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eemil11/07/20246 repliesview on HN

How much more evidence do we need, that exercise is good and any amount is better than none?


Replies

outworlder11/08/2024

Well, I personally do not.

I was about to be put in blood pressure medication. Then I started a gym, with a trainer. I noticed that, after the exercise, blood pressure would immediately drop and stay low for a few hours.

Over time, the amount of time it spent lower than average increased, and it got lower and lower. It crossed 24h.

Now? I can go to the gym Mon/Wed/Fri and it will remain low at all times. I did stop for a couple of weeks and it started creeping back up so it's not a 'cure', but functionally, as long as I keep it up, I have normal BP.

I still have some weight to lose, that can further help things, most likely. And removing sugars also did help since I dropped a lot of liquid I was retaining.

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0xcde4c3db11/08/2024

With the caveat that I'm just a random non-expert on the internet who has nevertheless spent too much time reading scattered studies and scholarly opinion articles:

We don't need "more" evidence exactly, but rather a better model of how the effects of exercise map to a given individual's physiology. Exercise is good overall, but it's also considerably overhyped due to a procession of weak and narrowly-applicable results being misconstrued as adding up to a massive pile of benefits that applies to the average person. In reality, the average person does not get anywhere close to the sum of all the touted benefits; they get some constellation of some of the benefits, while other outcomes are flat or even regress [1].

So yes, "exercise is good" at a sufficient level of abstraction, but it's much harder to make the case that it's "good for [specific outcome] for [specific person]". Which is one reason that it's such an obnoxious trend for specific health complaints to be met with generic recommendations to exercise (or exercise more, or exercise differently).

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6818669/

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yndoendo11/07/2024

Until society has better work-life balance to allow for exercise while allowing for cost effect doctor visit to assign supportive and recognized improvement. Cheerleaders are more useful then people think.

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m3kw911/08/2024

The detail is in how regular are the exercises? Doing one hour at end of day after sitting 8 hr straight is worse then spreading it out.

Of course doing 1 hour a day is better than nothing but it may not be effective

dartos11/07/2024

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