This is all my personal experience, but while struggling with emotional problems I tried exercise (cardio/weight lifting at the gym) for a period of 6 months. Although the exercise itself was not helpful in lifting my mood, having something to do (a routine if you would) helped me keep my mind off the "bad stuff". That itself was a plus but I could have easily replaced exercise with WoW, gambling or piano lessons and the result might've been the same.
Exercise Does Not Make You Less Depressed
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Re: Exercise Does Not Make You Less Depressed
#12I'm annoyed that the study does not go into details about what the "physical activity" consisted of. The only thing it says is "self reported level of physical activity (≤1, 2-3, ≥4 days per week, with at least 30 minutes of moderate or vigorous intensity physical activity)" which does not mean much. Anecdotally speaking, lifting heavy weights vastly improves my mood. This is in contrast to, say, cardio, which simply…
I agree. I always feel great after a heavy set of power cleans or deadlift.
Re: Exercise Does Not Make You Less Depressed
#13Note this study was targeted towards clinically depressed people. Whether or not it relieves stress in non-depressed people is a different topic.
Re: Exercise Does Not Make You Less Depressed
#14Would anyone be surprised to find out that externally facilitated exercise, as offered in the study, has different emotional effects than self-motivated exercise?
Yes! Common knowledge says that exercise helps you fight depression. If we see that some class of exercise is not as effective as another one (or is not effective at all) then we can start to ask ourselves how they differ.
I think you imply in your comment that "self-motivated exercise" is better than "externally facilitated". If that is true then we can start worrying less about selling the idea of exercising and more about thinking how to motivate a depressed individual.
On the other hand, if both cases of exercising offered the same results then we could say that it's not the motivation but the exercise itself who's helping us.
Re: Exercise Does Not Make You Less Depressed
#15I'm annoyed that the study does not go into details about what the "physical activity" consisted of. The only thing it says is "self reported level of physical activity (≤1, 2-3, ≥4 days per week, with at least 30 minutes of moderate or vigorous intensity physical activity)" which does not mean much. Anecdotally speaking, lifting heavy weights vastly improves my mood. This is in contrast to, say, cardio, which simply…
I agree. I always feel great after a heavy set of power cleans or deadlift.
Interesting; I usually feel tired after a bunch of weight-lifting but invigorated after a long hard run.
Re: Exercise Does Not Make You Less Depressed
#16This study is not about 'making you feel good', it' about improving cases of clinical depression. If this study is sound, it would generalize to saying "exercise in addition to usual care is no more effective than usual care alone at reducing self-reported levels of depression measured by standard means".
Re: Exercise Does Not Make You Less Depressed
#17The title of this post does not match the title of the paper.
The report does not say "exercise does not make you less depressed".
The report mentions some of the weaknesses; some comments to the article do a good job at pointing out other weaknesses.
Exercise is not just pushed at people with depression to treat that depression; it's to help with other stuff too:-
* medication side effects (sometimes include weight gain or overeating)
* improving social life
* improving general health
Re: Exercise Does Not Make You Less Depressed
#18In my own experience, diet had a much more dramatic effect on my day-to-day mood. Switching to basically a slow carb diet helped my mood and outlook tremendously. EDIT: I wanted to add that exercise also has a great effect on my mood, but only temporarily. By following a consistent diet that (in my case) is low glycemic and high in protein, the stability of my mood was much greater than exercise alone. I do not have…
On the diet angle, I noticed a dramatic improvement when I drank tea as opposed to coffee. YMMV of course, but in my case drinking coffee even in the morning kept me up later at night. I do notice however, that regular exercise helps with my stress-coping ability.
this is the wrong crowd to be advocating tea over coffee!
Re: Exercise Does Not Make You Less Depressed
#19To me, more interesting than the study itself was the rather brutal criticism it got from the scientific community posted on the same website.
Re: Exercise Does Not Make You Less Depressed
#20"three face to face sessions and 10 telephone calls with a trained physical activity facilitator over eight months" does not make you less depressed.