Exercise is Good, Actually — LessWrong

by Gordon Seidoh Worley

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Yesterday I wrote about how dressing nice is a good idea . This post is written similarly, but the topic is exercise. This is again somewhat casual writing that’s in the spirit of what I wish someone had told me when I was 15 .

I was carrying around a story in my head like this one:

I care about doing important intellectual and professional work that depends on my mind.

Physical exercise doesn’t much impact my ability to do that type of work.

Additionally, only muscle-heads go to the gym all the time. Regular people just get enough exercise from living their lives.

And besides, smart people in movies are usually weak anyway. Their power comes from being smart, not strong.

I’m smarter than average, so why do I need to be strong?

Conclusion: I don’t need to work out or go to the gym or even care about physical fitness.

I think a lot of this story can be traced back to how characters in stories work. They’re created like D&D characters: they get a certain number of points and the author distributes those points around to different attributes. Some characters have more points than others to work with, but at the end of the day you have to make tradeoffs. Want to be really smart? Gonna have to take that out of something else. What to be really, really, really smart? You’re going to have to have to put basically all of your points into intelligence and give up everything else.

Authors do this because it helps make characters more relatable. When someone is too good at too many things the story gets boring because they don’t face any real challenges, and we might even envy and hate a character that’s too capable because they make us feel inadequate. But this isn’t how real people work. In fact, positive traits tend to correlate in people. Yes, you find some jocks with tiny brains, politicians with terrible looks, and geniuses with major health problems, but most positive traits correlate in real humans so that it’s not unreasonable for someone to be strong, smart, and good looking.

Dismissing the need for exercise is a kind of coping mechanism for not being above average in physical ability. This is certainly how I coped. I have asthma. My peak flow is like 30% below normal (this means I can exchange less air with each breath). Even with significant training I can’t do things lots of people do, like go jogging or ride a bike and hold a conversation; instead, I’m breathing heavily after 30 seconds. My best performance at physical activities, even after significant training, is just up to the level of what the average fit person can do with zero conditioning. So to protect my self-esteem it was important to think that exercise was for dumb people who weren’t smart enough to do smart things like me.

But this is just nonsense. I actually like doing things with my body. I like hiking and kayaking and mountain climbing and dancing. I’m just not very good at them, even with significant work (e.g. I’ve never managed to send a bouldering problem past V3 despite climbing 1-3 times a week for 7 years and getting training). That doesn’t mean I can’t still enjoy them. I just have limits to how much I can achieve.

Knowing those limits, it’s okay to accept the conventional wisdom that exercise is good. We live in our bodies. Even if you mostly care about your mind, your mind lives in your brain, and your brain lives in your body, so you do well to take care of your body to take care of your brain to take care of your mind. Exercise also helps you build general physical capacity, and as you get older you will lose physical capacity due to aging, so building up more now means it will take you longer to reach a state of disability. So even if you don’t care about being strong or physically fit, greater physical ability allows you to maintain quality of life longer.

It’s also not so bad to go to the gym. You can listen to audio books or podcasts while you work out. And some forms of exercise are actively fun! Once you stop worrying about not being the strongest or fastest and just accept what you’re capable of, you can work within the frame to enjoy physical movement as best you can.