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Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change

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Re: Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change

#91

Post by ramblenode »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #2

...in the elderly. And across all tasks it's only half a standard deviation, meaning the result is far from significant. There are lots of good studies on positive effects of exercise in all sorts of ages and populations, but this is not one of them. Edit: Jesus, this thread is proof than HN techies think they know math but actually have no clue about statistics. They are easy prey for this kind of journalism.

> Edit: Jesus, this thread is proof than HN techies think they know math but actually have no clue about statistics. They are easy prey for this kind of journalism.

And yet you are the one confusing the standard deviation of an effect size with the standard error of a point estimate...

Re: Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change

#92

Post by anonporridge »

Alan Couzens (former Australian swim team coach) is a great follow on X for learning about athletic performance and the importance of exercise for longevity and health. A big thing he emphasizes is heart rate variability based training, and monitoring that as a signal of stress and adequate recovery.

Here are a few recent posts I loved.

https://x.com/Alan_Couzens/status/1726591761277943959 - Death zone health metrics to avoid and an aside demonstrating that an elite VO2max in the Mount Everest Death Zone is equivalent to a very old/unfit person teetering on the edge of death.

https://x.com/Alan_Couzens/status/1720437671623868878 - Decrease in all cause mortality directly correlated to MET-hours/week. MET-hours is effectively a measure of exercise level energy use you put your body through. It's also why people with a lower VO2max have to put in more hours to receive the same benefit, because a person with a high VO2max can do moderate exercise which would be an extreme effort for a less fit person, thus stacking MET-hours more quickly.

https://x.com/Alan_Couzens/status/1720437671623868878 - "50 and 50 goals"

His paid substack is also a wealth of valuable information.

Re: Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change

#93

Post by phatskat »

wormius wrote: post #87
phatskat wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm more describing making this important enough to you that you start looking for places to slot it into your day I get where you’re coming from, and I think you’re missing the point. Executive dysfunction (for me at least) means I can “want to do the thing” a LOT, heck I can even have the motivation, but getting my brain and body to actually do the damn thing can feel insurmountable. There are certainly ways to w…

Yep - executive dysfunction is... difficult, you short circuit your mind in a strange loop of fighting yourself. It's like writers block or when you try to go to sleep but can't and the harder you try the harder it feels. So it's... Difficult to even do things, even when you DO want to (I have been meaning to play solo board games I bought but ... just can't... My ADHD has gotten far worse over the years compared to…

That sounds rough! I’ve only been diagnosed for a few years so it’s nice to have a label to the way my brain has worked since forever. The exercise one is hard to get going though I’ve done some here and there, weirdly one of the hardest ones for me is allowing myself to start a new tv show by myself. Can’t do it. Doesn’t matter how hyped I am, my brain’s like “nope, not allowed”. Meat bags is weird

Re: Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change

#94

Post by dymk »

1123581321 wrote: post #68
dymk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a misunderstanding of what executive dysfunction means; somebody with executive function problems is not going to buy a treadmill much less use it every day.

How about a walk around the block once a month? I struggle with executive dysfunction; when people describe a more aggressive routine than I could manage, I just mentally translate the numbers and level of consistency into what's achievable rather than berate them. Their point was: start with what's possible for you and go from there, because you don't need to achieve a certain threshold of activity or knowledge for…

Executive dysfunction is different for everybody. I'm sure GP's comment is well intended, but advice in the form of "Just go DO the thing even if it's small" is about as helpful as telling a depressed person "Have you tried smiling?".

Re: Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change

#95

Post by TheCleric »

niceice wrote: post #71
kortex wrote: post #19

> Maximal effects were found for tasks related to executive functions, (i.e., aspects of higher cognition principally associated with the functions of prefrontal cortex). Oh good, exactly what I'm looking for. If only the executive dysfunction didn't mess with my ability to form any kind of stable exercise routine.

Read this book: Atomic Habits

I did, and I could find no reward more appealing than "not doing that".

Re: Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change

#96

Post by ttonelli »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #88
m3nu wrote: post #40

Been looking into this recently and one really needs 3 types of exercise: - strength/resistance training: to build and keep muscles; one benefit of which is better stability at age and metabolic regulation. - high intensity cardio/HIIT/zone 5/95+% max heart rate: to build VO2max, was also shown to reduce arterial plaque. - normal cardio/zone 2/50-80% max HR: mitochondrial efficiency, fat burning?, endurance, memory (…

what is the notation? HIIT 5/95? means what? Can I just do a ten minute hard run in the morning a few times a week?

Those are heart rate zones, high intensity interval training (HIIT) is zone 5. Here's the first description I found: https://www.polar.com/blog/running-heart-rate-zones-basics/ Since it's interval training, just doing 10mins hard is not what's prescribed. It's more like doing repetitions of, say, 2 mins easy and 30s sprints.

Re: Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change

#97

Post by pton_xd »

delecti wrote: post #89
pton_xd wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If only the executive dysfunction didn't mess with my ability to form any kind of stable exercise routine. It's not actually about any difficulty in establishing a stable routine. It'd be very easy for almost anyone to maintain a routine of eating snacks and watching Youtube for 20 minutes per day. The root issue is we've become conditioned to avoid discomfort. Collectively our mental fortitude relatively weak in t…

Respectfully, you seem likely to not have ADHD. If I had "snacks and Youtube" on my calendar for 20 minutes every day, I would spend the preceding hour stressing about what video I would watch on a given day, and struggle to make myself go down to the kitchen to grab a snack when the time came. It's not even the discomfort, I enjoy exercise, it's overcoming the activation energy to get started. Executive dysfunction…

Fair enough!

Maybe the Youtube and snacks example was a bit misleading in that perspective. In my head exercise is in the same category of routine as brushing your teeth, showering, getting dressed, and feeding yourself. If one struggles with those on a daily basis then I agree that's a whole different issue. Putting a time slot for exercise on the calendar may work for some but in my view it's a more fundamental part of living.

Re: Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change

#98

Post by metabagel »

TheCleric wrote: post #85
metabagel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One approach is to put your body on auto-pilot. Just do the thing for 5 minutes or whatever, without consideration for whether you want to or not. The desire and will will typically develop over time. Get an easy win.

For me, my executive dysfunction makes one part MUCH more difficult than the rest: transitioning from one thing to another (especially if I have negative emotions attached to the other thing). The 5 minutes (or even 30-60 minutes) is the EASY part. I have no problem with that. It's my brain screaming at me with every ounce of its energy that the effort of stopping what I am doing and starting something else is insurm…

Meditation may help. Taking advantage of windows of time when your feelings may be more neutral may help. Discarding judgemental thoughts in favor of more neutral thoughts may help.

It's a battle for most people, some more than others.

Re: Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change

#99

Post by shortcake27 »

There’s a common saying, “you can’t outrun a bad diet.”

I hate this saying so much. I can’t imagine how many people don’t bother to exercise because they already have a bad diet, read stuff like this, and think “what’s the point then” and give up. Despite the fact that exercising on a bad diet is so much better than not exercising on a bad diet.

Re: Aerobic exercise is good for the brain; easy wins for behaviour change

#100

Post by 1123581321 »

dymk wrote: post #94
1123581321 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a walk around the block once a month? I struggle with executive dysfunction; when people describe a more aggressive routine than I could manage, I just mentally translate the numbers and level of consistency into what's achievable rather than berate them. Their point was: start with what's possible for you and go from there, because you don't need to achieve a certain threshold of activity or knowledge for…

Executive dysfunction is different for everybody. I'm sure GP's comment is well intended, but advice in the form of "Just go DO the thing even if it's small" is about as helpful as telling a depressed person "Have you tried smiling?".

Because it varies, there’s even less reason to be upset. You know there are people whose dysfunction looks more like perfectionism or overplanning and the advice is meant for them. You understand that variance in individual cases means that not every general discussion will match yours.
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