So many similar studies, including this one, suffer from the same flaws pointed out by Olympic coach Steve Magness.
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.
Professional athletes don't train for cardiometabolic health. They train to perform at competitions. The study is perfectly fine for the people it is intended to serve in the context of their lives. Normal people neither want nor need to train like athletes. They certainly don't need to follow a training program to compete at the Olympics. But they would still be well served to train in some form because of their increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Optimizing that form for efficiency is a key to population health. This paper is just the latest in a stream of evidence that suggests shorter but higher intensity bursts of exercise might be the more efficient way of training if you want to min-max your workout time and health as a normal person who has a real job and possibly a family and other hobbies.
In fact professional endurance athletes have to train at low intensity because they put out so many watts at higher intensities that they can't get enough fuel in to sustain it for the number of hours they train. If they do then they end up with chronic fatigue etc. Once an amatuer is under a certain number of hours a week (10?) and relatively low wattage it doesn't make sense for them to train at low intensity. (You could be a really fast amateur and still be putting out relatively low watts compared to a pro).
misinfo. that has nothing to do with why athletes train the way they do. getting more calories in is not a limiting factor.
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.
This is my frustration with AI coaches, specifically Garmin. They want me to have a 10k time goal or something when I don’t ever run competitive races and don’t directly care about times. I just want to get healthy.
I do recommend learning what Steve Magness says about the subject. He covers that as well. Even as a complete amateur you still would not structure your training as they did in that paper, because it makes zero sense.
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".
It is only efficient because of the short duration of 8 week study. It's like, pounding Leetcode is the most efficient/effective way to prep for an upcoming interview. But for the long term, it is better to mix up the type of work you do.
Just to add my interpretation of what Magness would say, which is: intense interval training tends to show significant gains over moderate work in shorter (8 weeks) study periods, but those gains level off quickly in the long term. A more blended training approach that incorporates all types of training intensities (hard, moderate, easy) will outperform just doing hard interval training, over the long term. And this advice applies to all types of athletes, not just people training at a high level.
Yes. And he emphasizes spending most of your time doing easy volume. Because especially as a regular Joe you won't recover well from doing high intensity intervals three or four times a week, especially when you haven't built a strong aerobic base through lots of easy volume.
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.
Former professional distance runner here. I’ve not read the study but I can comment on the statement regarding training at low to moderate intensities - I can agree that low intensities have an important role in endurance training but a lot of training is at or near threshold levels which can be on the moderate to high levels of intensity. Easy efforts are critical but there is a lot of effort, in a “normal” training segment, that are at or near high intensity effort.
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.
Isn't it likely that blended exercise is best for longevity anyway? i.e. per week 1-2h Zone 2 and 20 minutes HIIT (nordic 4x4?) and then as much strength training as you can fit in, say 3 x 1h PPL per week, and maybe some sauna too.
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".
Thought experiment, not completely serious but something worth considering.
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.
You will feel better and be in hospital at the end of your life for a lot less time on average so yes it’s a lot but potentially the chances of being a fit 80 year old could be worth it.
The logic of exchanging 3.5 months every 10 years to be as healthy and able as possible for as long as you are alive seems to me to be absurdly compelling. Who wouldn't take that deal?
Most people don't exercise at all. If some of these people draw the wrong conclusion from such a study and start exercising at high intensity, it will still be better than their current couch-potato training protocol.
Probably not. They'll train like hell for a few weeks, their bodies unable to properly recover, they'll feel wrecked the entire time and they will never develop the habit of exercise.
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.
Good and best is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.
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.
Reading these studies has slowly convinced me that motivation is a more important factor than optimising a workout.
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.
It's not about motivation, it's about discipline. Motivation is fleeting, and if someone only exercises when motivated it's going to be hard to keep going. Discipline is what will get a person to exercise enough that it becomes part of their life. But to your point, discipline is not that common.
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.
> 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.
This still seems like a step in that direction. If you can have more benefits by spending less time training and enduring physical discomfort, then that should be an overall guideline for training aimed at the general population. Although the biggest change in health we've ever seen in our obesogenic society is still from semaglutide and I think physical exercise will never reach the same prevalence as a drug that you can take.
Why would you need to exercise unless you were living an unnaturally sedentary life due to being trapped in wage slavery? Shouldn't this be retitled to something like overcoming illhealth related to sedantism?
What about the fact that due to modern medicine many people now live twice as long and therefore need to stave off the effects of aging, e.g. loss of muscle mass and stability, to have a good quality of life in those bonus years?
The point of all these articles is that if you exercise hard you get extra health benefits. Even folks that move all the time and clock 15k steps per day may not get those benefits because it's not the right exercise.
Yeah. The formula isn't terribly complicated: don't eat crap and move your body in different ways.
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.
Such good advice. Another probably unpopular use of AI - I was using Claude to figure out all the music I listened to at university and what would have been playing in the bars at the time. I was loving the nostalgia and I would not have remembered 205 of it without the conversation!
So many similar studies, including this one, suffer from the same flaws pointed out by Olympic coach Steve Magness.
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.
Professional athletes don't train for cardiometabolic health. They train to perform at competitions. The study is perfectly fine for the people it is intended to serve in the context of their lives. Normal people neither want nor need to train like athletes. They certainly don't need to follow a training program to compete at the Olympics. But they would still be well served to train in some form because of their increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Optimizing that form for efficiency is a key to population health. This paper is just the latest in a stream of evidence that suggests shorter but higher intensity bursts of exercise might be the more efficient way of training if you want to min-max your workout time and health as a normal person who has a real job and possibly a family and other hobbies.
In fact professional endurance athletes have to train at low intensity because they put out so many watts at higher intensities that they can't get enough fuel in to sustain it for the number of hours they train. If they do then they end up with chronic fatigue etc. Once an amatuer is under a certain number of hours a week (10?) and relatively low wattage it doesn't make sense for them to train at low intensity. (You could be a really fast amateur and still be putting out relatively low watts compared to a pro).
misinfo. that has nothing to do with why athletes train the way they do. getting more calories in is not a limiting factor.
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.
And this is totally the way a lot of amateurs end up being coached in some of endurance sports.
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.
This is my frustration with AI coaches, specifically Garmin. They want me to have a 10k time goal or something when I don’t ever run competitive races and don’t directly care about times. I just want to get healthy.
I do recommend learning what Steve Magness says about the subject. He covers that as well. Even as a complete amateur you still would not structure your training as they did in that paper, because it makes zero sense.
> you still would not structure your training as they did in that paper, because it makes zero sense.
That isn't relevant. The paper is not setting out to find the optimal way for people to train.
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".
It is only efficient because of the short duration of 8 week study. It's like, pounding Leetcode is the most efficient/effective way to prep for an upcoming interview. But for the long term, it is better to mix up the type of work you do.
Just to add my interpretation of what Magness would say, which is: intense interval training tends to show significant gains over moderate work in shorter (8 weeks) study periods, but those gains level off quickly in the long term. A more blended training approach that incorporates all types of training intensities (hard, moderate, easy) will outperform just doing hard interval training, over the long term. And this advice applies to all types of athletes, not just people training at a high level.
Yes. And he emphasizes spending most of your time doing easy volume. Because especially as a regular Joe you won't recover well from doing high intensity intervals three or four times a week, especially when you haven't built a strong aerobic base through lots of easy volume.
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.
Former professional distance runner here. I’ve not read the study but I can comment on the statement regarding training at low to moderate intensities - I can agree that low intensities have an important role in endurance training but a lot of training is at or near threshold levels which can be on the moderate to high levels of intensity. Easy efforts are critical but there is a lot of effort, in a “normal” training segment, that are at or near high intensity effort.
> actual athletes
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.
But athletes don't have health as their main goal.
Isn't it likely that blended exercise is best for longevity anyway? i.e. per week 1-2h Zone 2 and 20 minutes HIIT (nordic 4x4?) and then as much strength training as you can fit in, say 3 x 1h PPL per week, and maybe some sauna too.
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".
Thought experiment, not completely serious but something worth considering.
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.
You will feel better and be in hospital at the end of your life for a lot less time on average so yes it’s a lot but potentially the chances of being a fit 80 year old could be worth it.
The logic of exchanging 3.5 months every 10 years to be as healthy and able as possible for as long as you are alive seems to me to be absurdly compelling. Who wouldn't take that deal?
Most people don't exercise at all. If some of these people draw the wrong conclusion from such a study and start exercising at high intensity, it will still be better than their current couch-potato training protocol.
Probably not. They'll train like hell for a few weeks, their bodies unable to properly recover, they'll feel wrecked the entire time and they will never develop the habit of exercise.
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.
Good and best is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.
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.
Reading these studies has slowly convinced me that motivation is a more important factor than optimising a workout.
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.
It's not about motivation, it's about discipline. Motivation is fleeting, and if someone only exercises when motivated it's going to be hard to keep going. Discipline is what will get a person to exercise enough that it becomes part of their life. But to your point, discipline is not that common.
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.
Two sides of the same coin. Why would I impose discipline on myself without proper motivation?
> 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.
This still seems like a step in that direction. If you can have more benefits by spending less time training and enduring physical discomfort, then that should be an overall guideline for training aimed at the general population. Although the biggest change in health we've ever seen in our obesogenic society is still from semaglutide and I think physical exercise will never reach the same prevalence as a drug that you can take.
If you're waiting around for motivation to exercise, you will never succeed. It needs to be a habit. You need discipline.
Full title too long: Exercise intensity modulates interorgan communication and is associated with cardiometabolic health outcomes in humans
Why would you need to exercise unless you were living an unnaturally sedentary life due to being trapped in wage slavery? Shouldn't this be retitled to something like overcoming illhealth related to sedantism?
What about the fact that due to modern medicine many people now live twice as long and therefore need to stave off the effects of aging, e.g. loss of muscle mass and stability, to have a good quality of life in those bonus years?
The point of all these articles is that if you exercise hard you get extra health benefits. Even folks that move all the time and clock 15k steps per day may not get those benefits because it's not the right exercise.
Exercising hard = good for health. News at 11.
Yeah. The formula isn't terribly complicated: don't eat crap and move your body in different ways.
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.
Such good advice. Another probably unpopular use of AI - I was using Claude to figure out all the music I listened to at university and what would have been playing in the bars at the time. I was loving the nostalgia and I would not have remembered 205 of it without the conversation!
While there are infinite arguments to be made about individual diets, literally no one can do wrong by heavily cutting refined sugar intake.
Wow, I'd like to see a writeup of your Claude as diet buddy experience.
"Claude does candy bar has sugar?"
"Claude does Fruity Loop has sugar?"
"Claude does mint chocolate chip has sugar?"
EXCLUSIVE: Local man gleefully continues letting himself go while awaiting scientific consensus on universally optimal diet and exercise
This is about comparing different exercise intensities ? Sprinting > jogging basically ?