You All Over Exercise?

If only that was how it worked. In reality, the literature is quite clear that maintaining fitness, any fitness (strength, hypertrophy, aerobic capacity, lactate clearance) is easier by a factor of 2 to 3 than gaining it in the first place, so the person who maximizes his gains early in life will be able to maintain them with half the effort of your misguided 70 year old who will have a lower ceiling for muscle gain, having missed out on his opportunity decades ago. That’s the flaw in your reasoning: unfortunately, if you don’t strike while the iron is hot, you don’t get another chance. Of course, better late than never, but you can’t prance around wasting time forever if you want to optimize your results. Unfortunately, our actions (or inactions) have consequences.

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Is this concept something you made up because it makes sense to you? I don’t see the connection between the how a ball is thrown for distance vs how a person lives a long healthy life.

For one thing, the ball doesn’t care about the distance it travels while my body is constantly trying to adapt to my environment and repair itself for damage done while living.

I go with the idea that the higher the level of fitness, strength, bone density in youth (or anywhere along the timeline), the longer it lasts in old age (more to lose and gene expression advantages).

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Yes we partialy quite agree, and for example for IQ and education, this holds, i.e. go to the attainable max as early as possible and keep at it, but to overdo musclemass to the attainable maximum, or running (joints) to the attainable maximum naturally and usually leads to a decay early (logically, because you maxed it, you can soon only decline by definition, biologically realatively early, 65, 70) that also, because you maxed it, is a steep and thus in itself harming process, for example if a 65 year old Schwarzenegger type suddenly needs strickt bedrest due to accident. The 65 year old who is still on the up and has relatively smaller but slowly build, efficient muscles, will do better and likely recover much better and still improve another 30yr, while the other type just discussed usually now decays rather rapidly.

Do you dismiss the examples of 70yr olds attaining impressive muscle mass and great fitness, winning rowing competitions with 90yr for example, or do you claim that too many people are biologically or mentally not able?
And I addressed the people on this forum, who all are quite mentally able to control diet and exercise

I think the problem with your argument is the assumption that animals are selected for longevity. They’re not. They’re selected to live long enough to reproduce.
If you, as a human, want to be healthy in old age, you can’t look to evolution or selection. Exercise and weight training will help in old age regardless of whether our ancestors did that.

No, that is not my assumption anywhere at all. On the contrary, we clearly evolved to die!
We coevolved with the inevitability of long fasts once in a while, and they select survivors that actually benifit from the fast, almost like grass benifits from being trampled by cattle, or bodies use UV to make VD.

I realize this thread has strayed from exercise to fasting, but I get the feeling you just want fasting to be good for you. I think there is no evidence of that, especially for someone taking Rapa.
That someone survives a fast does not imply that they benefit from it.

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You are all over the place with assuming assumptions. Look, that is not how evolution works, I would never claim it like this, and anyways, fasting is just a very good example for something “negative” (not advantageous) that nevertheless coevolved into something quite functional, i.e. enhanced autophagy. I put forward this example in order to clarify how to think about which exercise protocols are clearly unnatural in the sense of that no conceivable advantage ever coevolved with that behavior, which is most obviously given with exercises that do not mimick anything that even occurred at any relevant rate, such as looking like a maxed out bodybuilder.

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That article has been discussed previously, my opinion is that it is way too generic.

Resistance exercise: a) which type? Loadings? Trained-untrained? Duration time - Including time between sets? The latter parameter can easily inflate or decrease times by a factor of up to 5.
I remember I read the full article but such details were not evaluated.

Beyond the authors ’ publications curriculum, the article does not seem to have a good value.

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Totally agree, but even assuming high loadings and short breaks, the stated times are so very much shorter than what longevity enthusiasts put in, it is no doubt significantly less. And I think that is consistent with the evolutionary point of view.

I understand your reasoning, but I think that the best way to tackle this article would be first to examine attentively the original studies from which the metanalysis was carried out, or better to listen to the comments from guys like nick Verovhen and others familiar with the statistics of medical articles.

It may be that the metanalysis is to be discarded totally, so no further discussion needed, or conversely it may be that the original data, if we know it well, may disclose some aspects that are actionable to the longevity buffs.

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That one article, … is just a small bit of a consistent whole and not so interesting. I have myself destroyed other authors’ shoddy papers using nontrivial statstics, so I know most studies details are a can of worms. Thus, take into account whether many studies have a clear trend towards something, best without it “coincidentally” being politically or otherwise convenient, and whether it does not contradict fundamentals, for example, evolutionary analysis. I looked at the whole and decided to slow down years ago. Recent research supports it.

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I don’t know about other recent research, but the decision to slow down may well be a good one in some specific subgroups, for example the over 60s.
The numbers cited in the paper you posted, though, are too pessimistic according to the experience of most people, even 60+, unless they refer to net time of muscle-strengthening activities, excluding pauses and warmup times;
40 minutes may be equal to 40 sets per week which, if we speak about compounding exercises taken at failure, in some cases may be optimal for longevity.
For example, 5 sets of squats,5 sets of leg press, 5 sets of deadlift, 5 sets of rowing machine, 5 sets of flat bench press, 5 sets of inclined bench press, 5 sets of pullups, 5 sets of dips. this sounds like an optimal weekly schedule, maybe not only for longevity but for hypertrophy as well!

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Yes, I would really like to know whether those resistance training time graphs are measuring just the work-time of training sets, or include warm-up and rest times between sets. It’s world of difference. Does anyone know?

The key thing with respect of muscle building and exercise is that you need to figure out how to maintain your muscles as you age. Also not all muscles are equally important. For longevity. For instance, you see men trying to develop large biceps and chest muscles while neglecting the most important leg muscles.

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Those are important beer drinking muscles.

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Question What is the association between cardiorespiratory fitness and long-term mortality?

Findings In this cohort study of 122 007 consecutive patients undergoing exercise treadmill testing, cardiorespiratory fitness was inversely associated with all-cause mortality without an observed upper limit of benefit. Extreme cardiorespiratory fitness (≥2 SDs above the mean for age and sex) was associated with the lowest risk-adjusted all-cause mortality compared with all other performance groups.

Meaning Cardiorespiratory fitness is a modifiable indicator of long-term mortality, and health care professionals should encourage patients to achieve and maintain high levels of fitness.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2707428

There are tons of studies linking Vo2 max to longevity, which you not going get very much of by doing 10 minutes of cardio a day… .with “some high intensity”.

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By analyzing over 7,000 patient responses to a physical activity survey, the study suggests that engaging in at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise weekly significantly lowers the risk of chronic conditions.

https://scitechdaily.com/this-simple-habit-could-slash-your-risk-for-19-chronic-diseases/

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Well, I wrote 45 min/d, not 10, and the main criticism was overbuild of muscle mass that must at some point decay, and rather unhealthy exercises like just lengthy running/swimming, which some can apparently do without limits, congrats, but many will find their knees/shoulders shot, for example. So, we are I think in agreement, no?

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Being in shape is better for longevity than being thin, new study shows

A comprehensive review found that being out of shape greatly increased the risk of dying prematurely — regardless of age or body mass index.

Being in shape is far more crucial for a long, healthy life than being slim.

That’s the conclusion of the largest, most comprehensive study yet of the relationship between aerobic fitness, body mass index and longevity. A review and analysis of reams of earlier research, it found that being out of shape doubled or tripled the risk of dying prematurely, whatever someone’s age or body mass index.

On the other hand, if someone had obesity but was aerobically fit, he or she was about half as likely to die young as someone whose weight was normal but their aerobic fitness low.

“This tells us that it’s much more important, all things considered, to focus on the fitness aspect” of health and longevity “rather than the fatness aspect,” said Siddhartha Angadi, an exercise physiologist at the University of Virginia and the study’s senior author.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/01/08/fitness-fatness-longevity-health/

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