The Last Exercise Column You Ever Need to Read
Reading Time: 7 minutesThis past year at MediaDownloader, we explored exercise. Here’s what we learned., Everything you need to know about exercise in 2024.
This is an installment of Good Fit, a column about exercise.
It can be difficult to untangle how a specific substance or action precisely affects your health. For decades, for example, researchers in Finland have been following thousands and thousands of pairs of twins, mailing them surveys, along with collecting biological samples like DNA and fat biopsies from some of that group. The idea is that by looking at genetically identical people who grew up in the same environment, they can isolate how various lifestyle choices like smoking and diet affect the body in the long term. The effort has produced a deep catalog of research on everything from the role of genes in drinking habits to the risk of dieting for future weight gain to, more recently, the effects of exercise on life span.
That last study concluded that working out does not matter all that much in terms of how long one lives, once you control for other factors. In fact, exercising too much can end up having a negative effect on ‘biological aging.’ Overall, the researchers concluded, being active might be a sign that you’re healthy for other reasons, rather than itself being an elixir of health. This apparent shift from so many years of wisdom and results from other studies of course made for zesty write-ups in the New York Post and Daily Mail.
Personally? I was excited to see this study. Not because it portended anything good for me, health-wise. (As a marathoner and recently minted ‘ultrarunner,’ I fall if anything into the category of too much exercise.) Nor because I believed that it heralds a paradigm shift in how we understand exercise. (There are nuances in its conclusions, namely that exercise still has some effect, as well as bones to pick with the methodology; it also has not been peer-reviewed.) No, the reason I was excited was much more mundane: I knew I had a column to write, and behold, here was an interesting news hook that could help me make my point!
Readers, welcome to the last installment of Good Fit, MediaDownloader’s series on exercise. It ran for all of 2023. And now, as we had planned from the start, we’re sunsetting it. Why? It’s been popular. Other national publications are, if anything, expanding their forces when it comes to publishing timely, fresh pieces about how to work out. It makes sense! Talking about fitness is fun, which is why we wanted to do it.
Our approach, though, was—by and large—to not follow the exercise ‘news,’ for precisely the reason illustrated by the Finnish twin study: While it does give you a way to keep editorially repackaging workout advice in fresh ways, it usually brings you somewhere more confusing, not less. Readers of the latest exercise research in recent years may have, for example, found themselves swept up in a craze of short workouts—the benefits of which, as the very paper that helped popularize the trend recently noted, might have been ‘oversold.’ Such is the nature of science—it doesn’t march forward linearly toward some kind of perfect truth. And scientists disagree about things all the time, particularly when it comes to the specifics of how we should apply its findings to our lives. ‘We have screwed this up from the get-go,’ Panteleimon Ekkekakis, a professor of exercise psychology at Iowa State University, told MediaDownloader last year about the tendency of Americans to look at exercise as a medical task to complete, versus an aspect of life that’s—sure, among other things—simply enjoyable.
To the Finnish twin study, I ultimately say: So what? Even if the results bear out, it does not, in my opinion, shake the core thing we regular people need to know about exercise—which is something we already know. What is that? It’s that exercise is … basically good for you. The twin paper did, however, make me doubly convinced of something that editing Good Fit for this past year has taught me: The best thing you can do isn’t to read more and more and more about what exercises you ‘should’ do, from all the sources that are out there yelling for your attention and jockeying for relevance. It’s to accept the well-supported premise that exercising regularly is good, then figure out what works for you from there. And while we felt we had something to add to the conversation around fitness—and surely will, here and there, in the future—we are, when it comes to covering fitness regularly, now done. So, here’s what we have learned this year at Good Fit, and will now be spending our time putting into action:
Everything from your fitness watch to your competitive instinct encourages you to speed up and pass the person who is running/cycling/kayaking in front of you. But pushing yourself to the limit every workout is a recipe for burning out your body, as well as your general enthusiasm for whatever activity you’re doing. Instead, having days where you go very slowly, maybe even embarrassingly slowly, can allow you to recover—as well as just take in the scenery.
You also don’t have to be good at something right off the bat. Maybe it’s even better if you’re not. Failing at a new kind of exercise, and persevering through the frustration of that, is extremely valuable. Getting things ‘right’ isn’t even the point in some cases. ‘What you’re describing is called yoga-rexia,’ Paul Grilley, one of the founders of yin yoga, told Heather Schwedel on her quest to do happy baby correctly. ‘You think doing the poses is important. What’s important is how it affects your body.’
OK, sure: Whether you’re running or lifting weights, you need the right shoes, the right bra, and basic workout clothes. But, writes Hamilton Nolan, ‘there are thousands of varieties of heavy, expensive, and utterly superfluous exercise machines that clutter our nation’s basements, rec rooms, and strip-mall L.A. Fitness franchises.’ All it’s good for is ‘the idea that ‘working out’ is something special, an esoteric skill’ that you need to fork over thousands of dollars to do properly, versus just … going outside and moving. If you think Nolan is being a little extreme, he is—but also, look at one of the latest trends in exercise equipment, the walking pad, which allows you to … walk.
Eleanor Cummins’ entry on how yoga classes got so expensive helped persuade me to treat myself to a (very, very expensive) five-pack of private sessions with my favorite teacher last spring. Instructors—good ones, at least—are experts, and they are typically paid woefully poorly for the time and energy they bring to a class. There is, I have also learned generally as a health and science editor, nothing like having an expert look at what is going on with your particular body versus you trying to piece together what’s wrong with your form, etc., via the internet.
But it’s important to remember that the person standing at the front of the class is also human. Former personal trainer Sarah Kurchak, who is also the author of the book Work It Out, explained that the way she sees the mistakes made by her colleagues at the gym is influenced by her own relationship to error: ‘During my own fitness journey—and just in my general existence as a woman in the world—I have internalized criticisms of my body and how it worked. I passed too many of the critiques on to clients,’ she writes in an entry titled ‘What I Regret About My Time as a Fitness Instructor.’ ‘I wish I’d been quieter and more helpful about the occasional hyperextended elbow I saw in classes, for example. My focus on proper exercise sometimes veered too close to perfectionism.’
There are times in life (say, pre-kids?) when you can regularly attend a workout class five times a week. And there are other times when there is a ‘total wipeout,’ writes Hillary Frey, whose exercise of choice was, for a long time, yoga. ‘I’ll stay off the mat for three to six months, even a year, the whole time feeling shame over my laziness, and then ashamed that I couldn’t practice one of the core tenets of yoga: to be kind to yourself.’ She searched for something sustainable, and came up with this: ‘Just to move. Every day. A little or a lot.’
That was her first entry in Good Fit. Then, she got some advice from a doctor: As a woman approaching 50, she needed to add some strength training to the mix. In her second entry for Good Fit, she chronicled her journey trying out weights and upping her protein intake dramatically. ‘I have a group chat with three other women who are all around my age, and I refer to it now as the ‘menopause lunch chat,’ ‘ she writes. Fitness for her now includes talking with her friends about all the chickpeas they’re eating. Things change!
OK, fine, I do think the Finnish exercise study demonstrates a couple of important points. Exercising is only one part of being healthy (with many of those other parts being factors outside our control). And more exercise isn’t necessarily ‘healthier’ in the long term—or, as Jen Miller explored in her Good Fit essay, ‘Too Much of a Good Thing,’ the short term either. Despite all the marketing slogans that encourage us to push our limits, Miller writes, ‘we are limited, and we can hurt ourselves, whether by attempting a multiday hike without any training, strapping into a Peloton day after day after day without rest, or working out outside during a ‘code red’ air-quality alert.’
Last April, she dropped out of a 24-hour endurance race partway through, after she couldn’t stop crying. Miller, also the author of Running: A Love Story, realized that she had been out there on the trail searching for something in particular: ‘I went into the race seeking out the postrace feeling of relief, of praise, and the reward of allowing myself to eat whatever I wanted, to sleep in, to take long, slow hikes with my dog instead of pounding out miles—as if I could not already do those things without the ‘permission’ that completing an ultramarathon supposedly gave me.’ In searching for acceptance and permission, she pushed herself too far. So, she took a break.
The literature and the rest of the world will have all kinds of things to say about whatever it is you do. But the best reason to exercise is really simple: Do it because you want to.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/last-exercise-column-you-ever-need.html
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