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Douglas_Knight comments on Exercise isn't necessarily good for people - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: NancyLebovitz 08 June 2013 02:32PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 08 June 2013 06:25:00PM 3 points [-]

12% of healthy people make their blood pressure higher by exercising 150 minutes a week. 20% get little or no improvement. [42:00] Graphs of low responders for aerobic capacity, muscle mass, and insulin sensitivity.

Mixed results, not enough to show a firm conclusion either way.

It's not mixed results but mixed people. For the median person, exercise improves blood pressure. But for 12% of people exercise makes their blood pressure worse every time (and for 20% it's always a wash).

Comment author: Xachariah 09 June 2013 12:52:40AM 19 points [-]

For 12% of people it makes blood pressure higher not worse. The presenter chooses the terms 'adverse' and 'worse' for his own purposes.

My girlfriend has chronic hypotension, and can easily faint or become dizzy when standing or if she doesn't have enough water. Anecdotally, regular exercise seems to help prevent that. It's hard to find numbers, but the closest thing to solid I could find is that 26% of people with diabetes (couldn't find general population) suffer from hypotension.

If the 32% of people receiving no change or an increase in blood pressure fall on the bottom end of the bloodpressure spectrum, they're getting exactly what they need. Regardless of how the speaker labels the results.

Comment author: ephion 23 December 2013 04:51:50PM *  1 point [-]

Here is the study cited. There are four health markers that were chosen to be analyzed for this analysis. Actual physical fitness (ie VO2 max, strength, body fat percentage) were not measured. In all but one of the examined studies, diet was not controlled for, and they specifically only included endurance exercise, when virtually every recommendation is to combine endurance and strength exercise. Claiming that this population doesn't respond to exercise is a vast overstatement. More accurately, you might be able to say that "Endurance exercise alone isn't sufficient to improve health markers in a small fraction of the population."

EDIT: The inverse to that is "Endurance exercise alone is sufficient to improve health markers in most of the population," which doesn't strike me as a good reason to not prescribe it.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 December 2013 05:59:22PM 1 point [-]

diet was not controlled for

And three out of their four markers are known to be strongly influenced by diet!