I posted a similar question in GQ a while ago (I think it was one of my very first posts to the SDMB in fact) and got a lot of replies saying that it is uncomfortalbe because/if you are unhealthy.
At the time I didn’t reply at all in that thread. I only posted the OP. Well I disagree with what those people said, because I used to be quite healthy/physically fit. I played footy (soccer) regularly and I had a semi regular ride of my mountain bike along a quite demanding route (involving lots of hills) Yet I still found excercise to be a negative sensation. I hated it - it was the afterfeeling that caused me to do it (getting to the top of the biggest hill and being satisfied/impressed/relieved, and the prospect of freewheeling it almost all the way back home) And it was the sheer enjoyment of playing footy that caused me to virtually ignore the physical uncomfortability of charging down the attacker and taking the ball off him.
So the data I was using was excercise when fit, which contradicted what the replies in the original post said.
I have posted it again in IMHO because It is probably more of an matter of opinion than a one-answer GQ.
I want people’s opinions about the sensation of excercise - people who don’t find it uncomfortable, people who do, but have a conscious coping mechanism, people with input of any kind about cardiovascular (and to a lesser extent anaerobic) excercise…
Well, I’m not in any way an expert, but here’s what I remember from high school biology:
When our muscles work, one of the byproducts is lactic acid. This builds up in the muscles, and is carried away in the blood stream. When you work hard, lactic acid builds up quicker than the blood can carry it away. So, you’ve got an acid building up in your muscles that causes pain.
Also, IIRC, “building” muscle involves actually tearing it in small bits, which might also cause pain.
As for the pleasure bit, it releases endorphins or some such. For people who enjoy the feeling, I’d imagine that the pleasure from endorphins outweighs the pain from the other outcomes of exercise.
The lactic acid explanation sounds about right. So, I phrased my OP a bit badly -
How did we evolve to a state where physical hard work is uncomfortable, when surely it should be comfortable in order to encourage us to do it (like sex is nice, so we are encouraged to do that)
From an evolutionary standpoint, hen you exercise, you’re burning energy. Burning energy means you have to go get more food. Getting more food means that there will be less food later. Furthermore, you might get eaten yourself. So conserving energy is good. So feeling bad during exercise is your body’s way of discouraging you from wasting energy.
This, at least, is what I tell myself while sitting on the couch with that pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
Evolutionarily speaking, humans did NOT have to be encouraged to excercise. We had no choice. If we wanted food, and wanted to evade predators, we had to move. There was no need to make it pleasurable, like sex. If we didn’t exert ourselves, we would die (and therefore not pass our genes onto our descendants). It is only recently that most people even had a choice about excercising or not.
It is sort of like saying “Why are foods that taste really good, like ice cream and french fries, so bad for us? If they are bad for us shouldn’t they taste bad?” Well, no. Most of human existence has been a desperate quest for enough calories to keep from starving to death. We are therefore hard-wired to love foods high in fat and calories. It is only in very recent human history that civilization has advanced to the point that EXCESS calories are a problem.
Sadly, of course, most people alive today still don’t get enough to eat.
I find that light excercise is quite pleasant. Hard exercise, like roller hockey, is enjoyable for what it accomplishes, but not physically pleasant. And whenever I’m riding a century (100-mile bike ride) while I’m doing it I think “This sucks. This is awful. I’m not enjoying this” but afterwards I’m happy I did it.
That’s the data. For the theory of why is is that way, I pretty much agree with Laughing Lagomorph.
Of course, there are animals specialized to be sedentary. Cocodiles, they don’t move much at all, which means they can go months and months without eating. Humans are tachymetabolic, so we burn calories all the time, so we have to eat frequently, which means getting off our butts and foraging for food. At least it used to.
It’s interesting that the end result (rock hard abs and a healthy heart) is considered to be a positive but the process is unpleasant. But people do plenty of things for the result alone, even if the process isn’t their cup of tea.
There are forms of exercise that I very much enjoy, but they mostly involve being distracted from the actual physical effort by a game of some sort. I hardly relish the burn in my lungs after I’ve jogged an embarrassingly short distance. But it does feel good when it’s done.
The best part to me is the feeling of having outsmarted myeslf. “See, me, I knew this was good for me, and I didn’t want to do it, but I was able to talk me into doing it anyway and now I’m happy”.
yeah, more often than not, it’s the end result that is rewarding.
Although there are times that the exercise itself is the reward. Usually this is during the course of a game of some sort.
I can enjoy running if I’m working toward some goal, or feel like I’m making good time. There are times when I feel like I need to exercise, it hurts while I do it, but feels good afterword.
There has to be some sense of accomplishment, or reward other than the physical sensation of exercising.
Like killing a deer.
Emerging victorious from battle.
Delivering a message in Marathon.
Kind of a muliti-faceted thing, there’s the positive reinforcement attained by the feeling after the workout, theres secondary reinforcement attained through the game, and theres negative reinforcement with the alleviation of the feelings of sloth.
I like the sensation of exercise. I’ve come to enjoy yoga a lot. It makes you use all of your strength and stamina and balance and flexibility, and at the same time focusing your mind on the exertion rather than trying to distract yourself from it. It’s exhausting in ways that sports I’ve done in the past aren’t, and I’ve found few things in life more satisfying than holding a really difficult pose until your muscles are trembling, and you’re dripping sweat, and it takes all your will power not to give up and come out of the pose, but you don’t.
I don’t find the physical exertion part of exercise enjoyable. I may like the activity or the end result, but I would be happyt if I could get the same result without the exertion.
I’ve often wondered what would happen if there was a 100% safe pill you could take that would give you the results you wanted, how many people would still exercise? I don’t think I would ever go jogging again. I’d still play soccer though since I find the game enjoyable.
But to me, it does seem advantageous to like exertion from an evolutionary perspective. So someone who enjoys to be moving around would seem to be more successful at foraging and hunting than someone who preferred to sit around camp. So while it does take energy to move around more, it seems that you’d be more successful at food gathering and be more likely to pass on your genes. One possibility is that there has never been someone who had the genes which liked exercise so they never got passed on.
Maybe this is a related question, but why do kids seem to like exertion so much? From the minute they get up they’re running all over the place. It seems their preference is to run from place to place. This seems to be bad from an evolutionary standpoint since they are using so many more calories and would need to eat so much more. But kids do seem to like exertion.
Filmore, if occurs to me that if you did have some subset of prehistoric guys who really, really liked to be out hunting and roaming and exerting themselves all the time, you also had the rest of the guys who preferred to hang around the campfire and tell tales about the ones that got away whenever they could get away with not scrounging.
Guess which ones were most likely to be on hand to dally with the females most often?
As for kids – it is absolutely vital for children to learn about their world, how it works, how it’s put together, what it offers, and so forth, since humans can’t rely on a whole lot of hard-wired in instinctive behavior. Children who run rather than amble get further and learn more, at least before ‘learning’ became a matter of planting your rump in a chair in a classroom.
