content note: exercise

[alexseanchai]

Sitting here wondering why my legs hurt. Just now recalled, I walked a mile today.

One. Freaking. Mile.

I want to be able to breeze through a 5K (which is three point one miles) and not feel it afterwards. But apparently I don't want to put in the actual work it takes to get there from here. Because every time I try, it hurts after.

(See also my not-great flexibility, my not-great strength esp in the upper body, and the thing where exercise is supposed to improve matters for depressed folks.)

Comments

[madgastronomer]

No, there is NOT good data that exercise works as well as meds. Those results have not proved repeatable, and few people with clinical depressive disorders find long term effects from regular exercise. That one study keeps being trumpeted, and there have only been a few other studies that have attempted to replicate it, but they have not succeeded. Please please please do not repeat this as a proven thing. It ends up being really damaging. Depressed people end up guilting themselves about not exercising, when the depression is what is preventing them, or overexercising and assuming they're doing something wrong when they don't get the promised effects, or stopping other forms of treatment because of these promised effects.

A lot of people don't even get short-term endorphin rushes from single exercise sessions, either.

[rthstewart]

I will do so and apologize for the incorrect information.
Edit - I was able to delete the comment. Thank you for the correction.

[alexseanchai]

I did see your comment notif, and thanks for the encouragement! Even if, as madgastronomer points out, we were both working off an incorrect assumption re depression.

Though for the record, the emotion I was trying to express was frustration at walking only a mile, when in the past I have done 5Ks—not with good times, but I did them—and the only difference between then and now is how much walking I did. And I can't really do 'walk less than a mile' and 'walk outside in the sunshine' at the same time—just-shy-of-a-mile is the length of the loop that goes "leave house going left, follow street around and turn left on street-that-goes-from-development-entrance-to-clubhouse, then turn left on street-I-live-on". I could do a somewhat longer loop, but not a shorter one. Or I could go to the clubhouse gym, but that's not in the sunshine!

[madgastronomer]

You're welcome. And thank you for taking it well. A lot of people get very defensive about that, being very sure that Exercise Is The Answer. I get a bit tetchy, having seen Exercise Is The Answer used very abusively against many people. (Including me.)

[liv]

I'd really like to see the studies you're referring to, if you have any sort of identifying information I could use to find stuff about not repeating the study about benefits of exercise in depression. Because I work in an medical environment and "exercise works as well as meds" is pretty much the received wisdom, albeit with the caveat that "as well as meds" is actually not very well at all, only a small proportion of people with depression get real long-term improvement with anti-depressant medications alone. What I'd heard is that exercise, talk therapy, conventional anti-depressants, and some herbal medicines notably St John's Wort, are about equally effective, which is to say not very but they do help (different) small proportions of people. But that to get real long-term improvement you need a combination of most of those.