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Too much sitting, too little exercise may accelerate biological aging

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21–30 of 321 posts

Re: Too much sitting, too little exercise may accelerate biological aging

#21

Here is something most people can do that will have great impact on your overall health: take a walking break at work. Besides the health benefits it will help you clear your head and possibly find a solution to that problem, get some sun, chat with a co-worker about life, etc....

I take five minute walking breaks almost every hour. What really helps is to take a slow, leisurely pace, as though you were on vacation strolling through a park and observing the environment around you. At least for me going for a walk at my normal (i.e. fast) pace does not help to clear my head, and I suspect that is true for others too.

Re: Too much sitting, too little exercise may accelerate biological aging

#22
post #7

I'm reluctant to be this commenter, but this honestly reads like "sky is blue" kind of thinking. Worse: it is likely that nobody knows the "best" formula for physical-activity-unto-staying-young. Think about how difficult a problem this is. And even if there were a plausible, scientifically defensible answer in terms of the effect of specific routines on a sample population, it's still very difficult to generally app…

>> elderly women who sit for more than 10 hours a day with low physical activity have cells that are biologically older by eight years compared to women who are less sedentary.

It's always interesting to consider whether the direction of causality might point the other way:

Elderly women who have cells that are biologically older by eight years prefer to sit more compared to women with younger cells.

Re: Too much sitting, too little exercise may accelerate biological aging

#23
post #13
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (and maybe it's quite obvious) the trick is that exercise makes you feel temporarily worse. It's difficult to evaluate how you'll feel deep into a routine before starting to build those habits.

Depends on your definition of "feel worse". Is it bad to feel out of breath? I quite enjoy it in certain contexts.

It's not just definitions, it's also that a lot of people experience actual adverse reactions to exercise [1]. The typical social script is to condescendingly explain to them how they must be doing it wrong, and doctors often have trouble finding a medical explanation (even when it actually is caused by a medical condition), so people often blame themselves for having problems. This is, to put it mildly, not an optimal experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_intolerance

Re: Too much sitting, too little exercise may accelerate biological aging

#24

I switched to a standup desk 5 years ago. I got a dog 3 years ago. I don't sit anymore and she forces me to take her for two walks almost everyday. I don't exactly have more energy and I don't feel like I'm going to live forever, but I have noticed I am aging slightly slower than my colleagues who are forced to sit down in their offices for over 12 hours a day.

How can you notice something like this?

Re: Too much sitting, too little exercise may accelerate biological aging

#25
post #7

I'm reluctant to be this commenter, but this honestly reads like "sky is blue" kind of thinking. Worse: it is likely that nobody knows the "best" formula for physical-activity-unto-staying-young. Think about how difficult a problem this is. And even if there were a plausible, scientifically defensible answer in terms of the effect of specific routines on a sample population, it's still very difficult to generally app…

>> elderly women who sit for more than 10 hours a day with low physical activity have cells that are biologically older by eight years compared to women who are less sedentary. It's always interesting to consider whether the direction of causality might point the other way: Elderly women who have cells that are biologically older by eight years prefer to sit more compared to women with younger cells.

Yes. I often think of reports about studies this way. And then I add likely confounders and draw the causality arrows in all directions, and most are often just as reasonable sounding as the reported causal relationship.

Re: Too much sitting, too little exercise may accelerate biological aging

#26
Telomere length as presently measured in white blood cells is a measure of immune health before all other factors: how often are new cells turning up with long telomeres (thus how well is the thymus and bone marrow stem cell population doing), how often are existing cells dividing and shortening their telomeres while doing it (how much stress is the immune system under, how much war is it waging), how many senescent cells are hanging around lowering the average, that sort of thing.

Exercise is very well associated with better immune function. So not a surprising result beyond the fact that they actually managed to get a result at all, as telomere length measured this way is actually a pretty terrible metric of aging. The correlations with aging only show up in large populations, and even there you'll find as many failures to identify associations as successes in the literature. For an individual knowing your immune cell telomere length won't tell you a great deal that you don't already know, and nor will changes over time. The numbers will be all over the map, and won't compare usefully at all with other individuals in your circumstances, unless you have a few thousand of them to compare with.

If you want a decent biomarker that might actually prove to be actionable, DNA methylation patterns after the model pioneered by Horvath et al look fairly promising. (There's even a Florida company offering an implementation as a service these days).

The sitting question is generating a lot of ink in the research community. All sorts of large epidemiological studies have tackled the topic. I think it remains unsettled as to whether it is the sitting or whether it is the inactivity: decent arguments from data could be made either way. If pulling in data from the broader context, however, the inactivity looks more compelling. Accelerometer studies are becoming more common since the miniaturization and cost reduction that came with cell phones, and these are showing that even very low levels of exercise appear to make noticeable differences to outcomes in later life - at the level of housework and puttering around the garden.

Re: Too much sitting, too little exercise may accelerate biological aging

#27
post #13
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (and maybe it's quite obvious) the trick is that exercise makes you feel temporarily worse. It's difficult to evaluate how you'll feel deep into a routine before starting to build those habits.

Depends on your definition of "feel worse". Is it bad to feel out of breath? I quite enjoy it in certain contexts.

I think it's an acquired taste :) Certainly took me many years to learn to enjoy it.

Re: Too much sitting, too little exercise may accelerate biological aging

#29
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (and maybe it's quite obvious) the trick is that exercise makes you feel temporarily worse. It's difficult to evaluate how you'll feel deep into a routine before starting to build those habits.

I think it's a question of how much you "go at it". Unhealthy people who begin exercise take themselves to a point most people rarely do when training. How many regular runners go until they feel like being sick? It's no wonder unfit people don't maintain their routine. Frequent runners might do one session in a few where they push themselves, but even then they don't feel like obese people do when they go out and tr…

I've been training seriously for rock climbing for several years now (I've been a climber for a long time, as well as an endurance athlete--runner, cyclist), and the conventional wisdom being applied from other domains (general strength training, weight lifting) is that if you want to get strong (not necessarily bulk up, but just increase your strength), you never work to the point of feeling completely knackered. It's totally counter-productive. That said, picking up heavy stuff requires a lot of effort, but it taxes your central nervous system, and that's a whole different thing than feeling wasted after a run.

The advice I hear from coaches about losing weight generally has three parts:

1) Watch your diet

2) Get out and walk 30-60 minutes each day

3) Start doing some form of strength training, or interval training, as those burn fat and build muscle better than just running.

Re: Too much sitting, too little exercise may accelerate biological aging

#30
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (and maybe it's quite obvious) the trick is that exercise makes you feel temporarily worse. It's difficult to evaluate how you'll feel deep into a routine before starting to build those habits.

I think it's a question of how much you "go at it". Unhealthy people who begin exercise take themselves to a point most people rarely do when training. How many regular runners go until they feel like being sick? It's no wonder unfit people don't maintain their routine. Frequent runners might do one session in a few where they push themselves, but even then they don't feel like obese people do when they go out and tr…

> it's going to take you a long time to get fit,

Not really - you'd be suprised how much energy is expended on this change of state (and the stress that accompanies it) as opposed to the paced effort of learned distance running. That's what HIIT is based on, and I'd argue that for an average unfit person it's much easier to quickly expend lots of energy than for a trained athlete.

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