In brief, the training protocols used in these papers are not representative at all of how actual athletes train. And athletes do not train that way because it doesn't work nearly as well as the training protocols that have become popular since the 1960s or so.
With this I am not trying to invalidate the research. What I am doing is warning laypeople from drawing overly simplistic conclusions from studies like these, such as concluding that "Exercising hard is good". Successful endurance athletes spend the overwhelming majority of their training at low and moderate intensities, because that is what works best in the long term.
anaerobic lactic and alactic regime training just has a hard metabolic and fatigue thresholds where you won't see any improvements if you add volume.
aerobic regime training (which is by its nature low intensity) does, from what we know, not really have the same limitations. on the contrary a lot of its most important adaptions keep increasing with absdurd training volumes and only show up after accumulated years and decades of training (long distance endurance athletes can often peak or maintain near peak shape into their 40s or 50s because of this).
all of this necessitates large volumes of low intensity training.
E.x. in cycling a lot of the high volume low intensity work is targeted at the elite athletes that are putting in 20+ hours a week of training time.
I guess it's different for everyone but I still train somewhere between 7-15 hours a week and have always needed some of that to be low intensity.
That isn't relevant. The paper is not setting out to find the optimal way for people to train.
If I could simply choose between 3 minutes of running fast versus 90 minutes of walking, of course I would always choose the shorter one and get it over with, and may not have even chosen the walking at all due to the time involved.
And Magness isn't saying anything revolutionary here. Every other coach says very similar things. But Magness has the credentials to make him more authoritative than a random coach out there.
I other words, I agree with you. And I think hopefully you now also agree with me.
Then you might add more race specific work as race day gets closer. In one week you might do 2 days of track or threshold workouts before your long run of 14 miles at 6:00 pace with 8 at goal marathon pace (~4:50/mile).
This is likely around what is best for most people and probably cutting the strength training time to 1h before cutting the rest if you "don't have time".
This would be 5 h per week, or 250 h per year, or over 10 years, 3.5 months of continuous 24/7 exercise. This is a large amount of training. 4% of your waking time would be spent on exercising. Or 6% of free time. At what point does it turn net negative, ie as time that it eats away from life. You can't attend events or hang out with family since you're always at the gym. I have understood smoking reduces your life span 8%. On the other hand, if you replace watching reels with gym, maybe it's also positive time otherwise.
My view on exercise is that it should give me something in the moment. That also helps keep me motivated.
So arduous hikes and bike tours aren’t something I do for the exercise, that’s just a nice side benefit. I do those because I want to get to exciting places or explore the world at a pace that makes sense.
I ride my exercise bike to keep in form and be able to do those hikes and bikes tours, even to go further and enable me to reach new places and do new things. Same with swimming, though that also helps me to clear my head and think about stuff. Both of those can potentially be boring, but at least I always feel amazing and energized afterwards.
Strength training is admittedly something I do almost exclusively for its long-term health benefits (and struggle the most with), though I also like feeling stronger and seeing my body change at least a tiny bit. Oh, and it’s an activity (as well as some Yoga and flexibility exercises) I do together with my partner, so it always has that social component.
Bouldering and badminton (both of which I absolutely suck at) also have that social component: it’s something I do with other people.
Oh, and then I don’t own a car, so my bike is my only means of getting from a to b and transporting things. So I automatically get moving that way and it never feels like wasted time or even exercise to me.
That’s much more than five hours per week spent exercising and very little of it is boring or feels like empty time that is merely an investment into my future. I do think that’s the trick to being and staying active. At least for me.
Phone activity time is almost irreducible because it's not dedicated or de-fragmentable by design. It's almost always concurrent with something else, or in the "in-between" periods where your alternatives are limited.
One successful strategy here is to offload exercise into "snacks" that compete for this time. And that might buy back time you spend at the gym. Strength training and mobility work where the emphasis isn't on getting your HR up can easily be squeezed in here. So you might go to the gym, do your pressing exercise in 20 minutes, then come home and do pushup press variants as your accessory work in small increments over the day.
The one area this does not work on is CV training, where you need a dedicated amount of time in target zones to get the benefit. For that, you need to treat it as a first-class obligation, find some protocol that meets your constraints, and hold it sacred to get it done.
Probably need to define. Are we talking about professional athletes or just people who have a lot of training experience?
Exercising hard for a person who has never trained is very different than someone with years under their belt training. An untrained person can't even tap into what hard means compared to a trained person.
I'm also confused about the focus on endurance. Yes, all people need some cardio, but everyone would do better with additional strength. The stronger someone is going into their 50s, they better they will end up in the 60s and 70s.
Likely best for most people is to just start moving and once you have _actually_ established the habit of exercise, slowly add intensity. Let your body accommodate.
What are you talking about when you speak of good/best outcomes? I think especially when it comes to talking about fitness it is important to be explicit about outcomes because only with outcomes in mind can you talk about what “good” actually means.
In that context I’m a bit confused by your focus on (endurance) athletes. Their overriding goal is obviously increasing their athletic performance in a way that keeps them injury free. Their main focus aren’t health outcomes. That’s not the same. So if you focus on them you are in danger of talking past each other.
To that point: sure, those studies often have unrealistic protocols but the way (performance) athletes train is also unrealistic for most people!
If those studies are about population health they should have realistic protocols (in terms of: realistically achievable and adhered to by non-athletes, in the best case also empirically grounded in the sense of: this is a realistic range of activities non-athletes might actually engage in on a regular basis) for non-athletes.
Yeah, we know that resistance training is wonderful and so is high intensity cardio, but the biggest barrier seems to be motivating people to do something difficult which puts stress on their bodies. I don't feel like I see much research on HN or elsewhere that covers how to make people actually follow health advice.
I've done some sort of workout almost every day for the last 25+ years. It had nothing to do with motivation, but making exercise a part of my day like brushing my teeth.
So it isn't about discipline either, it's about habits?
I'm like you. Routine exercise for the last 25 years or so. I feel neither particularly disciplined nor particularly motivated. It is either just a habit I've formed or I happen to have the correct physiological temperament for exercise to be easy.
EDIT
I'll also add that most people who are disciplined don't really think about it that way. They just do what they need to do.
I claim the same about hunger (within bounds of moderation etc etc). It's simply uncomfortable, but it's a discomfort that you can adapt to and live with. My general view is that both hunger and exercise work as ways to moderate weight but they rely on the exact same capacity for discomfort (and enduring that requires either necessity or motivation/discipline etc)
I took a solid 6 months of forcing myself to ignore my mind's constant excuses to not work out, to the point of my mind realizing that the excuses just weren't going to work and stop.
Exercise feels good to me. I think it felt good immediately when I started? I like the feeling of pushing myself and I kind of like discomfort/pain I can control.
It's not much different from starting a business or making a piece of software. Motivation kicks things off because it's fun, but it goes away and now you have to have the discipline to keep going. When people talk about execution is everything, they aren't talking about day 1, they are talking about day 100, day 365, day 720.
My hypothesis is that HIIT and other high intensity training will have a greater effect on the rest of someone's day. I suspect the physical discomfort of keeping your heart rate at 120 for an hour is less than that of almost maxing it out in a handful of one minute intervals.
Only when you limit it to lactate levels. But you're not going to push to athlete serum levels anyway. There is a lot of tangential discomfort surrounding every aspect exercise, especially if you're not trained at all and have no routine.
It might actually be better even after factoring in the recovery time, but I think leaving out the recovery is a mistake when we're talking about public health.
Despite doing exercise (including high intensity stuff like spin class) I was overweight and had a HOMA-IR of 3.8 (Moderate Insulin Resistance) and insulin 13.2 (Early Insulin Resistance).
This was because I was addicted to sugary stuff.
I cut my refined sugar intake to almost zero and in two months HOMA-IR went to 1.02 (Normal Range) and insulin to 4.9 (Optimal / Longevity Range). My triglycerides had peaked at 228 (Moderate Risk) and dropped to 96 (Normal/Good). Glucose went from 116 (Prediabetes) to 85 (Healthy).
My assistant in cutting all that sugar was Claude. I used Claude as my buddy: I'd chat with Claude when I had cravings and it gave me alternatives and support. And it worked.
"Claude does Fruity Loop has sugar?"
"Claude does mint chocolate chip has sugar?"
A little more than your example