"In this model, mice lived in specially designed cages where food was accessed through a hinged, weighted lid. To eat, the mice had to lift the lid while wearing a small shoulder collar, causing a squat-like movement that engaged the muscle contractions people use during resistance exercise. The load was gradually increased over several days, mimicking progressive strength training."
So the study doesn't really show that weighlifting per se is beneficial, but putting food behind weighted hatches is?
"Voluntary wheel running (EEX) was conducted as previously described in single-housed mice with access to voluntary running wheels and food and water ad-libitum,"
Dr. Bernstein has long argued this and documents it extensively in his book "Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution"[1]. The main reason being that muscles act like natural glucose sinks that drain sugar directly out of the bloodstream, bypassing the liver, so more muscles = more glucose control.
I highly recommend the introductory chapter to "Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution" by the way, even for non-diabetics. It's basically just the "Life and career" section of his wiki page, but in way more detail -- a really interesting biographical account about an industrial engineer doing diabetes self-experiments with a glucose meter he procured through his wife and going up against the medical community/orthodoxy and failing, only to finally break through when he got a medical degree late in life. I could probably upload and link to just that section if people are interested.
Have you studied control systems? Adding a second storage mechanism with different dynamics changes control, and may complicate it. Those muscles may increase hypoglycemic events as well as soften spikes.
As much as we like to think in abstractions, the tail does not wag the dog.
You may intend to lift weights to gain muscle, but the body is doing a lot more than just gaining muscle. It's interesting to see what else happens. That is the point of this discussion.
Yeah but sometimes you have to do things you don't particularly like. For example there are lots of people who do nothing but cycling and never do any sort of strength training which is certainly healthier than doing absolutely nothing but they are really missing out by not doing strength training.
You don’t have to exercise at all though. The far greater majority are people who don’t like exercise at all, and won’t do anything. To have a person do at least some exercise of any form is a big win for their health anytime it happens. That’s what we don’t want to discourage.
Nobody is actively discouraging that so you are just making up a strawman argument. That said cross training is very important for things like injury prevention. So if you just do something like running and nothing else at some point you are far more likely than not to get injured to the point that you have to completely stop or switch to something lower impact like cycling. And while cycling is great it doesn't have lots of the benefits of something like strength training so things like your bone health could still rapidly deteriorate as you age. So that means something relatively preventable like a fall leading to a broken hip that you never recover from can still happen to you. But yeah just do what you like and make sure you don't do anything you don't like in the moment
I find it fascinating that people who exercise would want to skip the weights. Strength training makes everything else so much easier, even "doing nothing" (sleep, metabolism, etc.)!
Outside of the (in mice) factor, the study compares optional exercise with mandatory exercise factors.
> To eat, the mice had to lift the lid while wearing a small shoulder collar, causing a squat-like movement that engaged the muscle contractions people use during resistance exercise.
vs
> For the endurance group, mice were given open access to a running wheel, an established model of aerobic exercise
The study is comparing the exercise that came in right before eating, which is effective at sugar control over the exercise done at any time as desired.
Speaking as a runner, I ignore the diet bump which makes me put on extra fat when I am training up for the SF (+2.5 kg over June & July is normal).
Mostly because I eat more the night before and mostly light carbs.
In fact, I'd bet my resting metabolism is actually slower when I'm training and the resting heart rates drop to 45 bpm & sleep takes up fewer calories too.
The muscle mass increase from lifting probably never cuts your metabolism needs when you are recovering or resting.
Cardiovascular fitness doesn't really cause weight loss when you're resting. So you'll be comparing something which reduces the calorie spend for the all the time you're not running vs something slightly bumps the spend when you are not lifting.
These poor quality animal studies tend to be non-replicable, but provide fodder for predatory journals and tabloid journalism. And for getting grants from gullible philanthropists.
Citations and money, a great outcome for some random graduate student at a third tier programme...
I treat many obese adult diabetics. It is difficult to get most of them to go for a brisk walk a couple of times a week, far less do weight lifting before each meal. There is a reason why they are diabetics ( apart from the genetic overlay , which is a major factor in some populations).
Weightlifing is the only exercise that I've ever managed to make a habit. I do powerlifting 3x/week. I've tried running, swimming, cycling, etc. and hated all of it.
Running is quite meditative when you get in to it (at least for me when outside - indoor running on treadmills is soul destroying though I agree). You don't have to go fast or far, but after 10-15-20 mins I find my mind gets into a fairly calm state, even if my legs and lungs are burning.
We - as a species - are engineered and built to run. I think there is a lot to be said for it.
If anyone is reading this and considering giving it a go, please do. You don't need any specific fancy equipment (just some generic trainers/sneakers will do - running does not damage your knees, quite the opposite in fact). I love travelling for work and packing my running gear and exploring the city I am visiting while running - beats sitting in a hotel room watching netflix on my own.
My biggest advice is that when you first start running outside you will feel like you are going slow even if you are not. If you have a smartphone get an app that will help you track your running pace (Strava is popular but I use runkeeper as I don't like the gamification & social parts of strava) and don't try to go faster than 6 mins/km for the first few runs. When I first started running outside (after doing a lot of gym-based treadmill running and before smartphones were really a thing) I had no frame of reference for how I was moving through the space apart from driving so it felt so terribly terribly slow when in reality I was pushing very hard. There are no prizes here and you are not racing anyone - run at a pace that feels sustainable and let your mind go.
10km/h is very fast for a beginner and likely unsustainable for more than a couple of minutes, I would expect most people to be starting around 5-6km/h if they’re a healthy weight.
I think the best piece of advice is START SLOW. way slower than you think. And run for way shorter than you think. Even if your lungs and muscles are fine, if you haven’t ran for a while then your tendons certainly aren’t. You won’t know until it’s too late and then you’ll be out of the game for weeks or months. If you can run on grass or a softer surface your body will thank you, running on concrete is brutal until you’re used to it.
There’s probably programs than you can follow that introduce you to running, I’d follow one of those.
I’m horribly out of shape and that’s pretty much what I can manage. The question isn’t how fast _should_ I go, but how fast _can_ I go so that I can come back and do it the next day.
If you haven’t ran before and are carrying some extra weight then yeah it’s probably a good place to start for your first couple of short runs. Even running slowly puts additional stress on your achilles so it’s a bit of a wake up call to your body. Running slowly for 10 minutes a few times when you’re just getting started isn’t going to hurt anyone and if everything checks out then you can start to up the pace.
Agreed. One way I found back into running was to acknowledge that I could walk for 5k, then try to slowly jog sections of it: walk for 5 mins jog for 15secs and repeat. Then next time raise both durations or reduce the walk or whatever. Now I can run a 5k no problem and all I did was frog boil myself.
Since it’s summer i try to start my day with biking downhill to the gym for some weightlifting, then bike to the outdoor pool, then slowly bike back. Probably the best 2 hours of my day every day. But I agree with the spirit, once you find what you enjoy, no matter how mediocre you are at it, it feels amazing.
Yup, love the adrenaline rush, the simple "get up with this heavy shit on you" on it.
After running for a decade without any spectacular performance to speak of and constant weight issues, one year of powerlifting 2x a week - not only is every single health metric better with less running, possibly the best they've ever been, at a point where they should be declining; my running is hitting PBs as well.
(in mice) - I get it if it’s some new experimental drug, a mouse probably makes sense to test first. With exercise you’d think they could go straight to humans? Seems like it would be more effort getting mice to lift weights than it’s worth.
Controlled experiments in humans are expensive, time consuming, and actually very difficult to do. Meanwhile any grad student can do a mouse model. The motivation of most academic labs is citations and grants, not useful information. Putting it together…
Selection effects are ridiculously strong for almost anything related to health.
I strongly believe that's why nutrition science is soooo far behind the rest of medicine. There aren't nearly enough serious RCTs (whereas regulations make them abundant for other medical interventions).
We still are in the experimental phase about how we can get two groups of human study participants to keep behaving mostly the same, while also complying with the change in exercise we want data on.
I try to be open minded about research choices because I have no special knowledge of what will or won’t be important. Left-field discoveries have made profound and positive impacts on many occasions.
I’m having trouble with this one, and am tempted to write it off as playing with mice in a lab. The extrapolation to human conditions is hyperbolic, maybe worse.
Given the number of people with continuous glucose monitors and activity tracking watches in the world, why not study that data directly? Causation by activity would be more apparent, more relevant and more significant (if present) wouldn’t it?
I used to do weightlifting, but it's hard to keep up daily discipline with potential injury risk. Rest days are mandatory and this is the #1 killer of compliance over time (for me).
Rowing is my go-to now. It is low impact so I can do it every day without any exceptions. I've been able to hold onto this discipline for 2 years now. The advantage of rowing is that there isn't really a limit to how much it can suck. You can burn 500 calories per hour, or 9000. It's more of a psychological battle than a physical one.
My system is to row at whatever intensity and duration until I my brain starts to internally play music from Spotify. However long that takes. Sometimes it's 40 minutes, sometimes it's 80. I think this variance mostly boils down to blood sugar and what I ate the previous day. If I gorge on a box of snacky crackers, I need to row for at least an hour before I stop feeling like shit.
You cannot burn 9000 calories per hour. Cycling at 166W for 1 hour burns approx. 600 calories. That's sustainable for a most amateurs. The absolute best riders in the world can optimistically do 450W for 1 hour and then be completely drained. That's 2000 calories and mere mortals are nowhere near that. So a realistic cap if you have great cardio and you're pushing it is 1000 calories.
It depends how you train. 6 days per week is pretty common among bodybuilders. Injury risk is also lower (for naturals) because you’re generally lifting at a lower % of 1 RM.
As this is a mice study it’s worth pointing out humans are particularly adapted for endurance exercise compared to other animals. Not gonna pretend to be a HN expert, but it seems relevant when comparing this sort of thing across species.
Simple trick for those outside of academia. Google the impact factor of the journal you are reading. If it's below 5 it's fake. If it's 5 or above, it's also fake.
Luckily, we live in the reality where every human who is interested in how their own body, and not the one of some random mouse, deals with blood sugar, can order a relatively inexpensive (for the benefits it provides) device — a continuous glucose monitor — and gather all the data they need to see what helps controlling the sugar level, and what does not. Using a CGM was a truly life changing experience for me, and I recommend trying it for everyone interested.
I’ve tried CGMs multiple times and didn’t have any life changing experiences.
I did have a couple low and high readings, but even with a food log and going back to re-eat the exact same meal I got completely different results.
I think the exercise induced changes that help regulate blood sugar aren’t going to show up on the time scale of ordering a couple CGMs. It has to be a sustained lifestyle choice.
Took me about half a year to drop my baseline levels, so, of course, not instant and not within "a couple" CGMs, but "a couple" was enough for me to understand the trends.
I used Libre 3; you can get different ones without a prescription online. You can easily get a prescription (in the US) if you get diagnosed with Type 2 based on your A1C numbers, but ordering a CGM online without any prescription is not a problem at all. Wearing it for 2-4 weeks is usually enough to learn a lot about your relationship with sugar.
I used Stelo from Dexcom with my Oura Ring, no prescription. I didn't really learn much, other than occasionally realizing I was cranky because of low blood sugar.
"In this model, mice lived in specially designed cages where food was accessed through a hinged, weighted lid. To eat, the mice had to lift the lid while wearing a small shoulder collar, causing a squat-like movement that engaged the muscle contractions people use during resistance exercise. The load was gradually increased over several days, mimicking progressive strength training."
So the study doesn't really show that weighlifting per se is beneficial, but putting food behind weighted hatches is?
"Voluntary wheel running (EEX) was conducted as previously described in single-housed mice with access to voluntary running wheels and food and water ad-libitum,"
And the runners could each as much as they liked?
Sounds like bunk.
Dr. Bernstein has long argued this and documents it extensively in his book "Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution"[1]. The main reason being that muscles act like natural glucose sinks that drain sugar directly out of the bloodstream, bypassing the liver, so more muscles = more glucose control.
I highly recommend the introductory chapter to "Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution" by the way, even for non-diabetics. It's basically just the "Life and career" section of his wiki page, but in way more detail -- a really interesting biographical account about an industrial engineer doing diabetes self-experiments with a glucose meter he procured through his wife and going up against the medical community/orthodoxy and failing, only to finally break through when he got a medical degree late in life. I could probably upload and link to just that section if people are interested.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_K._Bernstein
2.5kg variation from moment to moment can be entirely accounted for by hydration status and intestinal content volume.
Have you studied control systems? Adding a second storage mechanism with different dynamics changes control, and may complicate it. Those muscles may increase hypoglycemic events as well as soften spikes.
As much as we like to think in abstractions, the tail does not wag the dog.
You may intend to lift weights to gain muscle, but the body is doing a lot more than just gaining muscle. It's interesting to see what else happens. That is the point of this discussion.
The exercise you like doing and will do beats no exercise at all for blood sugar control
Yeah but sometimes you have to do things you don't particularly like. For example there are lots of people who do nothing but cycling and never do any sort of strength training which is certainly healthier than doing absolutely nothing but they are really missing out by not doing strength training.
You don’t have to exercise at all though. The far greater majority are people who don’t like exercise at all, and won’t do anything. To have a person do at least some exercise of any form is a big win for their health anytime it happens. That’s what we don’t want to discourage.
Nobody is actively discouraging that so you are just making up a strawman argument. That said cross training is very important for things like injury prevention. So if you just do something like running and nothing else at some point you are far more likely than not to get injured to the point that you have to completely stop or switch to something lower impact like cycling. And while cycling is great it doesn't have lots of the benefits of something like strength training so things like your bone health could still rapidly deteriorate as you age. So that means something relatively preventable like a fall leading to a broken hip that you never recover from can still happen to you. But yeah just do what you like and make sure you don't do anything you don't like in the moment
I find it fascinating that people who exercise would want to skip the weights. Strength training makes everything else so much easier, even "doing nothing" (sleep, metabolism, etc.)!
Outside of the (in mice) factor, the study compares optional exercise with mandatory exercise factors.
> To eat, the mice had to lift the lid while wearing a small shoulder collar, causing a squat-like movement that engaged the muscle contractions people use during resistance exercise.
vs
> For the endurance group, mice were given open access to a running wheel, an established model of aerobic exercise
The study is comparing the exercise that came in right before eating, which is effective at sugar control over the exercise done at any time as desired.
Speaking as a runner, I ignore the diet bump which makes me put on extra fat when I am training up for the SF (+2.5 kg over June & July is normal).
Mostly because I eat more the night before and mostly light carbs.
In fact, I'd bet my resting metabolism is actually slower when I'm training and the resting heart rates drop to 45 bpm & sleep takes up fewer calories too.
The muscle mass increase from lifting probably never cuts your metabolism needs when you are recovering or resting.
Cardiovascular fitness doesn't really cause weight loss when you're resting. So you'll be comparing something which reduces the calorie spend for the all the time you're not running vs something slightly bumps the spend when you are not lifting.
In mice...
These poor quality animal studies tend to be non-replicable, but provide fodder for predatory journals and tabloid journalism. And for getting grants from gullible philanthropists.
Citations and money, a great outcome for some random graduate student at a third tier programme...
I treat many obese adult diabetics. It is difficult to get most of them to go for a brisk walk a couple of times a week, far less do weight lifting before each meal. There is a reason why they are diabetics ( apart from the genetic overlay , which is a major factor in some populations).
Weightlifing is the only exercise that I've ever managed to make a habit. I do powerlifting 3x/week. I've tried running, swimming, cycling, etc. and hated all of it.
Running is quite meditative when you get in to it (at least for me when outside - indoor running on treadmills is soul destroying though I agree). You don't have to go fast or far, but after 10-15-20 mins I find my mind gets into a fairly calm state, even if my legs and lungs are burning.
We - as a species - are engineered and built to run. I think there is a lot to be said for it.
If anyone is reading this and considering giving it a go, please do. You don't need any specific fancy equipment (just some generic trainers/sneakers will do - running does not damage your knees, quite the opposite in fact). I love travelling for work and packing my running gear and exploring the city I am visiting while running - beats sitting in a hotel room watching netflix on my own.
My biggest advice is that when you first start running outside you will feel like you are going slow even if you are not. If you have a smartphone get an app that will help you track your running pace (Strava is popular but I use runkeeper as I don't like the gamification & social parts of strava) and don't try to go faster than 6 mins/km for the first few runs. When I first started running outside (after doing a lot of gym-based treadmill running and before smartphones were really a thing) I had no frame of reference for how I was moving through the space apart from driving so it felt so terribly terribly slow when in reality I was pushing very hard. There are no prizes here and you are not racing anyone - run at a pace that feels sustainable and let your mind go.
Good luck.
10km/h is very fast for a beginner and likely unsustainable for more than a couple of minutes, I would expect most people to be starting around 5-6km/h if they’re a healthy weight.
I think the best piece of advice is START SLOW. way slower than you think. And run for way shorter than you think. Even if your lungs and muscles are fine, if you haven’t ran for a while then your tendons certainly aren’t. You won’t know until it’s too late and then you’ll be out of the game for weeks or months. If you can run on grass or a softer surface your body will thank you, running on concrete is brutal until you’re used to it.
There’s probably programs than you can follow that introduce you to running, I’d follow one of those.
You expect people to start running at 5-6km/h which is about a fast walking pace? That seems unduly slow?
Running is harder work than walking. Try it!
I’m horribly out of shape and that’s pretty much what I can manage. The question isn’t how fast _should_ I go, but how fast _can_ I go so that I can come back and do it the next day.
If you haven’t ran before and are carrying some extra weight then yeah it’s probably a good place to start for your first couple of short runs. Even running slowly puts additional stress on your achilles so it’s a bit of a wake up call to your body. Running slowly for 10 minutes a few times when you’re just getting started isn’t going to hurt anyone and if everything checks out then you can start to up the pace.
Agreed. One way I found back into running was to acknowledge that I could walk for 5k, then try to slowly jog sections of it: walk for 5 mins jog for 15secs and repeat. Then next time raise both durations or reduce the walk or whatever. Now I can run a 5k no problem and all I did was frog boil myself.
Since it’s summer i try to start my day with biking downhill to the gym for some weightlifting, then bike to the outdoor pool, then slowly bike back. Probably the best 2 hours of my day every day. But I agree with the spirit, once you find what you enjoy, no matter how mediocre you are at it, it feels amazing.
Have you tried sprint workouts as a complement to powerlifting?
Same. I just take great joy in powerlifting especially squats
Yup, love the adrenaline rush, the simple "get up with this heavy shit on you" on it.
After running for a decade without any spectacular performance to speak of and constant weight issues, one year of powerlifting 2x a week - not only is every single health metric better with less running, possibly the best they've ever been, at a point where they should be declining; my running is hitting PBs as well.
The downside, I'm a bore about it.
(in mice) - I get it if it’s some new experimental drug, a mouse probably makes sense to test first. With exercise you’d think they could go straight to humans? Seems like it would be more effort getting mice to lift weights than it’s worth.
Controlled experiments in humans are expensive, time consuming, and actually very difficult to do. Meanwhile any grad student can do a mouse model. The motivation of most academic labs is citations and grants, not useful information. Putting it together…
It’s probably saner to look at large populations of different types of athletes / exercise patterns in a longitudinal study.
Selection effects are ridiculously strong for almost anything related to health.
I strongly believe that's why nutrition science is soooo far behind the rest of medicine. There aren't nearly enough serious RCTs (whereas regulations make them abundant for other medical interventions).
Imagining adorable mice dumbbells
With enough gains, Pinky & the Brain can finally take over world.
Pinky and the gains
We still are in the experimental phase about how we can get two groups of human study participants to keep behaving mostly the same, while also complying with the change in exercise we want data on.
Maybe the real value is in training mice to do useful work.
I try to be open minded about research choices because I have no special knowledge of what will or won’t be important. Left-field discoveries have made profound and positive impacts on many occasions.
I’m having trouble with this one, and am tempted to write it off as playing with mice in a lab. The extrapolation to human conditions is hyperbolic, maybe worse.
Given the number of people with continuous glucose monitors and activity tracking watches in the world, why not study that data directly? Causation by activity would be more apparent, more relevant and more significant (if present) wouldn’t it?
I used to do weightlifting, but it's hard to keep up daily discipline with potential injury risk. Rest days are mandatory and this is the #1 killer of compliance over time (for me).
Rowing is my go-to now. It is low impact so I can do it every day without any exceptions. I've been able to hold onto this discipline for 2 years now. The advantage of rowing is that there isn't really a limit to how much it can suck. You can burn 500 calories per hour, or 9000. It's more of a psychological battle than a physical one.
My system is to row at whatever intensity and duration until I my brain starts to internally play music from Spotify. However long that takes. Sometimes it's 40 minutes, sometimes it's 80. I think this variance mostly boils down to blood sugar and what I ate the previous day. If I gorge on a box of snacky crackers, I need to row for at least an hour before I stop feeling like shit.
You cannot burn 9000 calories per hour. Cycling at 166W for 1 hour burns approx. 600 calories. That's sustainable for a most amateurs. The absolute best riders in the world can optimistically do 450W for 1 hour and then be completely drained. That's 2000 calories and mere mortals are nowhere near that. So a realistic cap if you have great cardio and you're pushing it is 1000 calories.
It depends how you train. 6 days per week is pretty common among bodybuilders. Injury risk is also lower (for naturals) because you’re generally lifting at a lower % of 1 RM.
It's funny you should say that because I had to stop rowing due to repetitive strain on my ankle.
As this is a mice study it’s worth pointing out humans are particularly adapted for endurance exercise compared to other animals. Not gonna pretend to be a HN expert, but it seems relevant when comparing this sort of thing across species.
Simple trick for those outside of academia. Google the impact factor of the journal you are reading. If it's below 5 it's fake. If it's 5 or above, it's also fake.
Luckily, we live in the reality where every human who is interested in how their own body, and not the one of some random mouse, deals with blood sugar, can order a relatively inexpensive (for the benefits it provides) device — a continuous glucose monitor — and gather all the data they need to see what helps controlling the sugar level, and what does not. Using a CGM was a truly life changing experience for me, and I recommend trying it for everyone interested.
I’ve tried CGMs multiple times and didn’t have any life changing experiences.
I did have a couple low and high readings, but even with a food log and going back to re-eat the exact same meal I got completely different results.
I think the exercise induced changes that help regulate blood sugar aren’t going to show up on the time scale of ordering a couple CGMs. It has to be a sustained lifestyle choice.
Took me about half a year to drop my baseline levels, so, of course, not instant and not within "a couple" CGMs, but "a couple" was enough for me to understand the trends.
Which CGM did you get? Don't they require a prescription?
No prescription is required, but as the other comments say, you’re unlikely to learn anything significant.
Blood sugar in non-diabetics is boring, rarely moving in any significant way.
One impact could be dispelling misconceptions if you have them. Another could be discovering pre-diabetes.
I used Libre 3; you can get different ones without a prescription online. You can easily get a prescription (in the US) if you get diagnosed with Type 2 based on your A1C numbers, but ordering a CGM online without any prescription is not a problem at all. Wearing it for 2-4 weeks is usually enough to learn a lot about your relationship with sugar.
I used Stelo from Dexcom with my Oura Ring, no prescription. I didn't really learn much, other than occasionally realizing I was cranky because of low blood sugar.
Or just, you know, lift weights and run.
have you tried grape soda?