Does exercising really make you live longer?

[Yousif]

21 hours ago, Heaven said:

It’s good to question the norms. It’s nice that someone is trying to question such a popular belief. 
I observed people that do workout and do not. 
When you exercise it builds a healthy momentum in other aspects of life.(Nutrition, sleep, stress levels).

Overall I would definitely go with working out than not to. 

Longevity is overrated. Vitality is underrated.

You can live however you want.

[Yousif]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

 

However, less muscle mass requires your muscles to work harder, so when you walk, your heart will beat "as if you're jogging".

 

You clearly haven’t been skinny before lol, your heart or muscles will not work harder since all you’re carrying is bones 

[Yousif]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

 

exercise makes you better at handling everyday life, and that impacts your health and longevity.

 

Yeah, it may help you live longer if you go walk or jog twice a week, I don’t think becoming a gym rat or an athlete will necessarily make you live longer.

[Carl-Richard]

On 30.3.2024 at 2:11 PM, Yousif said:

the only reason your resting heart rate will go this low is because you’re extremely fit and active, and to maintain that you’re gonna  be a working out your heart day in and day out

I guess I have to spell out the earlier calculation then:

Let's assume one person is decently healthy and is physically active 60 minutes 3 times a week and another person is never physically active.

The physically active person works out 60 * 3 = 180 minutes every 7 days (and 7 days = 60 * 24 * 7 minutes = 10080 minutes). That adds up to 180 / 10080 = 0.0179 = 1.79% ≈ 2% of their life spent working out. Let's also assume the physically active person has 50 BPM resting heart rate while the inactive person has 100 BPM.

Now answer me this: how can being physically active for 2% of your life while having a 50 BPM resting heart rate for 98% of your life, be worse for longevity than being physically active for 0% of your life but having a 100 BPM resting heart rate for 100% of your life?

This is impossible if it's the amount of heart beats that is bad for longevity. If it's not the amount of heart beats, then you would have to make the case that it's the "type" of heart beats associated specifically with physical activity that is bad for longevity.

Edited March 31, 2024 by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

50 minutes ago, Yousif said:

Yeah, it may help you live longer if you go walk or jog twice a week, I don’t think becoming a gym rat or an athlete will necessarily make you live longer.

Based on the assumption of amount of heart beats, unless the athlete or gym rat spends 50% or more of their life exercising (which nobody does), I severely doubt that.

Edited March 31, 2024 by Carl-Richard

[Yousif]

7 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Unless the athlete or gym rat spends 50% or more of their life exercising, I severely doubt that.

That’s what gym rats and athletes do  that’s what makes them athletic, being extremely active.

[Carl-Richard]

57 minutes ago, Yousif said:

That’s what gym rats and athletes do  that’s what makes them athletic, being extremely active.

Are you thinking through what you're saying? If you're working out 50% of your life, that is 12 hours every single day, 84 hours a week. Nobody does that. The most extreme top athletes work out maybe 5-6 hours a day 6 days a week, 30-36 hours a week.

I'm not denying that some top athletes could be running up against the limit where their maximization of functioning "here and now" could be decreasing their longevity (although whether or not they're actually crossing that limit is not so clear). But if you're a normal individual just wanting to be healthy, 3 hours a week of vigorous exercise (intermixed with some low-moderate intensity exercise like walking) is most definitely not going to decrease your longevity.

Even if you work out considerably more than that, it's not going to decrease your longevity (based on the assumption of heart beats as shown earlier). For example, I lift weights 3.5 times a week and sprint 1.75 times a week (I lift every other day and sprint every other non-lift day). That is 3.5 * 60 to 90 minutes = 210 to 315 minutes a week of lifting weights (3.5 to 5.25 hrs), and 1.75 * 30 to 45 minutes = 52.50 to 78.75 minutes a week of sprinting (0.88 to 1.31 hrs). That is 3.5 + 0.88 hrs to 5.25 + 1.31 hrs = 4.38 hrs to 6.56 hrs a week of working out. That is only 2.6% to 3.9% of my life spent working out.

Edited March 31, 2024 by Carl-Richard

[Yousif]

9 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Are you thinking through what you're saying? If you're working out 50% of your life, that is 12 hours every single day, 84 hours a week. Nobody does that. The most extreme top athletes work out maybe 5-6 hours a day 6 days a week, 30-36 hours a week..

You want me to be precise while you come up with numbers such as 50% out of thin air? 
 

What I meant is athletes and gym rats whole life revolves around being extremely active, which I don’t think it’s the best strategy to live longer.

[Yousif]

9 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Even if you work out considerably more than that, it's not going to decrease your longevity (based on the assumption of heart beats as shown earlier). For example, I lift weights 3.5 times a week and sprint 1.75 times a week (I lift every other day and sprint every other non-lift day). That is 3.5 * 60 to 90 minutes = 210 to 315 minutes a week of lifting weights (3.5 to 5.25 hrs), and 1.75 * 30 to 45 minutes = 52.50 to 78.75 minutes a week of sprinting (0.88 to 1.31 hrs). That is 3.5 + 0.88 hrs to 5.25 + 1.31 hrs = 4.38 hrs to 6.56 hrs a week of working out. That is only 2.6% to 3.9% of my life spent working out.

I’ve already covered this, there are many factors at play not just the exercise itself, doing exercises will led to many things that can cause your death.

[Yimpa]

5 minutes ago, Yousif said:

I’ve already covered this, there are many factors at play not just the exercise itself, doing exercises will led to many things that can cause your death.

By that logic, so can simply breathing.

[BlueOak]

Your body is not static. It renews itself through use.

Exercise is like exorcism for the body, detox, clearing, and cleaning. If you don't run, for example, you'll never know what junk you are carrying on your chest, but this cleansing detox is going on throughout your body during elevated cardio exercise and resistance training.

You can get enough exercise through daily brisk walking a few miles, and work that involves resistance of some kind, as long you make sure your muscles are not being neglected by stretching them (exercising, etc). Most jobs are not going to work all your muscles, and if you neglect them, you risk injury later in life. Anything unused over time atrophies, this will be magnified by the aging process.

[Yousif]

1 hour ago, Yimpa said:

By that logic, so can simply breathing.

Yes, like I said above, being more athletic will not necessarily help you live longer because then you’ll become a monkey with high energy, you tell me which one you think is safer, a child that’s full of energy that jumps around like a monkey, or a lazy child that sits and watches tv? 
 

I’ve already explained my points above, you keep presenting the same inquiries as the ones before you.

[Yousif]

45 minutes ago, BlueOak said:

 

Exercise is like exorcism for the body, detox, clearing, and cleaning. If you don't run, for example, you'll never know what junk you are carrying on your chest, but this cleansing detox is going on throughout your body during elevated cardio exercise and resistance training.

 

Again, health and feeling good doesn’t necessarily mean living longer.

[BlueOak]

1 minute ago, Yousif said:

Again, health and feeling good doesn’t necessarily mean living longer.

Nothing is absolute. We do what we can to influence our life, and if you don't exercise, as you age you will feel it.

[Yousif]

11 minutes ago, BlueOak said:

Nothing is absolute. We do what we can to influence our life, and if you don't exercise, as you age you will feel it.

I never had a problem with exercising, I’m a gym rat myself, but my whole point was, don’t think being athletic necessarily means living longer, a lot of times it’s just the opposite.

[BlueOak]

25 minutes ago, Yousif said:

I never had a problem with exercising, I’m a gym rat myself, but my whole point was, don’t think being athletic necessarily means living longer, a lot of times it’s just the opposite.

Opposite, not really. It would be unrelated to exercise. Did you know someone healthy who died recently? I am sorry if that's the case and I missed it in the thread.

In the case of dying from an accident, malice etc, that's usually completely unrelated to how often we exercise. Exercise does have surplus effects, on mood, stress, and the elimination of toxins, which affect things the medical profession still lack to take into account in their entirety, though its getting better based on my last visit to the doctor about my heart. Many of the questions they asked were on point.

Many deaths are down to cumulative effects, not just one cause, and those toxins we build, the stress, the fat build-ups, the depression, etc, exercise helps correct a multitude of things in the body that we are thankfully most of the time never aware of. For example, the activation of certain genes only happens when the conditions for them come about, and exercise can prevent that.

It's a bit like how people never detox their organs or give them a chance to rest, they are always digesting, even back a thousand years ago we knew to fast and gave our bodies time to recover. Exercise can help with that, by giving you a detox as you move. 

Edited April 1, 2024 by BlueOak

[Yousif]

1 minute ago, BlueOak said:

Opposite, not really. It would be unrelated to exercise. Did you know someone healthy who died recently? 
 

Again, being athletic and active doesn’t necessarily mean healthy. You all keep confusing the 2. 

[Yousif]

4 minutes ago, BlueOak said:

In the case of dying from an accident, malice etc, that's usually completely unrelated to how often we exercise. 

I’ve made this point many times here, being active and full of energy will make you more prone into getting into accidents and troubles, 

 

you all keep focusing on the internal benefits that exercising have on your body, while I’m trying to make you see how that LIFE STYLE may externally ( outside your body) not make you live longer, even internally it may be optimal for LIVING LONGER not FEELING GOOD. 

[Carl-Richard]

8 hours ago, Yousif said:

You want me to be precise while you come up with numbers such as 50% out of thin air?

The 50% statistic can be deduced from the fact that vigorous exercise is usually defined as the zone between 70-100% of your max BPM, which for me would be 136-194 BPM. For simplicity's sake, let's assume the average BPM of my workout is 150. Let's also assume I have 50 BPM resting heart rate:

If I were to work out 50% of my life (12 hours a day), half of my life would be spent at 150 BPM and half of my life at 50 BPM. On average, my heart rate would be (150 + 50) / 2 = 100 BPM. That equals the resting heart rate of the unhealthy person (100 BPM), so it perfectly adds up: if you work out 50% or more of your life, you'll start to decrease your longevity based on the assumption of the amount of heart beats.

It's an estimate, sure, but it's not pulled out from thin air.

 

8 hours ago, Yousif said:

What I meant is athletes and gym rats whole life revolves around being extremely active, which I don’t think it’s the best strategy to live longer.

But exactly how often do I have to work out before I qualify for the description of "my life revolves around being extremely active"? You seem to be making statements that are not grounded in any statistics or empirical facts.

 

8 hours ago, Yousif said:

I’ve already covered this, there are many factors at play not just the exercise itself, doing exercises will led to many things that can cause your death.

"Death by exercise" is not a leading cause of death as far as I know. Do you have any statistics on that? Funnily, most of the leading causes of death are positively impacted (reduced) by regular physical exercise.

Edited April 1, 2024 by Carl-Richard

[Yousif]

19 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

 

If I were to work out 50% of my life (12 hours a day), half of my life would be spent at 150 BPM and half of my life at 50 BPM. On average, my heart rate would be (150 + 50) / 2 = 100 BPM. That equals the resting heart rate of the unhealthy person (100 BPM), so it perfectly adds up: if you work out 50% or more of your life, you'll start to decrease your longevity based on the assumption of amount of heart beats.

It's an estimate, sure, but it's not pulled out from thin air.

Go back in this post and read what I said, 

how does over working your heart makes you live longer? 
how does over using something makes it newer or last longer? 
 

doesn’t seem logical, and yet all your science and empirical data is based on logic,

 

I again made a point that sure, you’ll get to a resting heart rate of 50 bpm, but that’s after you’ve already exhausted yourself in exercising, and also if you’re really that athletic to the point of your resting heart rate comes down to 50 bpm, you tend to be a monkey and unable to rest, you’re basically addicted to being active, which means you’ll end up over using your heart which means you’ll not be living longer.