Hey guys. I read the article, and these are my thoughts.
I was very happy that I didn’t get defensive about it. I’ve been reading about BBM and BBM adjacent stuff to be open to new studies and sources of information. Even though I’ve got a bias towards strength stuff, the evidence suggests that we should also be doing walking/running/rowing etc. for pretty significant chunks of time. So rather than think about this as strength versus aerobics, I was thinking in terms of "Why not both?
I think there are health benefits to lifting weights, but I wouldn’t expect them to show up in the blood markers they were looking for independent of aerobic fitness. Being strong and self-efficacious is great in everyday life. Running and moving are also very important, that’s part of why we do them, and I’d expect running/aerobics to have a bigger effect on those metabolic blood markers than strength/anaerobics.
Diet. People who really run, I’m just guessing, also are likely to be really health conscious. They’re going to be eating tofu, salad, fish. That’s a confounding factor when looking at metabolic blood markers. People who are strong, sometimes they eat sheet cakes, plenty of red meat, stuff that might not be bad in of itself, but in quantities and for the purposes that people who lift eat them, could not be great metabolically.
This confirms a study I remember hearing about a while back that said that 150 minutes of moderate cardio per week helps you live longer, but that regular strength training doesn’t. I think it also said that overweight people who regularly do cardio live longer than people with a healthy weight who don’t regularly do cardio.
Studies have also shown a direct correlation between both grip strength and lean muscle mass with longevity. I think the main thing is to do what the Docs suggest: have a good balance of all types of training. Do steady state, intervals, and resistance training.
A lot of times articles oversimplify because they only look at one angle based on the bias of the author.
I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that people who run have better diets. Anecdotally, I know a lot of people that do endurance sports. 90% of them are addicted to sugar. Bad diet is an epidemic in every community.
absolutely nothing… that is if you don’t have an unhealthy thought process with it and can take it or leave it. The only problem I see mainly is when it affects people’s mindset… for instance when people feel guilty for eating sugar, or when they eat it, it’s not controlled and soon they have inhaled four bags of candy, 3 chocolate bars, 1/2 a gallon of ice cream and three quarters of a cake meant for 16 people in one setting or when used to medicate feelings… I think the goal for sugar is really to have it as a treat and once in a while instead of an uncontrolled situation that many people struggle with, really that is the biggest issue with sugar. (Ok so this is just my opinion)
To tag in on the sugar conversation, a good way to think about it also is that sugar is basically just “empty” carbs. So the micronutrient value is basically non-existant. If you are eating massive amounts of sweets there is probably a higher liklihood that, one, you are eating a caloric surplus (and probably overweight/obese) as satiety from most sweets (especially sugar sweetend beverages which are the number one source of sugar in Americans diets) is very poor compared to more “whole food” sources of carbs, and secondly you are more likely to be nutrient deficient in some way or eating too little of other macros such as protein and could end up with sarcopenic obesity (all the bad parts of both sarcopenia and obesity combined!). But assuming you are eating a reasonable diet added sugars really aren’t a problem and the current guidelines reccomend less than ~10% of daily calories from added sugars due to the crowding out affect they can have.
Regarding the study, If you look at their unadjusted tables i just don’t see this study really adding up to much outside of being yet again more evidence to show the handful of people who could be characterized as “strength is my only metric of health” that they are wrong. Once many of the body composition metrics were accounted for, there was a diminishing of effect size. I think the biggest take-away is something we kinda already know. People who run alot are not fat and volume of training is the most relevant (due to scaling) metric for health outcomes in regards to both aerobic and anerobic exercise (considering there is a decent cardio portion involved in high intensity higher volume lifting). Anectdotally, after cutting about 10lbs, moving to a gym with a higher ambient temperature, and doing a bunch of higher RPE higher volume training in Powerbuilding 1, my aerobic system is better despite very little “aerobic” training. I suspect if I was overweight and never did anything more than triples with 10min rest periods that my aerobic system would be much worse than it is currently and that direct aerobic training would be more relevant. There is also interpersonal variation where some people may not get a great training response and require more dedicated cardio training. We should probably all do some dedicated cardio, I’m just too lazy/hate it and think I can get away without directly training it if i am doing a bunch of heavy 6-12 rep compound movements three times a week.