Many here hit the gym often and for hours, run miles daily. I get it, muscle is longevity organ and all of that, but:
Research I find (much on this forum) shows short times being ideal:
1.1) 40 min/week muscle building, definitely less than 100 min/w.
1.2) 45 min/d cardio, but also not every day, and best even just 10 min now and then with high intensity, e.g. interrupting hours of sitting, adding up to 45 min.
People who recently started sports are healthiest, those who stopped have it soon worst (don’t remember where from, but intuitive anyways). Now think! All you already very muscular, as you grow real old, at some point you must cut back, even if just due to some accident bed rest say, so you find yourself declining rather rapidly, and that may well help to finish you off!
I increase muscle so slowly as to hopefully be still on the way up when I am 80 or 90.
Related, all that muscle of bulky people must go somewhere, and often, even if due to say accident and bed rest, it turns into fat (this from hearsay, maybe a myth). However, related to this:
Many here focus on muscle mass, but strong efficient muscles, like those of workers, martial arts, or exercise on metformin, beat bulkier muscle. I am myself a real skinny guy, look fragile, but very strong, so I know this from personal experience. Surely, in old age, having a good size of such resilient slowly build muscles is better than larger ones that fast decay without frequent maintenance.
Review all of the above in the light of evolution. E.g. it is totally expected that extended fasts are good for all organisms. Running from a threat, short time, high intensity, yes. But hours in the gym, being over average bulky? What in evolution ever selected for that? Marathons? Some say humans evolved at some point for running down pray over long distances. Maybe, but not over much of our recent evolution, and the old guys stayed home.
This is always an interesting way to look at things, but in no way indicates what best behavior is related to health or longevity. Fasting was a reality, not necessarily a benefit. Eating everything in sight was beneficial 10,000 years ago, but now? No cavemen lifted weights, but they weren’t planning for old age. Etc, etc.
The average person, even hitting it hard in the gym and trying to optimize muscle growth, is never going to get “bulky.” Criticizing “bulky” people through a longevity lens is a bit of a straw man, i think. Most natural people are going to struggle to add more than about 25 or maaaayybe 30 pounds of pure contractile tissue onto their frames in their entire lifetimes.
However, because building muscle is comparatively hard for most people, it makes sense to “make hay while the sun shines” as my mom always said, because it’ll be way easier to maintain it in your 50s and beyond than to build it fresh.
Research seems to support the non-linear relationship between resistance training and mortality. Too much of a good thing becomes unhealthy when done excessively.
@vongehr, where does the first chart come from? Do you have a link to the study?
Aerobic exercise is less clear. Vigorous aerobic exercise appears to improve QoL scores, but that’s not a great marker of longevity. All-cause mortality goes down with more steps per day, especially at older ages; but walking is hardly aerobic training.
Very high level take-aways: for longevity, resistance training 2/week (~1 hour) and lots of walking seems optimal. It would be good to see more on aerobic training and longevity, my guess is a non-linear relationship there too, a daily marathon is likely not great, but moderate training is good.
I’m going to take issue with that. Obviously everything can be taken too far, but associational studies are the weakest form of evidence, and the way you attempt to quantity resistance training (e.g., " an hour") is highly imprecise and really doesn’t even mean anything from a physiological standpoint. An hour or CrossFit and an hour or powerlifting and an hour of bodybuilding are all going to look quite different.
Functional measures of health need to be weighed heavily when evaluating exercise and body fatness protocols. My life objectives go beyond wanting to avoid using a walker or avoid needing a hand rail to pull myself off the toilet.
I want to be physically comfortable moving in the world on uneven ground without fear of falling or tripping despite situational awareness of danger around me. If I cannot be physically active, then I am not myself anymore. I know I can learn to be happy as another (less capable) version of myself, but I want to avoid it as I want to avoid death.
I also want to keep my cognitive function, memories, eyesight, teeth, vertebrae, knees, skin, hair, etc in a high functioning state along with my unseen organs. Function matters just as much as longevity, if they are not the same thing.
People have different goals but I cannot get inside the head of a person who wants to do the least necessary physical activity. I want to know what’s the most physical activity I can do and still recover and have time for the other important things in life.
So many things get in the way of doing too much physical activity. I don’t think I need to worry about doing too much. Life will pull me back from that threshold.
You confuse evolution with mere history. You say long fasts were reality but not advantage. That is irrelevant. The question is, did the long fasts select for survivors that actually benefit from those fasts as coevolved features. Yes, the reality of competition and thus inevitable scarcity is so basic that on any planet, from yeast to elephants, we are all survivors selected for fasting, and you can witness anymals naturally fasting in order to combat certain sickness. You do not see them lifting weights.
I clearly separated between muscle building in the gym and high intesity short runs versus marathons. You might like to focus on the old age decline arguments and the evolutionary perspective that you completely neglect to take into account in your less than constructive criticism.
I am not talking about the average person, I am talking about many people on this forum, reading about their protocols of how much exercise, and what they do to increase even more muscle although they are already far more “bulky” than is natural for humans, say if you look at a newly discovered rain forest tribe, none of them has a six pack of steel and huge biceps. Will such add longevity or will it succumb to my old-age-decline arguments, which you do not take into account at all.
Look dude, if you can’t handle someone respectfully disagreeing with your opinion then maybe you shouldn’t offer it. On the contrary, I did address the old age decline argument. That’s basically the position from which all longevity enthusiasts and researchers argue for muscle building: namely, that because of inevitable decline, it makes sense to maximize what you have early in life.
“head of a person who wants to do the least necessary physical activity. I want to know what’s the most physical activity I can do and still recover”
???
That is not necessarily maximising for function in old age, not if taking scientific studies into account. You also neglect my old-age-decline argument. What goes up must come down, the higher the more rapid the fall. I want to still slowly go up, because once it is going down, it is soon over.
That is not my old-age-decline argument! Read again more carefully.
“namely, that because of inevitable decline, it makes sense to maximize what you have early in life.”
No! If you are at the maximum already, you must decline!!! If you are still approaching the possible maximum, you are still improving, the opposite of decline.
The study was somewhere here on the forum, but yours about 60 minutes is just as well, well inside the 40 to maximally 100 min.
We agree, just I like to consider evolution rather than trust studies, because I worked in research all my life, so I know the reliability of most studies is a coin toss. So, lots of walking, yes, of course, but deadlifting mountains in the gym, not so much.
That’s just a misunderstanding of how it works. You don’t retain the same capacity for muscle building as you get older. You’re essentially saying that a winning strategy for racing the 100 meter dash is to accelerate more slowly so that you never finish accelerating, whereas other runners will hit max speed at 60 meters. Try it out and let me know what happens.
Unscientific nonsense. 70 year olds can start and slowly build muscles well into their 90s.
The 100 m race analogy is completely unsuitable. Try understanding my actual arguments first before criticising straw men.
If you’re arguing that a 70 year old (let alone a 90 year old) can build new muscle, over and above that which he has ever possessed, to the same extent as a 30 year old, you are wrong. Sorry. A 70 year old who follows your hypothesis will never end up with as much muscle as he would have had he optimized his muscle building before the age of 40. In fact, my analogy was exactly correct, and your failure to to actually engage with it speaks volumes.
How much is too much then? All we have are cohort studies that reference strength training generally, and it would be difficult to find anything but longitudinal studies to measure mortality risk.
All the dose-dependent studies I’ve seen land on 2 to 3 sessions, or ~1 hour of strength training, per week as the optimal amount to reduce mortality risk.
If your goal is maximum strength or function, which seems to be the case for @Joseph_Lavelle, then you may want to do more. But the best evidence I can find is 2 or 3 strength training per week, maybe combined with 2 hours of moderate cardio, provides the largest mortality risk reduction.
If you have evidence otherwise, I would love to see it.
I don’t know how much is too much. That’s a difficult problem to even quantify. Like I said, in my opinion, trying to quantify lifting by the time the workout takes is an incredibly rough approximation at best, and essentially tells you nothing about how much work was done. Someone like me who is very fast twitch and rests a lot can frequently take an hour and a half to do a workout with less actual volume than an “average” person doing a 45 minute session.
I think personally it’s good to shoot for 2-3 sessions a week and not overthink it too much
You recommend an unreasonable high, the attainable maximum, early, to then maintain, which exhausts and wears out any machine soon.
You run 100 m sprint, but we here want to live long, so we stroll a marathon that hopefully turns into a tripple marathon before finish line, and on km 20 we leasurely jog past your dead body, because you attained your maximum early and tried to maintain it as best as possible.
The 70 year old also does not try to attain an unreasonable maximum. He tries to Not Decline, to still improve a little all the time. That is the Dao!