Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug

> The author Daniel Lieberman has put it well: Exercise is healthy and rewarding even though it’s something we never evolved to do.

We have ostensibly spent much of our evolutionary budget on the ability to run ~indefinitely no matter what. Compared to virtually any other animal, we can vastly outperform them in the most arduous environments. Our bodies are mechanically optimized for running at every level. We have connective tissue that stores and releases energy. Our bodies can reject on the order of 1kW+ of heat steady-state through the magic of evaporative cooling.

I can directly tie my mood to how much exercise I’ve had in a given week. It’s also easy, given how busy life feels, to let the proverbial frog boil in water when it comes to this.

My partner often comments when I’ve been a little grumpier than usual by saying, “you should go on a bike ride.”

It really works wonders on the soul (and the more physical heart and lungs) getting out for a spin in the fresh air.

The best way to make a happy, healthy person into an unhappy, unhealthy person is to keep them lonely and keep them still. It should come as no surprise that the inverse also tends to hold true.

On a tangent, I think that's part of why volunteering can be so rewarding.

Exercise "simulate the arduous tasks that were once necessary to make it through a life" makes sense, as most of our ancestors were blue-collar workers and farmers. I try to integrate more physical activity in my life, which seemed like labor before, but now feels like life-saving activity. For example, I am intentionally trying to fix/diy things with my house like painting my garage, mowing my lawn instead of hiring someone else to do it, and even learning woodworking and gardening. Even in the heat of the summer, I feel more invigorated working outdoor whenever I can, and helps offset the sluggishness I feel after a day of sitting, coding, and staring at the monitors at work.

Walking is exercise. Never forget that.

Consistency over sporadic herculean efforts always wins out.

I go for a decent walk most days and it doesn't require effort or get boring. It goes well with listening to headphones and relaxing the eyes on the horizon plus seeing a bit of nature and humanity in action.

This does me a lot of good however the only upper body exercise I get is playing the piano! I can't see myself joining a gym or doing press-ups reliably in the long-term. I need to find a suitable hobby which has upper body + other benefits while being fun/interesting and low-risk. Carrying logs has helped but we have enough firewood now.

I find it interesting that the article is about exercise and the title picture is yoga. In fact near the top

> To a best approximation, aerobic fitness and weight-training seem to increase our metabolism, improve mitochondrial function, fortify our immune system, reduce inflammation, improve tissue-specific adaptations, and protect against disease.

Yoga is neither aerobic fitness nor weight training

note: I do yoga probably about twice a month (should do more) so I'm not dissing yoga. I'm only noting that the picture of yoga seems to have nothing to do with the article.

>Like someone already said: what if you get an injury going to hard at it?

There's no need to go hard, even steady walking for 20 minutes a day is healthy. And recent studies show that you don't need to jog or run, walking is almost as efficient and less stressful for your joints.

One of the best ways to exercise as long as you aren't a brain in a jar is to use an indoor rowing machine. Rowing will engage about 80% of your muscles.

Maybe not a drug. But if the improvements in health come from bio chemical signals, it should be possible to activate those signals without engaging in exercise. Eventually?

GLP-1 is a rare opportunity for our overweight nation to "get back on the treadmill" in both a literal and figurative way.

If you have been sedentary for a long time and are overweight, you obviously have too much weight for your muscular strength and connective tissues, which have concurrently atrophied with inactivity, in addition to reduced neuro-biomechanic maps in your brain since you haven't used the circuitry.

This all adds up to a high initial injury risk in starting exercise even if you have the mentally focus.

But GLP-1, if it is the miracle it purports, should be able to drop overweight people, even if it is temporarily, to the point where you can being exercise much more safely, and/or with more intensity and duration to get more benefits sooner.

On a macro level a universal health care system that is cheap and effective is really a generation or two away with heavily incentivized exercise, and not without precedent, if I am to understand what Iceland did.

We will live longer, live far better, feel better, look better, be happier, more connected, less anxious, more adventurous, smarter, more productive. These aren't 1-2% improvements at macro levels. 10% improvements, which in pharma land are considered exceptionally effective drugs, and a minimum, and 30-50% miracle drug levels of outcomes are on the table.

But our medical establishment is either drugs or surgery. The extent of insurance company inducements are "silver sneakers".

The perverse accounting involved in extreme obesity may demand a national level program of "Biggest Loser" (although, not to that insanity) for financial inducements to get people to lose weight, because the loss of "caring" for the obese (FORTY PERCENT of Americans are obese and it keeps getting worse each decade).

I hate exercise. The only thing I hate more is not exercising.

for those who are biochemically inclined:

Myokines aka exerkines

Until you injure something particularly nasty, like a joint, tendon, muscle tear, etc...