Study Reportedly Shows Vigorous Exercise Could Add Years to Your Life; I’m Not Playing Captain Obvious, This Is BIG News

A new study out, reportedly shows vigorous exercise, 2-1/2 hours a week seems to give the best results, will add years to your life – or, more to the point, keep a person alive longer. There are a few key flaws, namely that “vigorous” goes by perceived effort and the other is that everything was self-reported which can lead to over-exaggeration.

Here’s the key quote that really matters:

In general, those who had a higher proportion of vigorous physical activity to total amount of exercise showed a lower risk of early death from all causes. That means they were more likely to live longer than those who didn’t have more intense exercise in their routines.

The question, you may be thinking, is, why is this a big deal? Everyone knows this. Ah, that much is true. However, if you remember, less than a decade ago the experts were saying vigorous exercise should be limited because it didn’t show much in the way of benefit against the problems associated with prolonged physical exercise. Those “experts” said physical exercise should be limited to less than rigorous, for health’s sake.

This study, that followed 403,000 people (in other words, the study was massive), showed that the “leisurely walk is just as good, or better than, strenuous exercise” people were practicing a bit of “wishful hoping”. How can I say this? Well, I wrote, way back when (just last year, I’m being facetious), that the leisurely walk stuff sounded fishy.

The reason for the lying, and there’s a lot of it, is meant to be benevolent; to encourage people who wouldn’t ordinarily perform any kind of fitness activity, to at least do something. I suppose the thinking is, if we’re being honest, those who are interested in rigorous activity don’t really care what the talking heads say, they’re going to do their thing whatever the squacking dopes say the science shows. Where this gets ugly, though, is when people take that crap they lay out seriously.

What happens when the ignorant, woke masses (and I repeat myself needlessly, Lady Redundant Woman) get a hold of misinformation, call it fake news, like that? This is where things can get ugly. Imagine a world in which the woke complain those who rode a bike or ran too fast shouldn’t be allowed their “free” medical care if their ticker valve runs afoul and gets a little leaky after decades of rigorous exercise? Any doctor will tell you, old athletes have leaky valves. All of them. Many need pacemakers and ablation procedures to correct decades of working the heart muscle. If the old lie is embraced, that too much fitness is bad, what stops the powers that be from disallowing service based on your Strava data?

You may think that’s going off the rails into conspiracy theory land, but that’s all happening in the USA, in different nuances, right now.

Have a look at this is from 2017, from Time Magazine, or this article from WebMD that gets into exercise addiction from 2007. Here’s a great quote:

Do you insist on rising at five to run each morning, even when your back is aching, black ice coats the streets, and your wife beseeches you to stay in bed? Do you only feel good when you’re training for triathlons? Is eating merely a way to replenish for the next race? Then you, my Spandex-clad friend, may have an exercise addiction.

I insist on riding most evenings (I already wake up too early, I’m not waking up any earlier). I do ride when my back is aching and my wife knows better than to implore me to stay in bed – she’s usually right next to me (anyway, it’s a rare day someone will find my nuts in my wife’s purse, ahem). I don’t feel good when training for triathlons but I do feel good when I’m riding my bike. All of that BS leads to the money quote from the Time article linked above:

Findings like these are important because many people still believe that exercise has to be excruciating in order to provide big benefits. Not only is that untrue, but it’s also harmful, says Michelle Segar, director of the University of Michigan’s Sport, Health, and Activity Research and Policy Center. This sort of thinking leads people who can’t stick with regular rigorous workouts to think of themselves as failures, and in some cases to give up on exercise altogether, she says.

Segar is the author of a new study showing that many people avoid exercise because they assume it will be unpleasant or time-consuming. “Most people have the old ’80s and ’90s view that physical activity means going for a long run or doing a hard gym workout,” she explains. “But we know exercise doesn’t have to be intense or uncomfortable to be good for you.”

The Time article then to confuse the difference between getting off the couch to feel good and performing at higher levels to make the point that if you’re going from the couch to a ten minute walk, you’ll see a greater jump in benefits than someone who exercises regularly. The notion is preposterous unless you’re highly gullible:

“The true value of exercise is in just getting off the couch,” says Catrine Tudor-Locke, chair of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a researcher of the impressive health benefits of walking. She explains that almost all of the health perks research has linked to exercise—from a stronger heart and lungs to more energy and clearer thinking—increase the most when people move from a sedentary lifestyle to a modestly active one. “You continue to get benefits from exercise, but the returns are increasingly diminished,” she says.

Now that quote pisses me off. The true value of exercise is in just getting off the couch because you continue to get benefits from exercise but with diminishing returns? Buuuuuullshiiiiiiiiit!

That’s a Donut Shop lie in the form of elite idiocy, folks – it’s a lie you sound smart telling everyone sitting near to you at the donut shop. Oh, they’ll agree with you as they’re munching on their third apple fritter, but give me a break!

So why play Don Quixote with this? Who really cares?

Folks, this is us rocketing down the slippery slope. With politicians making rulings about what we should and shouldn’t put in our body (especially in the US where there are controls on such an overreach), and with ignorant pundits galore claiming those who don’t follow what they think is right – what’s the chance some ignoramus in charge of Health and Human Services decides they should go by the reported “science” in that equally ignorant Time article I linked above and start monitoring Strava workouts to see who they think is exercising too much to penalize them for putting too much and put a strain on the healthcare system by exercising too much which can lead to their body breaking down, requiring expensive surgeries to replace knees and hips? How about denial of service for a leaky valve or some other heart problem? Maybe the government decides to take away that Social Security check you’ve been paying ahead for your entire life because you can hold a 19-mph average on a road bike.

Do you think I’m wandering off into conspiracy theory land?

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/will-unvaccinated-people-face-barriers-to-medical-care
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/if-covid-vaccine-refusers-are-turned-away-hospitals-doctor-offices-ncna1277475
https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2021/08/18/should-the-unvaccinated-be-denied-health-care/
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/03/health/unvaccinated-death-benefits-khn-partner/index.html

Folks, as I said earlier, we’re not just “on a slippery slope”. We’re rocketing down that bitch on a toboggan. For the record, I believe I’ve had Covid (it was early, before tests) and am fully vaccinated (I haven’t gotten a booster because I don’t meet the criteria for doing so) but I respect personal choice over government edict any day of the week and twice on Sunday. The governments of the world, especially ours in the US, was WAY too short on truth and intelligence and too long on the manipulation when it came to this pandemic for them to be blindly trusted. After all, wasn’t it both President Joe Brandon Biden and VP Kamala Harris who both said the vaccine shouldn’t be trusted because it was rushed out?

Why yes it was. Now, many of us know they were lying to get elected when they suggested the vaccine was rushed and shouldn’t be trusted. But(t) now those same tools who claimed the vaccine might have been too rushed to be safe are the people who are saying those who were hesitant to get the vaccine because of that lying, scheming and conniving rhetoric should lose their health care for not trusting it?!

And you wonder why I’m skeptical of government? I say you’re nuts to trust that mess. This is, and always has been, why the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.