Earlier quoted context omitted.
80% of my injuries occurred while sleeping, which seems very weird.
I knew someone who dislocated her shoulder often while sleeping. If I remember right, she's dislocated it 17 times or some ridiculous number.
Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
51–60 of 194 posts
Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
#52I’m genuinely confused. Was there any doubt before this study that sport makes people healthier?
I have met people who figured, because they don't excercise they don't wear their body out, so their joints etc. will last longer. Same for injury, no sport no injury, that must be good!
Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
#53> “High-intensity training reduced fat and maintained lean mass […] though changes were small and not clinically meaningful compared with exercise of lower intensity…” High intensity does border on leading to injury — just making the wrong move — and you’re back to zero intensity?
Calisthenics is a really easy way to push intensity at basically 0 risk of injury. They're all compound and depending on the variation could require high reps, but between push ups, pull-ups, squats, their numerous variations, and accessory work, I would challenge anyone to actually injure themselves while also being able to push to true technical failure.
Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really depends on how you define high-intensity. To build muscle, you need to push yourself to a limit. You can reduce the weight and increase the repetitions. This approach is just as effective and lowers the risk of injury.
This is what I do. When I was beginning with weight training, I followed other's recommendations back then and pushed hard. Had quite often minor issues or injuries in the joints which set me back for weeks or even months, my tendons seem to be my weak spot and it does get worse with age, both limits and recovery. Lowered the load, increased repetitions and basically nothing for a decade. I can still go almost to the…
Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have met people who figured, because they don't excercise they don't wear their body out, so their joints etc. will last longer. Same for injury, no sport no injury, that must be good!
Charlie Munger thought of exercise as adding mileage to the car.
Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
#56Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
#57> “High-intensity training reduced fat and maintained lean mass […] though changes were small and not clinically meaningful compared with exercise of lower intensity…” High intensity does border on leading to injury — just making the wrong move — and you’re back to zero intensity?
Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
#58“though changes were small and not clinically meaningful compared with exercise of lower intensity and considering measurement error”
So the the research is inconclusive?
That is a conclusion.
Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really depends on how you define high-intensity. To build muscle, you need to push yourself to a limit. You can reduce the weight and increase the repetitions. This approach is just as effective and lowers the risk of injury.
Maybe with older adults the baseline goal should be to merely maintain or slow the loss of the muscle, mobility, and cardiovascular capacity they already have? It's not realistic for a 50 year old to think they could build muscle year-after-year for the next 30 years.
It's not that unusual for people to pick up e.g. powerlifting past 50 and still get to levels well beyond what most younger adults can lift.
I'm 51, and recently back into powerlifting after many years out of it, and I certainly expect to build back muscle and improving week over week for many years before I can't stem the decline any more, as long as avoid injury or health issues that takes me out of the gym - avoiding time off exercise is the biggest challenge with getting older.
Re: Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)
#60“though changes were small and not clinically meaningful compared with exercise of lower intensity and considering measurement error”
So the the research is inconclusive?
Body composition is a factor in health and long life. However there are many confounding factors if that is your goal and so you cannot draw any conclusions unless the sample size is very large, and the study runs over a very long time. Thus we get a lot of small studies that study something easy and hope that this is a good proxy for what we really care about. Sometimes science eventually figures the proxy is good, sometimes not, but often we still don't know. (meta studies have been really helpful here)
Large sample sizes are very expensive to study, a grad student without large grants can study 50-100[1] people alone, which makes the study cheap enough that they can do it. This was a 6 month study, again making it something a grad student could do leaving plenty of time to then write the paper and get it published. (Each subject was studied for 6 months, I'm not clear if they were all studied at once, or if different subjects had different start/end dates). All respect for the grad students who do this - despite all the problems I've pointed out[2], they still did a lot of work.
[1] I've never been a grad student, much less one in a field where you would study this. The 50-100 number feels right in my uneducated opinion, but if someone with more knowledge says something I accept their correction in advance.
[2] I wonder what other problems someone in this field could point out.