Posted by herman

https://herman.bearblog.dev/exercise/

I workout 4 days a week and I love it. It's the foundation of my morning routine, following spending 45 minutes drinking coffee on the couch and watching the sun come up with Emma.

I've been doing this for a few years now and while I struggled (as everyone does) in the beginning, I can't imagine not exercising in the morning now. On the rare occasion that I do skip a workout, I feel it missing throughout the day as a lack of vitality and less mental clarity.

Let's perform a thought experiment to work out the return on investment of exercise. For this let's first assume that exercise does nothing else but expand your lifespan (not extend; since it's not just adding frail years to the end but instead injects extra years in each stage of life). We can ignore the effects it has on strength, focus, feelings of accomplishment, and mental health for now.

It's well understood that a good exercise routine is a mixture of strength, mobility, and cardio; and is performed at a decent intensity for 2-4 days a week for at least 45 minutes. This could be a combination of weight lifting, yoga, running, tennis, hiking, or whatever floats your boat.

This totals about 3 hours a week, or 156 hours per year. If we extrapolate that over an adult lifetime, that's about 8,500 hours of exercise, or about a year of solid physical activity.

That sounds like a lot! But when put into the context of life expansion, it's actually an incredibly good deal. There are many studies detailing how any physical activity, from an easy walk all the way up to vigorous exercise a few times a week increases expected lifespan by 3 to 10 years. And none of these studies used lifetime exercisers, just people who exercised regularly in the last 10-ish years.

This makes sense, since 80 years ago we were still fighting the second world war, and jogging only entered the mainstream in the 70s. Weightlifting was an even later bloomer, and only becoming cool in the 90s!

I speculate that a lifetime exerciser with a modern approach to physical activity would have an even longer health and lifespan than any of these studies suggest. But for this writeup I want to stick with conservative estimates and not speculate too much.

We know from one study that people who played tennis a few times per week lived roughly 10 years longer than average. So we'll use that value going forward.

That means that over a lifetime, one full year of exercise leads to 10 full years of extra life. That's a 1:10 return on investment! So even without any of the additional benefits (which I'll get into later), this is still one of the best investments you can make.

Yes, this is an oversimplification. Correlation between exercise and longevity doesn’t imply causation. Confounding factors like diet, socioeconomic status, and healthcare access influence lifespan. Attributing 10 years solely to exercise ignores these; but it does play a significant factor, as many well-controlled studies will attest to.

This is also based on the premise that all of the time spent exercising is "wasted", which is hardly the case. People love running, playing padel with friends, lifting heavy things, and hiking. I love being in the gym, working towards mini-goals, making progress, and interacting with the community around me. This is not time wasted. I'll posit for many people it's the best part of their day. Not only that but it leaves you feeling accomplished, wholesome, and less depressed and anxious.

To end off I'll rattle off a few other things exercise is good for:

• Better sleep
• Less frailty in old age
• More strength
• Able to take part in more fun activities (like long hikes)
• Being more attractive (subjectively, of course)
• Improved self perception
• Better cognitive function and memory
• Access to communities
• Less pain
• More mobility
• A stronger immune system

And this is injected into every single part of your life and available in every decade. Not just at the end.

And this is inherently doable. This is the time equivalent of one episode of any Netflix show, 4 times a week. I watched 3 episodes of Pantheon on Monday alone!

So go do the thing. Incrementally at first. Start off slow and build up a practice that feels right. You won't regret it.

https://herman.bearblog.dev/exercise/