[HN Gopher] A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate...
___________________________________________________________________
A new study looks at how exercise can help alleviate anxiety and
depression
Author : FunnyLookinHat
Score : 72 points
Date : 2023-06-25 20:40 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (greatergood.berkeley.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (greatergood.berkeley.edu)
| sgtcodeboy wrote:
| Certainly can't speak for everyone, but the most effective form
| of exercise that I have found is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Couple of
| reasons. First: The deeper you get into it the more you learn its
| primarily an intellectual pursuit - its just hidden in a very
| physical endeavor. When I'm doing Jiu Jitsu, I have to actively
| think, engage my problem solving skills, I can't go on auto pilot
| as I do in other things - rowing machine for instance. Second:
| Anyone can do it, at nearly any age with any body type. If you're
| older and not super athletic, your Jiu Jitsu will be different
| than say a 20yo who is very athletic. But that in no way means
| your Jiu Jitsu or experience will be any less effective. First
| time posting on HN. Hope this helps someone.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| It's a bit cliche at this point thanks to people like Joe Rogan,
| but Jiu Jitsu is, imo, the best possible form of exercise.
|
| It's not only physically exhausting, it's also mentally very
| difficult. And not just because it requires deep levels of
| knowledge to be good, but it also resets any preconceived notions
| of strength. It's not uncommon for a new white belt male that
| weighs 200lbs to get absolutely waxed by a 100lbs brown belt
| female. I see it happen all the time. Of course, as you belt up,
| and gain more understanding of the sport, there are ways to
| utilize a size and strength advantages. But that's secondary to
| knowledge.
| oscribinn wrote:
| Judo is even better, as you also learn how to throw people from
| your feet rather than starting on the ground all the time, and
| you pretty much have to lift weights off the mat to stay
| competitive.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| > rather than starting on the ground all the time
|
| BJJ does not start on the ground as standard, let alone "all
| the time". Matches start standing, and if you are only
| training from the ground you are missing out. That's not to
| say that stand-up and takedown training aren't much more in-
| depth in judo than in jiu-jitsu, though.
| com2kid wrote:
| An ideal combo is submission wrestling combined with BJJ,
| you'll find MMA gyms train this way.
|
| As someone who used to train at an MMA gym, going to a pure
| BJJ gym is weird because yeah, I'll shrimp out, get up to my
| feet, and my training partner is sitting there on their knees
| waiting for me to re-engage and my first thought is "this
| would be a _great_ time for a kick to that completely
| unprotected noggin right there... "
|
| Of course once on the ground, the BJJ peeps dominate, which
| is what UFC spent 3 decades demonstrating!
| com2kid wrote:
| I keep trying to tell people this. Jiu Jitsu is like playing
| chess and your limbs are the pieces, it is a serious mental and
| physical workout.
|
| Though don't discount other forms of martial arts, the amount
| of mental effort in kickboxing is still high, the coordination
| needed to be planning your foot work and balance out 2 or 3
| moves in advance is non-trivial and that alone can take years
| to master!
|
| (Also IMHO kickboxing is a more intense workout than rolling,
| my opinion consisting of a polar heart rate monitor strapped to
| my chest ;) )
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't know if this has changed for younger generations, but a
| lot of people, particularly those in intellectual pursuits,
| suffer to one degree or another from thinking of themselves as a
| brain being carried around as a meat sack.
|
| We are learning more about mind body connections and this is very
| not true (the ways the vagus nerve can totally fuck with your
| mental state is terrifying, and there are people with
| dysfunctions that are five times worse).
|
| Any exercise where you think about your body as "you" helps with
| the dysphoria, and being integrated helps with a whole lot of
| other things.
|
| Especially for men, who are conditioned to not give themselves
| permission to have feelings and sensations affect their behavior
| (and then surprise! Are affected anyway, with zero attempts at
| healthy coping skills).
| jalino23 wrote:
| I don't get it. what do you mean by " brain being carried
| around as a meat sack"?
|
| >> Any exercise where you think about your body as "you"
|
| what does it mean to think of my body as me? and can you
| provide examples of these exercises? thank you!
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Not the op but the first quote completely describes my
| approach.
|
| I am me. The intellect, the mind, the person.
|
| My body is what carries my intellect, not completely distinct
| from the way a car or bicycle or wheelchair might. I don't
| identify with my body as "me". I have at best a cordial
| relationship with my body.
| haswell wrote:
| A lot of people feel like "they" are somewhere inside their
| head. They look out at the world through eyes that are
| windows. The world is out there, "I" am in here. In this
| undefined black hole of "me", mysterious, but definitely
| separate from the world and what's "out there" past one's
| eyes.
|
| They feel like their bodies are just the mechanical thing
| that carries them around. They don't think of the systemic
| impact of things that affect their body and consequently,
| their brain and mental states. E.g. gut health plays a major
| role in mental health, but this is not an intuitive concept
| for many people.
|
| Some have argued this is an outcome of Judeo-Christian
| thinking, e.g. my soul is not of this world, this body isn't
| my best body, my soul passes on when I die, etc. These ideas
| are deeply ingrained from an early age, during the time in
| which one is forming their concept of self.
| joker_minmax wrote:
| From my perspective, the belief that the soul and the body
| are totally separate and that the body is lesser is not
| actually a Christian belief, but rather a Gnostic one.
| Unfortunately a lot of the Christianity of America has a
| twinge of Gnosticism present. The "C.S. Lewis" quote that
| gets thrown around, "You don't have a soul; you are a soul.
| You have a body," was never actually said by C.S. Lewis. I
| actually got a better connection with my body from
| listening to an Eastern Christian priest talking about how
| if you think you can separate your body, mind, and soul
| from each other, you've created a false sense of self.
| haswell wrote:
| > _suffer to one degree or another from thinking of themselves
| as a brain being carried around as a meat sack_
|
| This was me for most of my life.
|
| Yoga has been life changing. Cultivating full body awareness
| and presence opened my eyes to states of being that I didn't
| know I was capable of experiencing.
|
| I can feel the subtle changes in strength each day, or a touch
| of soreness, or the exact spot that anxiety has settled into in
| my gut.
|
| Gaining the level of focus needed brought with it a deeper and
| broader awareness of my emotional states, and the realization
| that I have some separation from them, i.e. they != me. This in
| turn helped me unwind some big things I'd been dealing with in
| therapy.
|
| In retrospect, it makes so much sense to think of my body as an
| integral part of who I am and how I feel.
|
| But that's a mode of thinking that I was certainly never
| introduced to as a kid, and never experienced by default.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| I agree with this.
|
| I don't think that it's unique to the mind body connection
| either. It's very popular for people to try and look at things
| in isolation, to try and "scientifically prove" that what they
| are doing is efficacious, to distill to first principles.
|
| In an academic context this is absolutely the correct thing to
| do.
|
| But for our lives? You are a human being - you evolved to
| think, to make love, to run, to get outside and touch grass, to
| labour for things, to... well, we are general intelligences -
| generalists.
|
| There is something to be said for accepting that and not
| looking for the "efficiency hack" that allows you to minimise
| what it is to be the thing that you _are_.
| joker_minmax wrote:
| Our society has suffered massively from this disconnect. I
| honestly do feel like our computer and avatar-oriented society
| is fuelling it. Like the benefit for men you mentioned, I think
| women have a unique benefit too: a lot of women's healthcare
| knowledge has been suppressed, and developing these skills of
| bodily awareness helps with self-knowledge of those things.
| cgb223 wrote:
| > the ways the vagus nerve can totally fuck with your mental
| state is terrifying, and there are people with dysfunctions
| that are five times worse
|
| What are some examples of this?
| mudita wrote:
| The thing that made me transition from a mindset of "I have a
| body" to "I am a body", was actually Zen meditation. This was
| surprising to me. Before I tried it, I thought of meditation as
| a purely mental thing, I didn't expect that the first really
| noticeable effect of regular meditation would be a changed
| relationship to my body,
|
| Much later I discovered contemporary dance, quit my phd in
| machine learning and became a professional dancer, which really
| deepened my body awareness and transformed my relationship to
| being a body even more.
|
| I remember, in the beginning of my dance career, after a three
| month dance intensive I applied to a (Haskell) programming job
| again to finance my dance education and went to a computer
| science conference. It was a bit of surreal experience. The
| people at the conference were very nice and intellectually
| curious people and I liked them, but the contrast to the
| environment in dance communities was very strong. I felt like
| almost everybody there thought of them-self as a brain,
| piloting a body like a big mecha. In the dance environments,
| even during lunch breaks etc., it always felt like there was a
| lot of subtle awareness in everybody about their own body, the
| other bodies in the space, the distances and empty space
| between bodies, a non-verbal channel full of quiet energy and
| information. In the computer science conference this channel
| was just dead.
| mieubrisse wrote:
| That sounds like a fascinating journey that I'd love to read;
| have you written anything about it? I'm a born-and-raised
| software engineer (read: meat mecha mindset), but I recently
| became interested in dance when I moved to Brazil as many
| people there have this unconscious connection with dance and
| their body that I envy. In my case, I'm dimly aware of that
| non-verbal channel you mentioned, but I struggle to
| comminicate on it and - if I'm being honest - doing so makes
| me feel vulnerable and awkward.
| danaris wrote:
| While the phenomenon you describe is certainly real, I think
| that you may also have been misperceiving part of it: Having
| a deep belief/understanding that your _self_ is your whole
| body does not require having a highly-trained body or a
| strong kinesthetic sense. There could have been many people
| at that conference who shared your belief, but had not taken
| the _years of physical training_ to make that externally
| apparent.
| hinkley wrote:
| It was tai chi for me, but I started that after Buddhism and
| zen. I could never get comfortable. Not as in 3 out of 10
| pain scale, but 7.5-8.5 out of 10. Having people tell you to
| ignore the pain is unhelpful when they imaging paper cut and
| you're feeling knife wound.
|
| Tai chi has a warmup that's an easy shift into standing
| meditation.
| johnea wrote:
| Mostly the kind that involves getting up from your seat and
| going outside...
|
| After that, the more cardio exercise you get the better...
| divan wrote:
| One of the most amazing comments I've seen on HN. Thank you
| for sharing this!
| johnea wrote:
| Mostly the kind that involves getting up from your seat and
| going outside...
|
| After that, the more cardio exercise you get the better...
| nomilk wrote:
| For a _fundamental_ appreciation of how the body affects mental
| state, see Robert Sapolsky lecture biology lecture. It doesn 't
| talk of exercise specifically, but it leaves no doubt of the
| strong influence of the body on the mind (and vice versa).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > We are learning more about mind body connections and this is
| very not true...
|
| We are RE-learning. Look at all the "new science" on
| psychedelics. Or gut bacteria. Etc.
|
| I'm not sure what the bottleneck is...we did not evolve to sit
| all day, inside, at desk, gazing into screens. It really is
| *that* simple.
|
| p.s. While nothing revolutionary new per se "The Comfort
| Crisis" by Michael Easter goes a solid job making the case for
| "this is where we came from, stop thinking where we are is
| compatible."
| hinkley wrote:
| > We are RE-learning.
|
| Fair point. I got accused of the "noble savage" myth recently
| in another post and I went the wrong way with it. In trying
| to be better stewards of the natural world we are looking at
| vestige civilizations that never lost it, but the fact of the
| matter is that if you watch history shows, one I'm thinking
| of was a recreation of feudal life in Tudor England, Western
| Europeans used to "know" many, many of these things too, but
| they forgot it all in the Industrial Revolution, then
| encountered civilizations that hadn't forgotten, and ground
| them to dust, instead of remembering.
|
| After hundreds of years of trying to solve problems with the
| same level of thinking that created them, there's always a
| set of people who are asking questions about the trip we are
| on. There's a fine line between pastoralism and compromise
| that we haven't worked it out yet, and we don't even always
| see it when it happens.
|
| There's a circumstantial chain of evidence out there that
| David Hume injected Eastern Philosophy into The
| Enlightenment. If that's even a little true, this big
| philosophical Step Forward was really a step "back", or maybe
| sideways.
|
| And I think we still don't know where the Stoics got their
| ideas from. Themselves, or Buddhism?
| hisnameisjimmy wrote:
| A key unlock for me was doing exercise where at some point I was
| trying so hard and breathing so aggressively that I couldn't
| really think anymore, I could only focus on the task at hand. For
| me, that's been biking up steep hills. I like biking because I
| get to see a bunch of cool stuff and if I go up hills I get a
| dope view.
|
| I joke that doing these rides feels like I'm re-boring my
| arteries because my heart pumps so hard. I feel great afterward.
| Recommend!
| GoRudy wrote:
| Same same. Also when not biking bootcamp classes get me to the
| same place of only thinking about the workout / excercises at
| hand. 50 min - 90 min feels like the sweet spot in terms of
| time.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| Yep.
|
| Another example - it's pretty damn hard to think about doing
| the laundry when you have 100+ kg on your back.
| hinkley wrote:
| When I was trying to integrate a definition of "flow" that
| covered my many experiences, it wasn't biking up hills per se,
| it was those moments where bad shit almost happened and I saw a
| way through and just did it. Riding through gravel, loose dogs,
| when the "fast guy" tried to drop the pack and found me on his
| wheel.
|
| I think I agree with you that these experiences are pivotal,
| because they are moments when you just _are_ without thinking.
| That constant monologue some of us carrying our heads is gone,
| and the universe didn't end.
|
| Taking that information and finding the spot halfway between
| the two is the real lesson, IME.
| lm28469 wrote:
| You might be interested in
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breath:_The_New_Science_of_a...
| joewhale wrote:
| My wife had severe post partum depression twice. I wonder how
| much of it is linked to lack of exercise.
| joker_minmax wrote:
| It could be a factor, but it's also worth noting the full
| extent of the effects of the hormonal changes during and post-
| pregnancy still aren't well understood. Estradiol messes even
| with your body's usage of adenosine for petesake
| comfypotato wrote:
| I'd never seen "an overview of systematic reviews" before -- I
| would have thought this was already common sense, but it should
| be now more than ever.
|
| I was a little confused about the "less is better" part of the
| article. I think it just meant diminishing returns with more
| exercise, but it _says_ that less is actually better.
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, aside from diminishing returns, there are also injuries,
| physical stress, and other issues with going too much...
| Swizec wrote:
| > I was a little confused about the "less is better" part of
| the article.
|
| I ~workout~ train 20+ hours per week. This is definitely bad
| for my mental health, but the goals won't achieve themselves.
|
| Turns out qualifying for Boston is no joke.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| WHO recommends at least an hour of moderate+ activity per day
| which virtually nobody with an office job in the 1st world
| manages to do. The notion that you could accidentally do too
| much exercise is ridiculous unless you go all-in-gym-bro.
| hiq wrote:
| According to
| https://www.who.int/initiatives/behealthy/physical-activity,
| the recommendation you mentioned is for children and
| teenagers up to 17 years old.
|
| "Adults aged 18-64 years"
|
| > Should do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity
| physical activity throughout the week, or do at least 75
| minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity, or an
| equivalent combination of both.
|
| > For additional health benefits, adults should increase
| their moderate-intensity physical activity to 300 minutes per
| week, or equivalent.
|
| > Muscle-strengthening activities should be done involving
| major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Taking a walk might qualify. Any dog owner can easily meet
| this requirement.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _virtually nobody with an office job in the 1st world
| manages to do_
|
| An hour or more of moderate activity per day? Dunno about
| that impossibility of one hour. Perhaps you're talking about
| some hectic Amazon-style working environmen,t or people that
| just had babies, or commute for 1 hours each way?
| comfypotato wrote:
| The statement was referring to mental health. The data is
| clear for things like cardio that more is always better. I'd
| never heard that less (read 2.5 he/wk) is a sweet spot for
| mental health.
| whakim wrote:
| Once you're exercising (training) a lot then it starts to feel
| like you _need_ to do it, and you need to do enough of it and
| do it in the right way. I 'm a cyclist, and I know that I'm
| grumpy/irritable/depressed if I haven't ridden. If I have a
| particularly tough session to do that day it can sometimes feel
| like a weight around my neck.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| To what extent? Being too tired and exhausted to have negative
| thoughts doesn't necessarily mean that exercise itself is a
| fundamental solution.
| spiderice wrote:
| Did you read the article? It says 2.5 hours per weeks is the
| sweet spot. Spread between 4-5 session. Hardly enough to
| exhaust you to the point of not being able to have negative
| thoughts.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| They don't say you needed to do a lot (in fact they say that
| you get best results by NOT doing too much). There's a bevy of
| feel good effects that fall outside of just being "too tired".
| hi41 wrote:
| I think you are learning different skills as you explore
| different forms of exercise. As you develop those habits of
| exercise and connection to people, you are able to answer the
| call of depression with walking one day, running the second
| day, doing Yoga the third day, cycling the 4th day,
| communicating with people and so on.
|
| It's no that you won't face depression and anxiety but now you
| have groked the skills in your body, you are able to answer it
| with action and not just give mental arguments.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| A lot of people are saying Jiu Jitsu. I'd actually extend that to
| most contact martial arts. I wrestled in high school and it was
| fucking brutal. In fact, wrestling made me appreciate my life a
| lot more, because it's so much easier than wrestling. They call
| it "the most fun you never want to have again".
|
| The grueling, daily, multi-hour practices... the extreme physical
| conditioning required to succeed... the extremely nerve-wracking
| matches, especially the lead up to them... honestly, my FAANG job
| is a total joke compared to the difficulty of this stuff. I think
| wrestling prepared me quite well for life.
| gatane wrote:
| Dunno, I was in Taekwondo as a kid and it made my anxiety worse,
| because I was always watched by my parents or had to do the moves
| in certain way. Could not do exercise on my own, and school was
| already lonesome.
| johnea wrote:
| Mostly the kind that involves getting up from your seat and going
| outside...
|
| After that, the more cardio exercise you get the better...
| paddw wrote:
| The article does not answer the question. (I don't believe there
| _is_ a straightforward best answer but the article does not so
| much as make a conjecture beyond the most obvious prerequisites.)
| coldtea wrote:
| It's burried in the article, but it's there: exact type doesn't
| matter, higher intensity / making you breath harder is better,
| dimminishing returns above 2.5 hours per week.
| wakefulsales wrote:
| stronger than diminishing returns - negative returns
|
| Depression Four reviews42 44 57 58 presented analyses by
| weekly session duration (68 component RCTs, >5016
| participants, online supplemental eFigure 12). The median SMD
| for <=150 min/week and >150 min/week was -0.58 (IQR=-0.77 to
| -0.30) and -0.29 (IQR=-0.40 to -0.07), respectively.
|
| Anxiety One review58 provided analyses by weekly session
| duration (17 component RCTs, online supplemental eFigure 13).
| The median SMDs for <150 min/week and >=150 min/week were
| -1.23 and -0.99, respectively.
| hinkley wrote:
| I am inclined to agree with them. Things really started
| looking up for me when I was doing about 90 minutes of one
| exercise and 2-3 hours a week of a second.
|
| I definitely got the impression that this was working
| better than when I rode 15-25 hours a week, and there were
| definite diminishing returns with walking for distance. Not
| unlike how the first few bites of a candy bar are most of
| your experience and then at the end you're mostly just
| finishing it. After the second or third bite it's all
| downhill.
| [deleted]
| comfypotato wrote:
| It promotes higher intensity exercising. If you're breathing
| hard, that's a good sign.
|
| (For mental health.)
| pasquinelli wrote:
| that's not how i understand the term "high intensity."
| jogging makes me pant, but i wouldn't call it high intensity,
| because i can do it for twenty minutes.
|
| high intensity would be work you can do for only maybe a
| minute, not twenty, and as a result it won't keep your heart
| rate elevated very long.
|
| so if they're basically saying 30 minutes 5 days a week,
| that's low intensity exercise.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| Low intensity shouldn't involve panting at all, because low
| intensity exercises are designed for people with specific
| health issues where anything above slight exercise is
| dangerous to them. [consider: significant osteoperosis,
| serious heart disease, etc] Stretching is low intensity
| exercise.
|
| Also, an exercise you can only keep up for 20 minutes at a
| time is pretty high intensity.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| > high intensity would be work you can do for only maybe a
| minute, not twenty
|
| Actually according to the article, high intensity can be
| done for twenty minutes. So what you're calling "low
| intensity" is actually "high intensity."
|
| (Funny how this works both directions, isn't it?)
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Any exercise is much much better than sitting around for hours
| researching and reading articles about which exercise would be
| best.
|
| According to reader mode this article is about 10 minutes long so
| instead of reading it, go for a walk.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Weight lifting. Barbell. Compound movements. That is all
| dnsco wrote:
| I love heavy compound lifts, but find it does something
| different than cardio. I get maximum benefit when I do both.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| It's not exercise (outside the hiking) but ... camping is amazing
| and a great start if you're not inclined to do much. Limited
| responsibilities, and the responsibilities you do have (cooking,
| staying warm, not dying) help sort of reset some biological
| imperative that gets lost when you're entirely too comfortable at
| home on the couch.
|
| Any form of cycling really clears my head. The sensory
| stimulation, the forced focus, the sense of freedom, it's
| wonderful.
| carvking wrote:
| Jordan Peterson mentioned free weights - the balancing requires a
| lot of minute balancing moves
| newsclues wrote:
| Weight lifting, walking in a forest, hiking up mountains have all
| been beneficial to me.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| The best exercise is the one you'll stick with.
|
| For me that's cycling and kayaking, alternating every day. I had
| tried running just because it's convenient and requires very
| little gear, but found it incredibly boring. But many of my
| friends absolutley love running. So asking others might help with
| some ideas, but ods are, you'll prefer something else.
| x3874 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| chaostheory wrote:
| > The benefits of exercise might not be immediate, says Singh,
| but they should show up within weeks or months. Beyond that, the
| longer people engaged in exercise, the less beneficial it became
| for their mental health. This may be because they were sticking
| to the program less, due to waning motivation or, perhaps,
| injury. It could also be because the exercise itself began to
| feel less novel and more repetitive.
|
| This is exactly why I use a Quest 2 / pro to workout. When you're
| killing zombies, fighting ninjas, or boxing fighters, working out
| is almost always novel. I'm just playing VR video games, which is
| why it's easy to keep a routine even after 3 years
|
| I hope Apple Vision can provide this benefit to people who are
| still skittish about even trying the current generation of VR
| headsets
| cpursley wrote:
| Do you not have access to the outdoors? Parks, paths, etc? The
| physical is only one aspect of it.
| chaostheory wrote:
| * * *
| ghotli wrote:
| Mind sharing which games on the quest you find yourself
| returning to?
| weare138 wrote:
| But you have to be able to break the depression cycle to begin
| with in order to do things like exercise. It's the chicken before
| the egg problem.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I've read sudoku bing good exercise to avoid early deterioration
| as you age--use it or lose it. I find Go (board game) to be more
| interesting and develops a lot of cross-transferable skills
| outside of only games or memory. Playing StarCraft 2 is also a
| fun(?) way of maintaining speed.
| hinkley wrote:
| Aji is my favorite concept from Go. In Go is it common for a
| failure to persist on the board. There are better moves, and
| some fights have to be won twice if you capture, so it's better
| to leave them until the end.
|
| But Aji is attacking near a loss, turning the loss into a win
| (very, very rarely, resurrecting the dead pieces). The
| existence of a failure on the board can put pressure on
| neighboring areas, and they can still sometimes be turned to a
| redemption story. Lose ten stones here but gain 8 nearby. Still
| a loss but maybe enough to win the overall game.
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| The last part of the article has the best takeaways IMO.
|
| Start slow, find something that you enjoy. Escalate as and when
| you can.
|
| Too many people think of exercise as like, get on the treadmill
| and run as hard as you can and make yourself feel like shit to
| the extent that you can't go again for a week. The vast majority
| of people, even people who train hard, don't do things like that.
| teekert wrote:
| I like mountain biking on very technical tracks, I can't really
| think of anything other than the track, it requires full
| attention. I like that. Put me on a speed cycle (not sure what
| the English word is), it gets boring, my mind starts to wander, I
| don't even remember what route I took.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Exactly, there's something about the forced attention. I've
| upgraded my flat-bottom touring kayak to a faster one that's
| kind of narrow and tippy and it forces me to think about my
| technique and movement a lot. Compared to my older boat, the
| trips have gotten much less sightsee-y but at the same time
| more relaxing.
| exabrial wrote:
| +1 for MTB and agree on technical climbing. You have to plan
| the line about 2-3 moves ahead.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| This sport didn't really click for me. I think I'm just not
| coordinated enough for it. No sport has left me bruised and
| bloody and just mentally broken like mountain biking has. I
| also didn't really enjoy the experience of having to sit on an
| extremely bumpy bike for hours on end. To each their own,
| though - I am jealous that folks get to enjoy a sport that
| takes them deep into the beauty of nature.
| teekert wrote:
| I live in the Netherlands, we still call it mountain biking
| because of the bike but yeah... [0]. Mostly it gets technical
| on single tracks. Not nearly as dangerous as in real
| mountains I presume. This is typical: [1]
|
| [0] https://dutchreview.com/culture/history/netherlands-flat/
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0_MNbdrHEA
| uejfiweun wrote:
| I imagine that would be a little better. Last time I went
| mountain biking was in Sedona, AZ - extremely stressful.
| You're biking up narrow mountain passes, and if you fall,
| decent chance you fall directly onto a cactus. I'm a clumsy
| guy, and I prefer for the consequences for my clumsiness to
| be like spillage, not impalement.
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| Road Bike (as opposed to Mountain Bike)
| cpursley wrote:
| No Semis, Brodozers or Soccer mom SUVs on mountain bike
| rides. Road biking is unacceptably risky. Not judging, it's
| the other people on the road who I don't trust.
| lethologica wrote:
| I've had major clinical depression for the last 15 years or so.
| The first 4 months of this year was the lowest I've ever been.
| During that time though I was going to the gym 6 days a week
| doing weight lifting and then I would cycle 50km a day on top of
| that. All of it was on autopilot however, my depression just
| wouldn't allow me to focus on anything but it.
|
| Luckily I had been building up the habit for years in advance but
| that was the most I had ever exercised and it was also the most I
| had ever been depressed. In my case I don't think the exercise
| helped at all. Perhaps if I hadn't of been exercising maybe I
| wouldn't even be here now though... I'm not entirely sure.
| Finding the right medication and getting therapy has been what
| has really helped me. With those two I can see an almost day and
| night difference but with the exercise I noticed no difference at
| all. At least I had a great physique though!
| oscribinn wrote:
| 2.5 hours a week is insanely low for any young person in good
| health. I'm positive that at least 8-12 hours of determined,
| physically intensive training compared to a measly 2.5 hours of
| "exercise" per week will do a hell of a lot better for anyone's
| mental health than treating the usage of one's body as somehow
| secondary to the "knowledge based" work we're all forced to do to
| make a decent living in modern society.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Surfing, obviously.
| Yajirobe wrote:
| Nobody mentioning rock climbing? Come on, I bet half of Hacker
| News partakes in it
| coldtea wrote:
| Sounds like a hugely echo bubbly view of the popularity of rock
| climbing and the HN demographic
| eastof wrote:
| Indoor climbers are all software engineers in some cities. In
| Seattle and San Francisco in particular, nearly everyone I
| meet there is also a software engineer. The gyms are so
| expensive that they are the only ones who can afford it with
| FAANG subsidies.
|
| Outdoor though you're right, totally different demographic
| and very few of them are software engineers.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I climb, but I doubt 5% of hacker news does. In fact, among
| software engineers (few of whom rock climb in my experience), I
| suspect the ones who climb are less likely to be on HN
| hinkley wrote:
| If all my joints worked the way I would like I'd be spending
| half as much time talking about my hobbies online. It's what
| I do in the in between times.
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