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Wellness Wednesday for November 2, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Has anyone here actually experienced the alleged improvement in mood after exercise? How long did it take you?

Cause I'm going to the gym again (nothing serious; half an hour of cardio a day) for a couple of weeks and I'm wondering if this is a false bag of goods or if there's some threshold.

nothing serious; half an hour of cardio a day

Stop doing this shit and start lifting.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss cardio (and I say that as a gym-bro who much prefers lifting).

Lifting is fundamentally about vanity, whereas cardio has objective benefits for wellbeing (better mood, better sleep, improved cognitive function). I wish I had the willpower to do more cardio.

whereas cardio has objective benefits for wellbeing (better mood, better sleep, improved cognitive function).

Lifting has these objective benefits as well and some more.

The ideal fitness regime imo should include both lifting and cardio. Purely from a maximizing wellbeing perspective, nothing else.

I wouldn't say it's true that 'lifting has the benefits as well'. Sure, you can make your resistance workout intense enough that you get indirect cardio, and therefore get (a very small amount of) the benefits of cardio. But if you're wanting to maximise growth, then a slower workout with longer rest periods is much better.

Optimising each workout for it's goal (bigger muscles or taxing the cardiovascular system) is better than doing a faster resistance session which is worse for both goals.

(better mood, better sleep, improved cognitive function).

I am specifically talking about these 3. Of which there is research to support all 3. https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9h2jbi/you_should_probably_lift_weights/

Anecdotally, I have been lifting for almost a decade and personally experienced all 3 of these to a level I am confident is not placebo.