to this article. Excerpt:

“Noob gains”—the fact that novice lifters gain strength with incredible speed—is a phenomenon that’s advertised widely, but still under-advertised, as evidenced by the fact that there are people out there who could take advantage of it, but haven’t. I will consider noob gains to be a correctly-rated phenomenon when literally every adult who possibly can has enjoyed them.

If you haven’t lifted weights or done significant resistance training, you might understand, in theoretical terms, that you can double your strength in a matter of a couple of months with little difficulty. But if you haven’t done it, it’s probable that you haven’t fully absorbed just what that means, or how easy it is. I’m writing this in the hopes that reading one more person extolling the benefits of strength training will finally get you to go out and grip a barbell. [...]

Let’s start with a conceptual reframing. You might think of lifting as the art of becoming unnaturally strong. But that’s not the way to think about it. 

Your body isn’t designed for its current state if you live in a post-industrial society—you’re abusing yourself by default. Your body wants to be more muscular. It craves adaptation under stress. Thus, it is generous. In your early days of lifting, you won’t be pushing it to do crazy, outlandish things. Instead, you will simply be allowing it to be as strong as it should be. 

This is why, in the early days of lifting, the gains are so quick, and come without bodily protestation if your form is solid. It’s also why something just feels materially correct about becoming stronger, like you were crooked this whole time but finally you’ve been straightened. 

That sense of rightness is not just physical. Gaining muscle gave me emotional equanimity as well as physical equanimity, and this is reported generally. I could try and track down some stupid survey to “prove” this to you, but you will experience it yourself. Maybe the mechanism of action is ‘physiological,’ in the sense that your muscles release hormones or something, or maybe it’s ‘psychological,’ in the sense that you’ll have more confidence, and you will radiate it into the world, and the world will radiate back something different. 

I don’t care. It works.

You might think that you’re strong enough to do everything that your life requires. And, well, that’s probably true. But what you haven’t experienced is the feeling that your life is abundantly physically easy. 

This was a revelation to me. Until I’d gained some muscle, I didn’t know that getting out of bed shouldn’t actually feel like much, physically, or that walking up a bunch of stairs shouldn’t tire you out, or that carrying groceries around shouldn’t be onerous. I felt cursed by the necessity of occupying space while shuffling around this mortal coil. And now I do not. Moreover, I no longer feel that I need some special justification for existing, because simply residing in the material is now a privilege.

I used to have mysterious transient back pain. I thought this was normal because I heard that some back pain is normal. Then I did some deadlifts, and my pain evaporated. It turns out that my back was just weak.

There’s this nice side effect, too: when things in your life are less physically onerous, they are then less psychologically onerous. It’s easier to live life when the prospect of basic physical activities isn’t exhausting. You will want more to move in the world.

I’m not condemning you to a lifetime at the gym. Here’s the fun part—once you have some muscle, you can either keep building strength or just maintain it with light-to-moderate exercise, if you feel like it. 

I’m not a huge, musclebound guy. (Not yet, anyway.) I definitely look like I’ve done some exercise, because I have, but what I did is build up a reasonable level of strength—I stopped at a 2x bodyweight deadlift—and then didn’t lose it. Mostly I’ve been kind of half-assed about my workout regime in the last couple of years, and that hasn’t mattered a bit. The aesthetic and physical benefits have persisted.

So you can just do this for three months and then quit exercise except for what makes you feel good. That’s perfectly satisfactory.

Probably the biggest impact on me was the idea that I could just do an exercise program for a few months, then stop and keep the gains. Going with the D&D metaphor, if I was playing a game and I got the chance for a relatively minor one-time investment that gave me a permanent +4 STR for the rest of the game, I'd most likely take it! Probably I'd take it even if I was playing a spellcaster with no particular use for STR, because hey a permanent +4, I'm sure there will still be some situations where it comes in handy.

Now it still took me quite a while to get to it, because I had a bunch of shame of "being bad at this kind of thing" from school physical ed classes, and I knew I'd need to get a personal trainer to look at my form and those are expensive and paying for those felt icky. But then I had the fortune that a gym rat friend of mine volunteered to act as my personal trainer for free, and after that things have been going great.

I can confirm that it does wonders for my mood and helps boost my self-esteem, and I'm very happy that I started. At times it has felt sufficiently pleasant that I've felt slightly addicted to going to the gym. (I haven't yet noticed clear differences in daily activities or things like how easy it feels to get out of the bed, though.)

One additional point worth noting is that physical health has an enormous impact on mental health. Exercise (along with good sleeping and eating habits) is valuable even if it didn’t make you stronger.

For me, an important motivation for regular exercise is a desire for a long Healthspan—that is, I want to live long and be fully functional into my “marginal decade”, the last decade of my life.

Dr. Peter Attia, a physician who focuses on longevity, on his Drive podcast talks about a centenarian decathlon. He encourages us to ask, what things do you want to be able to do with your body when you are 80 or 90? And what do you need to do now, to be able to do those things, knowing that at least after age 40, most physical capabilities decrease noticeable each decade (strength, endurance etc.). 

Here’s a short podcast excerpt that discusses this concept: 

https://peterattiamd.com/how-to-train-for-the-centenarian-decathlon/

He splits out exercise into four component outcomes you want to work toward:

“-> Four components of exercise:

1. Stability
2. Strength
3. Aerobic performance
4. Anaerobic output”

Dr. Attia also in other podcast episodes talks about studies that show correlation between these factors and longevity (e.g., VO2 max (aerobic performance). See this podcast note, where he comments on a study that compared all-cause mortality for quintiles of aerobic fitness as measured by VO2 max, and which concluded that improving VO2 max even just from low to average or above average can have a huge impact: 

https://peterattiamd.com/how-does-vo2-max-correlate-with-longevity/ 

” Important stats

• Going from just being low to being below average is a 50% reduction in mortality over a decade
• If you then go from low to above average, it’s about a 60% or 70% reduction in mortality”

As I’m in my early 50s and I want to live a productive, fulfilled life with work and activities for many more decades, thinking about exercise not just as “what makes me feel good now?” but also as an investment in the value of my future decades is quite meaningful. 

Some random things that helped me exercise:

• it is easier to overcome the stereotype "only dumb people go to gym" if you know a specific smart person who exercises;
• for me, it is much easier to exercise while listening to music; note that the music best for exercise can be quite different from the music you listen when you want to relax; keep a separate playlist;
• advantages of exercising at the gym: many machines and weights, all distractions removed;
• advantages of exercising at home: you can listen to your favorite music, you can do something useful during the breaks (so you take longer breaks between the sets without wasting too much time);
• sometimes it is better to exercise using your body weight (you do not need to buy lots of stuff), but sometimes the weights are great, too;
• if you watch a movie and interrupt it every five minutes to do one set, at the end it will feel like "I spent the afternoon watching movies" rather than "I spent the afternoon exercising"´; by the way, you can do some exercises while watching the movie.

If there are such things as actively fun forms of exercise, I don't know them. I have tried several different forms of sport and exercise, but I am still stuck in the "Thou Shalt Suffer To Stay Healthy" paradigm. Finding an actually enjoyable physical activity would be greatly helpful, but at the present time I am basically incapable of exercising with something other than guilt-based motivations.

The fact that I've sucked at every form of physical activity ever since I can remember surely doesn't help; my mother swears that even at age 2 I strongly preferred to sit and read rather than running around like toddlers are supposed to do. At this point, whenever someone claims that exercise is funny or relaxing or immediately beneficial, my gut reaction is just "no it isn't".

I actually like doing things with my body.

This is the key insight. What would you suggest to someone who plain doesn't like to do things with their body?

I actually like doing things with my body.

...

And some forms of exercise are actively fun!

This is a key aspect. If "exercise" conjures up a picture of dutifully grinding out 3 x 10 x 50kg on the bench press three times a week, or sweating away on the exercise bike longing to get it over with, that may be the wrong frame of mind. There are others worth exploring.

One is exemplified by Ido Portal and Rafe Kelley. I think it is one or other of them that observed that when children exercise they don't call it "exercise". They call it "fun".

A rather different frame, also valuable, is that of Mark Twight, retired extreme mountain climber and trainer for the military and films like "300". He said, "It doesn't have to be fun, to be fun."

ETA: Another name: Cyberyoga (Lamont Goode). I cannot come within a country mile of what he does, but I find him inspiring to watch.

I have asthma. My peak flow is like 30% below normal (this means I can exchange less air with each breath). Even with significant training I can't do things lots of people do, like go jogging or ride a bike and hold a conversation; instead, I'm breathing heavily after 30 seconds.

Have you considered Inspiratory Muscle Training (IMT)?

I can only agree with this, regular exercise makes me sleep better, helps me focus, and make me think better. Ignoring all the benefits to yard work or looks and confidence, some exercise is still worth it.

>I care about doing important intellectual and professional work that depends on my mind.
>Physical exercise doesn't much impact my ability to do that type of work.

Do you not feel an immediate post-exercise mental benefit? A day where I get a good sweaty run in the morning is a day where I +3 on all my D20 INT skill checks. Even more than +3 on rolls specifically to maintain concentration and resist distractions. This is my primary motivation for cardio and I felt an improvement even when wildly out of shape and barely able to run, feels like relative effort level (amount of sweat, anyway) is what matters.

Even as a child I had this effect. But it was impossible to exercise before school because it started so early.