I think the Olympics is just generally physically bad for the athletes. Runners, weightlifters, wrestlers, boxers, rowers, etc all these folks end up working so close o the edge of sustainable human tolerance and capacity that’s it’s unlikely they are not constantly going over it.
I find it extremely weird when people complain that athletes should stop their sport because "it's bad for them". So is office work. 8 hours of sitting, back pain and the repetitive stress on hands causing arthritis issues isn't that much better. I'd say it's just as physically bad for people, except office work is a life unfulfilled and boring. Office work isn't exactly something you can brag about. I'd rather have bad knees being a competitive runner than having bad knees because I sit too much.
There's inherent risk in simply living. If people want to have fulfilled lives by pushing their body's to the limit, that's their choice and to be honest, a choice we should all be encouraged to try in our lives to some capacity. Also, to pretend they're unaware of the risk is ridiculous. It's not like the Olympics is the only competitive arena for these disciplines.
Pointing out how it damages body should be as acceptable as pointing out too much sugar is bad for you. There is absolutely nothing weird about saying so. And also, office work is less damaging to body then top sport.
Second, general public knowing that top sport damages body influences parents, teachers and coaches decisions. When we make that topic taboo, people are more likely to push kids toward maximum performance in sport. To teach them set of values that pushes it.
When we know serious clubs can damage them, we are more likely to pick less serious clubs (which prevents future top engagement).
> [office chair back pain, finger injuries] isn't that much better
But this generally doesn't case suicide
And can be treated, by going to the gym. (I had back, knee, elbow pain myself, from office work — and the gym, made it disappear. In my particular case)
> bad knees
Agreed, I'd be ok with bad knees.
But when it's the brain, it's ... to some extent, the end.
That's true, but I don't think GP was referring to those special cases where the risk is to the brain, even though those are the what the linked article of course discusses.
As their parent comment said, any sport that compels you to reach for the extremes of physical human performance carries a risk of injury and wear that's obviously greater than just exercising for health and casual fitness. In most cases that's to something else in your body than your brain.
But that reaching for the limits is also what makes those sports enjoyable to some people, and nothing else might quite equal the experience.
Agreed, we should not sympathize on behalf of them where they're free to choose to do something else if they wanted. This is a concious choice and it is in the same vein as people would support legalization of recreational drugs - let people make their own decisions.
Wanna rock climb and take the risk? We should allow it just like we allow sky diving, climbing the Everest and sailing.
This kind of thinking leads to degradation of the society where no one will be allowed to take risks.
So, ban all competitions in general? That sounds like a fantastic idea... gonna solve lots of problems with that one.
Football, both kinds, have lots of permanent injuries throughout the body and brain. If you want to talk about rewarding people for pushing themselves to the extreme, those are far better examples than free soloing.
It's interesting when people are fine with stopping passion sports like climbing, skateboarding and now sledding, but they're too scared to say the same about the 800-pound guerrilla, money making machine sports with a lot more TBIs and deaths. Especially since a lot of people go for football more for the reward than for the actual passion.
Again, it's not like anyone participating in any of these sports are unaware of the risk. An argument might exist for 20-30 years ago. But not today. That takes flat-earther mental gymnastics to think they aren't putting themselves at risk. But at the end, if you're complaining that, "These people push their body's too far", that's not you caring about their well being. That's you seeing your own weakness, laziness and cowardliness to attempt the same feat. These folks are going to push themselves some way, some how, because they want to not die wondering "what if". No one is ever safe from "mental demons" and it's terrible when someone takes their own life, no matter what the category root cause was. But I know very well that choosing to achieve nothing due to fear is a bigger open door for those issues.
I wrote "not encouraging", that's different from "ban all". Why did you reply to "ban all" instead?
I like MMA and UFC, however, the fighters get brain scanned to find out about underlying problems, and if you get knocked out, you cannot compete again for a long while (because of TBI risk).
Whilst the sledding sports seem to ignore brain injuries.
Fair enough, that's an important distinction and I concede. I think it makes sense to prevent glorifying deadly sports and still allow them to be conducted.
With things like running, rowing, and weightlifting you aren't at a significant risk of brain injury though. I would much rather have damaged joints than a damaged brain. And for these sledding athletes, it sounds like this damage is constant and inevitable even if you do everything perfectly, rather than a result of accidents like with sports like snowboarding and skiing.
Weight cutting is pretty bad for your body, and they take it to extreme levels of drying out their bodies too, so any of these sports which have weight classes (all the weight lifting, wrestling) are pretty damaging to all organs in the body and have caused death before. Not advocating to stop these in Olympics, pointing out there's non-obvious risks athletes take beside head trauma.
I don't understand this comment; what is physically bad about running? I'll accept that you may have a higher rate of injuries but surely we can agree that pulling a muscle and giving yourself Parkinson's are not remotely in the same ballpark of injuries.
Knee implants, significant negative hormonal changes for men over 50 miles/wk. Repetitive stress injuries are no joke.
OP is probably not aware that the Olympics does not have ultra-marathon type events which are generally very unhealthy for participants, only a 10K and a marathon (and shorter sprints of course)
WRT knee damage, I found a Harvard report saying that running helps protect your knees against arthritis [0]. You'll have to source your own hormonal claim because it was too vague for me to find much, but what I did find did not seem negative [1][2].
That first link is just a Q/A. There is no study or report linked.
Almost all studies use untrained vs trained athletes. They rarely qualified what "trained" means and could be anything from a lifetime athlete to someone who self-reported following a 6 week plan prior to the study and now we consider this person "trained". Most athletic studies are used to compare a sedentary person to someone who workouts casually (less than about 10 hours per week). Once you pass this point, you're in diminishing returns territory and you've got to actively sacrifice some parts of your overall health to make gains in a single activity (sprinting, jumping, etc.).
So will running a few times a week help fight mild arthritis? Probably. Will training like an Olympic athlete? No. Same thing applies to the OP article. Will sledding down a hill give you brain damage? No. Will constantly sledding at Olympic athlete speeds and g-forces? Seems like it.
Yeah, you definitely have to sacrifice parts of your overall health if you want to exercise more than 90 minutes per day.
/s
Diminishing returns doesn't mean that you have to sacrifice anything (besides some idealized notion of efficiency). The hurt-your-overall-health point is somewhere much closer to Olympic athlete than it is to 10hrs/week. If you just vary the activities a little, you will have no trouble with spending a lot more time on exercise. People who literally do only the one physical activity they compete in are straw men.
PS: The number of people completely clueless about fitness on HN would be hilarious if it weren't so sad.
Working out (not including warmup/cooldown) for 90 min, 7 days per week is insane and you will be less healthy. No rest day means you'll be over trained in less than two weeks, and your workouts will get worse over time. Not only that you'll probably get injured within a month.
Let's say you create a sane schedule of 3 days on, 1 day off (or similar) and you workout 2 hours per day (20 hours in 2 weeks) and let's assume you're sleeping the necessary 10 hours per day for this training schedule. And we'll make the very generous assumption you manage to not get injured for an extended period of time. You're still at higher risk of infections due to suppressed immune system[1] and also at a certain FFMI, your cardiovascular health actually starts to decrease[2]. Plus the chances that your nutrition, mobility, sleep schedule, and training plan are all good enough to not get you injured or sick during training, are astronomically low.
I only workout 60-75 minutes 5 days/week and I'm already at or above the FFMI level where my heart health is worse than if I just stuck to moderate intensity exercise for less time.
Huh, seems I read "workout" as "generic exercise" in your previous post, but I guess you meant high intensity stuff exclusively. I'm pretty sure most athletes have stuff to do that doesn't really have this sort of limit -- like cardio or technical work.
The thinking behind my post was that if you add up training (for the activity they compete in) and all the other physical activities people do, the differences in training volume will be dominated by the other differences -- consider people with jobs that involve manual labor, or, to a lesser extent, bike commuters. Perhaps this was controlled for in the studies?
The other thing I had in mind was people whose sports involve lots of different movements one can practice -- say, ice hockey. I have no idea whether ice hockey shooting practice counts as high intensity... but it's not nothing, and doesn't seem much like ultra running either.
Source? I would expect these are much more common in obese people than in habitual runners. My understanding is that runners have been found to have healthy knees, e.g. with a bit of googling I find [1][2] (but haven't read them).
> significant negative hormonal changes for men over 50 miles/wk
They have found somewhat lower testosterone levels, but I don't know of any study finding negative health impacts. Do you have a source for "significant negative"?
Not to the degree that there is a pattern of them committing suicide before 50. This sport seems particularly pernicious because it's a slow accumulated brain injury and because the sport normalises concussion which is taken very seriously in other sports.
