[smokel]

It might be empirically sound, but it does not make a priori sense that exercising a body will improve it. If I use almost any object in the universe frequently, it typically degrades rather than improves.

The health benefits of exercise are most likely due to improved blood flow and related physiological effects. In principle, pills could theoretically achieve similar outcomes by enhancing circulation or other underlying mechanisms.

Not taking sides here, just reasoning out loud.

[motorest]

> It might be empirically sound, but it does not make a priori sense that exercising a body will improve it. If I use almost any object in the universe frequently, it typically degrades rather than improves.

Rejecting all evidence, denying observations, and leaning heavily on half-baked hypothesis that culminate somehow on a gotcha. That sounds an awful lot like something someone who "does their own research" would say.

Yes, extreme levels of high-intensity exercise have adverse side effects. Cross-fit and rhadbo is an example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhabdomyolysis

Drinking water also does everyone good, and everyone's health will improve if they increase their water intake, but drinking water in excess can also be fatal. Does this mean that the idea that drinking water does you good "does not make a priori sense"?

No, it doesn't.

[twelvedogs]

i kinda see where he's coming from, wear and tear on joints and such

however any kind of "pill" that would have anywhere near the same health effects as exercise is decades away at least.

hips and knees acls tend to be a failure point but the non-existance of said "pill" is probably a fairly big tick for the excercise side, and our tech for repairing those failure points continues to progress at speed

[iamacyborg]

In the context of running, physiological benefits I’m familiar with include improvements to bone density and joint health, increased capillarisation and therefore blood flow in the muscles and improved energy efficiency in cells.

I suspect you’re not going to find a pill or combination of pills that can achieve those outcomes. And again, we’re ignoring the mental health benefits.

[untrust]

Doing resistance training will mechanically stress the ligaments, bones and muscles which results in your body reinforcing and strengthening them. This is important to do on a localized level, as hypertrophy of the heart is not good whereas hypertrophy of the leg muscles is. You cant do this in pill form (at least yet)

[froggit]

Excessive exercise might not be healthy? No shit?

[dredmorbius]

It turns out that there's a wealth of evidence which shows that appropriate introductions of stress (cardio training, resistance training, fine-motor-control practice) do in fact lead to improvements: greater heart health, better pulmonary function, increased strength, greater bone density, improved blood sugar regulation, decreased overall stress response, and more.

Yes, overtraining is possible (and not infrequent, particularly by those who fail to read or ignore the evidence). But an absolutely sedentary lifestyle is exceptionally fatal.

Medications (as with exercise) come with both intended and unintended consequences, as well as costs and inconveniences. Generally the more extreme the condition you're treating, the more likely that medications will carry some of these disadvantages (e.g., chemotherapy against cancer, where the goal is often to kill the malignancy at least slightly faster than one kills the patient). Exercise operates through complex feedback cycles and mechanisms, not all of which are well-understood (as an example, why muscle grows in response to strength training being a fundamental case despite much information on how muscle responds to which specific training protocols). Medications can amplify training response (e.g., anabolic steroids for strength training athletes), but often don't by themselves substitute for it.

This is why, in a broader sense, that the Baconian scientific method does not rely simply on a priori hypotheses, but tests these with experiment and evidence, that is, empirically. The ultimate critique of pure reason is that whilst it can be a useful guide for what you then want to test empirically, it has a phenomenal tendency to lead one to utterly fallacious and/or irrelevant conclusions.

One of the more robust sets of evidence on both the negative effects of a zero-stress lifestyle and of the benefits of regular cardio and strength training is that accumulated through long-term space missions, largely aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Microgravity would be the ultimate low-stress environment, and it turns out to be seriously harmful. Astronauts there are tested before and after missions, with various measures of fitness loss. With time-in-space being an immensely valuable resource, astronauts also spend two hours per day engaged in physical exercise (<https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronauts/living-in-space/phy...>), or 1/8 of their waking schedule.

Online, ExRx (<https://exrx.net/>) has a large library of fitness information, including a list of online journals (<https://exrx.net/Journals>) and expert talks (<https://exrx.net/Talks>). Good books on fitness will link to research substantiating recommendations (Lou Schuler's New Rules of Lifting series is a good example of this).