Tabata et al.[1] found in the mid-1990s that just 2-4 minutes of "high-intensity intermittent training may improve both anaerobic and aerobic energy supplying systems significantly." This was popularized as "Tabata training" 20+ years ago. I generally believe that brief bouts of exercise can be very beneficial, especially because they're easier to do consistently over the long-term vs. more time-consuming routines. For a decade now, I've just been running through my neighborhood most days for 20-30 minutes (with some sprints mixed in) and doing one or two maximal sets of pushups or pullups or barbell exercises at home on a weekly basis. I know a lot of people who got really into longer (e.g. 60-90 minute) gym routines but couldn't sustain it for more than a few months, and then stopped doing anything.
Yep. I hated running when I made it an option. The mental struggle around whether to run today took up many brain cycles. Now, I run weekday mornings. Tired? Go run. Don’t feel great? Go run. Busy day ahead? Go run. Read an article about the optimal workout routine in mice aged 25-35? Go run. Routine sucks until it works, and then it’s great.
I don't know if it works for everyone, but for me I tell myself "you HAVE to go for a 1 minute run, then just see how you feel" and every time I just end up doing a decent run anyway.
Yeah I would say in general habits are the most powerful force in health. Finding an activity you enjoy is 1000x easier to stick with than anything that feels like a grind.
Same thing for food. Trying to switch to a healthier but difficult diet wholesale fails essentially always. But what's relatively easy is finding a healthier alternative to one single thing you eat regularly, that you like just as well. This takes some experimenting, but is usually doable. Then once you've gotten used to the healthier option it becomes automatic.
Then you can replace a single other food, and so on. I think that gradual and sustainable are the most important things to focus on for most people looking for general health improvement.
I was about to be put in blood pressure medication. Then I started a gym, with a trainer. I noticed that, after the exercise, blood pressure would immediately drop and stay low for a few hours.
Over time, the amount of time it spent lower than average increased, and it got lower and lower. It crossed 24h.
Now? I can go to the gym Mon/Wed/Fri and it will remain low at all times. I did stop for a couple of weeks and it started creeping back up so it's not a 'cure', but functionally, as long as I keep it up, I have normal BP.
I still have some weight to lose, that can further help things, most likely. And removing sugars also did help since I dropped a lot of liquid I was retaining.
With the caveat that I'm just a random non-expert on the internet who has nevertheless spent too much time reading scattered studies and scholarly opinion articles:
We don't need "more" evidence exactly, but rather a better model of how the effects of exercise map to a given individual's physiology. Exercise is good overall, but it's also considerably overhyped due to a procession of weak and narrowly-applicable results being misconstrued as adding up to a massive pile of benefits that applies to the average person. In reality, the average person does not get anywhere close to the sum of all the touted benefits; they get some constellation of some of the benefits, while other outcomes are flat or even regress [1].
So yes, "exercise is good" at a sufficient level of abstraction, but it's much harder to make the case that it's "good for [specific outcome] for [specific person]". Which is one reason that it's such an obnoxious trend for specific health complaints to be met with generic recommendations to exercise (or exercise more, or exercise differently).
Until society has better work-life balance to allow for exercise while allowing for cost effect doctor visit to assign supportive and recognized improvement. Cheerleaders are more useful then people think.
This could get far more mileage with people by saying "activity" instead of "exercise." It is amazing how much people can get out of a simple walk around the house. Make it out and around the neighborhood, and you start getting absurdly good results.
Uh, yeah? Note that I'm not claiming people don't do any walking at all. But a lot of people that would easily do another walk around the house before settling down to watch TV will balk at exercise.
FYI, the absolute fastest way to lower blood pressure is to lose weight if you are obese.
Rule of thumb is that your systolic blood pressure will drop by 1 mmHg per 1 lb of weight loss, eventually slowing down to 1 mmHg per 2 lbs of weight loss as you get back down to more normal blood pressure range / weight range.
Source: went from 160/110 to 120/90 in several months by dropping 60 lbs.
Yep, I found weight loss was pretty much the only thing that would drop my blood pressure. Though it didn't drop linearly like you're describing. From 215lb to 180lbs, it didn't really change much at all. Once I got down below 180lbs, it quickly dropped (from ~150/90 to ~120/80) and stayed there. When I slacked off my good eating habits and went back above 180lbs, blood pressure shot right back up to ~150/90. I'm back down again to about 172lbs and clearly get it now, I have to stay here.
I've had similar results with blood pressure, although a smaller weight loss (about 30 lbs) and smaller decrease. Another 10-20 pounds to go.
For what it's worth, I'm on a intermittent fast. I only eat between 5pm to 10pm, with no real restrictions on what I eat. I was surprised how quickly weight fell away, and how easy a diet it was to stick to. 'Eat after work' was a simple behavior to adapt to.
People are very individual, and this might not work for a lot of people, but it's doing great for me. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life on blood-pressure drugs.
Getting a little beyond the headline, we find they had people wear blood pressure monitors and accelerometers and concluded:
> More time spent exercising or sleeping, relative to other behaviors, was associated with lower BP. An additional 5 minutes of exercise-like activity was associated with estimated reductions of –0.68 mm Hg (95% CI, –0.15, –1.21) SBP and –0.54 mm Hg (95% CI, –0.19, 0.89) DBP. Clinically meaningful improvements in SBP and DBP were estimated after 20 to 27 minutes and 10 to 15 minutes of reallocation of time in other behaviors into additional exercise. [1]
Somewhat related is Betteridge's law of headlines:
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
I like to swap out any of these maybe-headlines with the exact opposite. It may help us, or it may not.
> Just five minutes of activity a day was estimated to potentially reduce blood pressure, while replacing sedentary behaviours with 20-27 minutes of exercise per day, including uphill walking, stair-climbing, running and cycling, was also estimated to lead to a clinically meaningful reduction in blood pressure.
Sounds like 5 minutes of exercise is where it has a statistically significant measurable impact in blood pressure, but 20-27 minutes is where it's a meaningful impact.
The headline is about a study that showed increased activity was correlated with decreases in blood pressure.
So, no, it's not equally accurate to say the opposite is "equally accurate" unless we're playing pedantic games where we ignore the study and pretend it's all just meaningless words.
GASP, exercise is good!? No way. The hard part is finding time and having the motivation. Particularly the latter. There's constantly about 49 other things that feel like they need doing more than purposely exercising and wearing myself out even more than I'm already worn out.
The greatest misconception about exercise is this "if you're tired your best course of action would be to abstain from the thing that in your mind will make you more tired" train of thought. Exercise doesn't always work like this. Yes you'll have bad days, but you'll find yourself more energised most of the time and mentally more at peace.
It's like that classic sedentary worker ailment of the sore back. Many people take this as a sign to rest more, but these types of issues are often caused by weak musculature and the best thing to do is start resistance training. Obviously not a blanket solution, but one that definitely seems overlooked.
>The hard part is finding time and having the motivation.
Motivation certainly, but if we accept the results of the study, you really don't think you can find 5 minutes of time in your day to walk up some stairs or do some jump rope?
possibly counter to intuition, I find that since I have started to religiously use my stationary bike in the morning, I have a lot more energy for the day, not less. I suppose if you're butting up against caloric/nutrient limits you might suffer. I personally find exercise clarifies my thoughts and improves my mood, even if its the last thing I want to do when I do it.
The mind-body connection is quite real. Improving your physical state will almost certainly have a non-zero improvement on your mental state. Exercising can really help you make sense of all those other things you have going on. Not to mention that being in shape and strong makes every physical thing you do easier.
If you live in an area with decent infrastructure, cycling to and from work is a great way to get exercise in without sacrificing much time (in some cases you even save time)
some people just have a bad genetic soup and do exercise and diet and such and still have hbp well beyond the numbers designated as meaning "high" ultra high etc I didn't see any hard numbers of reduction in the article either, I've read that smoking raises bp by 5-10points which is largely marginal when you look at how inaccurate most bp readings are. I'm skeptical in this selling environment we live in that this isn't all just to sell drugs to people for their whole lives, these are the same people who want to decimate human populations btw
5-10 points isn't marginal just because there is measurement variance to account for. And just because there's variance doesn't mean you can't fuzz out real numbers. It's like thinking you can stop a timing attack with sleep(random()).
I'd be very skeptical of defending something like high blood pressure. People do the same with high cholesterol. It's a bunch of cope and wishful thinking that they're very different from everyone else who gets heart disease, our #1 killer.
Except those two don't really matter when predicting heart attack or stroke risk. HRV results, EKG results, labile hypertension; these are the indicators of whether or not you're at a risk for a heart attack or stroke. Getting a regular stress test is more important than blindly throwing anti-hypertensives at someone who may not need them in the first place.
My smart ring detects if there are potential arrhythmia, same with the Apple Watch. Wearables are far more effective at determining heart attack risk than measuring blood pressure which fluctuates in correspondence with your circadian rhythm.
Tabata et al.[1] found in the mid-1990s that just 2-4 minutes of "high-intensity intermittent training may improve both anaerobic and aerobic energy supplying systems significantly." This was popularized as "Tabata training" 20+ years ago. I generally believe that brief bouts of exercise can be very beneficial, especially because they're easier to do consistently over the long-term vs. more time-consuming routines. For a decade now, I've just been running through my neighborhood most days for 20-30 minutes (with some sprints mixed in) and doing one or two maximal sets of pushups or pullups or barbell exercises at home on a weekly basis. I know a lot of people who got really into longer (e.g. 60-90 minute) gym routines but couldn't sustain it for more than a few months, and then stopped doing anything.
[1] https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/1996/10000/Effec...
Add travelling and dress/undress time and you got an extra 15-30 minutes tacked on
system > goals
Yep. I hated running when I made it an option. The mental struggle around whether to run today took up many brain cycles. Now, I run weekday mornings. Tired? Go run. Don’t feel great? Go run. Busy day ahead? Go run. Read an article about the optimal workout routine in mice aged 25-35? Go run. Routine sucks until it works, and then it’s great.
I don't know if it works for everyone, but for me I tell myself "you HAVE to go for a 1 minute run, then just see how you feel" and every time I just end up doing a decent run anyway.
Yeah I would say in general habits are the most powerful force in health. Finding an activity you enjoy is 1000x easier to stick with than anything that feels like a grind.
Same thing for food. Trying to switch to a healthier but difficult diet wholesale fails essentially always. But what's relatively easy is finding a healthier alternative to one single thing you eat regularly, that you like just as well. This takes some experimenting, but is usually doable. Then once you've gotten used to the healthier option it becomes automatic.
Then you can replace a single other food, and so on. I think that gradual and sustainable are the most important things to focus on for most people looking for general health improvement.
How much more evidence do we need, that exercise is good and any amount is better than none?
Well, I personally do not.
I was about to be put in blood pressure medication. Then I started a gym, with a trainer. I noticed that, after the exercise, blood pressure would immediately drop and stay low for a few hours.
Over time, the amount of time it spent lower than average increased, and it got lower and lower. It crossed 24h.
Now? I can go to the gym Mon/Wed/Fri and it will remain low at all times. I did stop for a couple of weeks and it started creeping back up so it's not a 'cure', but functionally, as long as I keep it up, I have normal BP.
I still have some weight to lose, that can further help things, most likely. And removing sugars also did help since I dropped a lot of liquid I was retaining.
With the caveat that I'm just a random non-expert on the internet who has nevertheless spent too much time reading scattered studies and scholarly opinion articles:
We don't need "more" evidence exactly, but rather a better model of how the effects of exercise map to a given individual's physiology. Exercise is good overall, but it's also considerably overhyped due to a procession of weak and narrowly-applicable results being misconstrued as adding up to a massive pile of benefits that applies to the average person. In reality, the average person does not get anywhere close to the sum of all the touted benefits; they get some constellation of some of the benefits, while other outcomes are flat or even regress [1].
So yes, "exercise is good" at a sufficient level of abstraction, but it's much harder to make the case that it's "good for [specific outcome] for [specific person]". Which is one reason that it's such an obnoxious trend for specific health complaints to be met with generic recommendations to exercise (or exercise more, or exercise differently).
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6818669/
The detail is in how regular are the exercises? Doing one hour at end of day after sitting 8 hr straight is worse then spreading it out.
Of course doing 1 hour a day is better than nothing but it may not be effective
More
Until society has better work-life balance to allow for exercise while allowing for cost effect doctor visit to assign supportive and recognized improvement. Cheerleaders are more useful then people think.
Yes, Cheerleading is great exercise and the population would probably be healthier if everyone did it.
Cheerleading is actually incredibly dangerous with the number of catastrophic spinal or brain injuries exceeding the combined totals of all other female sports. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/magazine/cheerleading-jef...
Interesting article. I hadn't considered the injury aspect.
This could get far more mileage with people by saying "activity" instead of "exercise." It is amazing how much people can get out of a simple walk around the house. Make it out and around the neighborhood, and you start getting absurdly good results.
Is this really a high bar these days?
Uh, yeah? Note that I'm not claiming people don't do any walking at all. But a lot of people that would easily do another walk around the house before settling down to watch TV will balk at exercise.
FYI, the absolute fastest way to lower blood pressure is to lose weight if you are obese.
Rule of thumb is that your systolic blood pressure will drop by 1 mmHg per 1 lb of weight loss, eventually slowing down to 1 mmHg per 2 lbs of weight loss as you get back down to more normal blood pressure range / weight range.
Source: went from 160/110 to 120/90 in several months by dropping 60 lbs.
Yep, I found weight loss was pretty much the only thing that would drop my blood pressure. Though it didn't drop linearly like you're describing. From 215lb to 180lbs, it didn't really change much at all. Once I got down below 180lbs, it quickly dropped (from ~150/90 to ~120/80) and stayed there. When I slacked off my good eating habits and went back above 180lbs, blood pressure shot right back up to ~150/90. I'm back down again to about 172lbs and clearly get it now, I have to stay here.
I've had similar results with blood pressure, although a smaller weight loss (about 30 lbs) and smaller decrease. Another 10-20 pounds to go.
For what it's worth, I'm on a intermittent fast. I only eat between 5pm to 10pm, with no real restrictions on what I eat. I was surprised how quickly weight fell away, and how easy a diet it was to stick to. 'Eat after work' was a simple behavior to adapt to.
People are very individual, and this might not work for a lot of people, but it's doing great for me. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life on blood-pressure drugs.
I love hearing stories like this, well done.
"Could" is an interesting choice of word. I know researchers are cautious but that wording makes it meaningless.
Getting a little beyond the headline, we find they had people wear blood pressure monitors and accelerometers and concluded:
> More time spent exercising or sleeping, relative to other behaviors, was associated with lower BP. An additional 5 minutes of exercise-like activity was associated with estimated reductions of –0.68 mm Hg (95% CI, –0.15, –1.21) SBP and –0.54 mm Hg (95% CI, –0.19, 0.89) DBP. Clinically meaningful improvements in SBP and DBP were estimated after 20 to 27 minutes and 10 to 15 minutes of reallocation of time in other behaviors into additional exercise. [1]
[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.124.0...
Somewhat related is Betteridge's law of headlines:
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
I like to swap out any of these maybe-headlines with the exact opposite. It may help us, or it may not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
From the article:
> Just five minutes of activity a day was estimated to potentially reduce blood pressure, while replacing sedentary behaviours with 20-27 minutes of exercise per day, including uphill walking, stair-climbing, running and cycling, was also estimated to lead to a clinically meaningful reduction in blood pressure.
Sounds like 5 minutes of exercise is where it has a statistically significant measurable impact in blood pressure, but 20-27 minutes is where it's a meaningful impact.
Quite. "5 minutes of exercise a day could raise blood pressure" is equally accurate.
The headline is about a study that showed increased activity was correlated with decreases in blood pressure.
So, no, it's not equally accurate to say the opposite is "equally accurate" unless we're playing pedantic games where we ignore the study and pretend it's all just meaningless words.
Exercise has changed my life for the better. I'm not a fit-geek but 20 minutes of light running really helps me clear my head
GASP, exercise is good!? No way. The hard part is finding time and having the motivation. Particularly the latter. There's constantly about 49 other things that feel like they need doing more than purposely exercising and wearing myself out even more than I'm already worn out.
The greatest misconception about exercise is this "if you're tired your best course of action would be to abstain from the thing that in your mind will make you more tired" train of thought. Exercise doesn't always work like this. Yes you'll have bad days, but you'll find yourself more energised most of the time and mentally more at peace.
It's like that classic sedentary worker ailment of the sore back. Many people take this as a sign to rest more, but these types of issues are often caused by weak musculature and the best thing to do is start resistance training. Obviously not a blanket solution, but one that definitely seems overlooked.
Figure out how to get entertainment in the form of audio, like Youtube debates or audiobooks, so then exercise is simply multitasking.
Youtube debates sound like a way to raise blood pressure immensely
>The hard part is finding time and having the motivation.
Motivation certainly, but if we accept the results of the study, you really don't think you can find 5 minutes of time in your day to walk up some stairs or do some jump rope?
possibly counter to intuition, I find that since I have started to religiously use my stationary bike in the morning, I have a lot more energy for the day, not less. I suppose if you're butting up against caloric/nutrient limits you might suffer. I personally find exercise clarifies my thoughts and improves my mood, even if its the last thing I want to do when I do it.
The mind-body connection is quite real. Improving your physical state will almost certainly have a non-zero improvement on your mental state. Exercising can really help you make sense of all those other things you have going on. Not to mention that being in shape and strong makes every physical thing you do easier.
If you live in an area with decent infrastructure, cycling to and from work is a great way to get exercise in without sacrificing much time (in some cases you even save time)
some people just have a bad genetic soup and do exercise and diet and such and still have hbp well beyond the numbers designated as meaning "high" ultra high etc I didn't see any hard numbers of reduction in the article either, I've read that smoking raises bp by 5-10points which is largely marginal when you look at how inaccurate most bp readings are. I'm skeptical in this selling environment we live in that this isn't all just to sell drugs to people for their whole lives, these are the same people who want to decimate human populations btw
5-10 points isn't marginal just because there is measurement variance to account for. And just because there's variance doesn't mean you can't fuzz out real numbers. It's like thinking you can stop a timing attack with sleep(random()).
I'd be very skeptical of defending something like high blood pressure. People do the same with high cholesterol. It's a bunch of cope and wishful thinking that they're very different from everyone else who gets heart disease, our #1 killer.
Except those two don't really matter when predicting heart attack or stroke risk. HRV results, EKG results, labile hypertension; these are the indicators of whether or not you're at a risk for a heart attack or stroke. Getting a regular stress test is more important than blindly throwing anti-hypertensives at someone who may not need them in the first place.
My smart ring detects if there are potential arrhythmia, same with the Apple Watch. Wearables are far more effective at determining heart attack risk than measuring blood pressure which fluctuates in correspondence with your circadian rhythm.