An exercise:

Name something that you do not do but should/wish you did/are told you ought, or that you do less than is normally recommended.  (For instance, "exercise" or "eat vegetables".)

Make an exhaustive list of your sufficient conditions for avoiding this thing.  (If you suspect that your list may be non-exhaustive, mention that in your comment.)

Precommit that: If someone comes up with a way to do the thing which doesn't have any of your listed problems, you will at least try it.  It counts if you come up with this response yourself upon making your list.

(Based on: Is That Your True Rejection?)

Edit to add: Kindly stick to the spirit of the exercise; if you have no advice in line with the exercise, this is not the place to offer it.  Do not drift into confrontational or abusive demands that people adjust their restrictions to suit your cached suggestion, and do not offer unsolicited other-optimizing.

To alleviate crowding, Armok_GoB has created a second thread for this challenge.

The True Rejection Challenge
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I have two reasons not to use your system:

One: If you're committed to doing the action if you yourself can find a way to avoid the problems, then as you come to such solutions your instinct to flinch away will declare the list 'not done yet' and add more problems, and perhaps problems more unsolvable in style, until the list is an adequate defense against doing the thing.

One way to possibly mitigate this is to try not to think of any solutions until the list is done, and perhaps some scope restrictions on the allowable conditions. Despite this, there is another problem:

Two: The sun is too big.

5handoflixue
This is my new favourite objection :)
2pwno
It's a good exercise in finding your true objections.
2Normal_Anomaly
I'm afraid I don't get your joke. Does this have anything to do with the system itself, or is it just an example of an insurmountable obstacle?
2jhuffman
It seems like both to me. The system is vulnerable to arbitrary problems that meet only a personal standard; the problems themselves are not subject to scrutiny.
2Alicorn
How big is too big?
3CuSithBell
They say not to eat anything bigger than your head.

Well, they're missing out on some swell watermelons, then.

I do not exercise.

(Caveat: I will refrain from taking any advice that would lead to me starting to significantly exercise until I have a diagnosis and a treatment plan of my apparent heart condition, which doesn't indicate it would be unsafe or otherwise a medically bad idea. I'd be really surprised if my doctor told me not to exercise, but in case she does I want to wait and make sure that my body is really lying to me when it says "don't do that, bad things will happen".)

Reasons (and existing known routes around each):

  • Sweat is horrible, and I overheat too easily. (Swimming gets around these; outdoor exercise in cold weather, interestingly, does not.)

  • Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues). (Anything indoors or at night gets around the sunshine thing. Other environmental issues are mostly limited to smelly gyms and excessively humid indoor pool facilities. Anything outdoors and at night and in nice weather gets around this.)

  • Many forms of it are financially costly (equipment, facility use). (Going for walks does not have this problem.)

  • It is boring. (When I tried jujitsu, it did not have this particular problem. Merely being able to listen to

... (read more)
[-]Benquo130

It seems to me as if some bodyweight strength training exercises might not trigger any of these problems. I would suggest very small sets of comparatively high-load exercises, e.g. work your way up to one-legged squats, one-armed pushups, and chinups if you have a suitable thing to hang from or are willing to get a chinup bar (I sometimes do chinups on the metro). If you are interested I can give you some details on how to work your way up to these exercises, since many people are not initially strong enough to do them (I sure wasn't!).

Sweat: Short sets don't give you much of an opportunity to overheat or sweat. Also, with bodyweight exercises, you can do them at home and take a cool shower/bath immediately afterwards. (By the way, do you hate sweating, or do you hate being sweaty? I am assuming the latter for now.) You could even do the pushups in a cool bath to get some of the advantages of swimming.

Environmental Issues: You can do this at home and indoors.

Cost: Only the time investment, plus (optionally) the cost of a chinup bar.

Boring: This type of exercise does not take very long, so you won't have much time to be bored. Not very long means 5-10 minutes total, a few times a week. You don't even have to do it all in one session, you can take a minute at a time through the day.

As a bonus, strength training can make other sorts of physical activity less unpleasant, since you will be operating at much less than capacity.

2MBlume
I would also be interested in learning to work up to effective bodyweight exercises.
0Alicorn
I am near-certain I do not currently have the strength necessary to do anything you have listed. The working up to it must also meet the criteria, but do tell. Both. If the sets are as short as you describe and can be broken up into arbitrarily small pieces, I would expect to be able to work around this, though.
[-]Benquo170

I have tried to be reasonably concise here so as not to drown you in intimidating details and caveats, please let me know if anything is unclear and I can expand on it or try to say it another way. I included common names for some of the more unusual exercises, to aid you in Googling, but am happy to try to explain anything that is not obvious to you.

I hope this helps, but please let me know either way, as it will help me give better and more relevant advice in the future. Especially anything that doesn't work for you.

I am near-certain I do not currently have the strength necessary to do anything you have listed. The working up to it must also meet the criteria, but do tell.

Basically the idea is to do exercises that are less intense versions, and to do negative reps. Try doing the hardest exercise you can do. If at some point in the day you can't do it anymore then move one notch down. Once you can do 5 sets of 5 repetitions each in a day, try the next level up (no reason you shouldn't be ambitious and try it earlier if you feel like it).

Less intense versions of the 1-armed pushups

  • Regular pushups

  • Regular pushups with 1 leg off the ground

  • Ab pushups, sometimes called Superma

... (read more)
3Alicorn
I wasn't aware there were so many difficulty-altering parameters to mess with. That alone might stave off boredom for a few sets. Thanks!
2Benquo
I was worried that adding that much detail would be intimidating or confusing; I'm glad it was encouraging instead.
2[anonymous]
You recommend doing multiple sets per exercise on multiple days a week. This seems to contradict what Tim Ferriss and others have said, but maybe that doesn't transfer to bodyweight exercises. Right now, I've been doing exercise similar to what you describe (following Convict Conditioning), but only about 3 sets per exercise per week (as the book recommends for beginners). I feel I stagnated somewhat and don't really transition to full push-up and pull-ups (legs and abs are doing fine). Do you think it would be beneficial to move to, say 3-5 sets on 3 days a week for those exercises? Or do I just have to wait it out, given that I'm fairly skinny and never had any serious strength? I'm also trying to be more consistent about my protein intake. Constantly forget to eat enough. I aim at ~150g at 85kg/185cm, but often just get 50-100 because I accidentally skip meals.
2Benquo
The linked Tim Ferriss article mentions one-set-to-failure, and if you're really truly maxing out you probably only need to do it a few times a week. But it's harder to max out with bodyweight than with weights. I was also trying to suggest sets that would accommodate Alicorn's desire not to sweat, which requirement would likely be violated by a true high intensity workout. For workouts that don't leave you feeling totally spent, which is generally the case with bodyweight exercises, you should take into account the total load in a day as well, and the brain-training effect of greasing the groove, for which there is substantial anecdotal evidence. It's a non-trivial skill to be able to be able to use your true maximum strength, we're designed to hold back in normal situations. There is also a difference between training for muscle volume and training for strength. Obviously the two are strongly correlated, but they are not entirely the same thing. My understanding is that you want fewer, more intense reps at a time if you're training for strength. EDIT: Though to be honest, I only do 1-2 sets of high intensity kettlebells and 1 set of the 1-arm pushups in a week. But I've decided that it's worth my time to maintain, but not to materially improve, my level of fitness at this point.
2a363
I also sweat a lot and the best way I've found of dealing with the discomfort is a merino wool baselayer. And not just for sports: I will probably never buy another pair of cotton boxers or socks. Cotton gets wet, then cold and clingy, which can exacerbate blisters (socks). All sorts of high-tech synthetics start to stink real fast (I don't have much experience with silver-treated fabrics though). Wool wicks very well, will not stink even after a week of wear, it retains 50% heat insulation and does not cling against the body even if it is saturated with sweat + merino wool is too fine to be itchy and it stretches back for longer than most fabrics so cuffs etc can stay tight for years. They used to have wool jerseys at the Tour de France up to the 1980's since it beat synthetics for cooling up to that point. Couple of downsides though: merino wool (Ibex, Icebreaker etc) is expensive (but hard wearing), needs delicate detergents and does not like aggressive machine drying. Bottom line: hundreds of millions of years of evolution for keeping warm-blooded animals performing from desert to arctic conditions has not been wasted.
0Alicorn
Wool is itchy. And my dislike of sweat has little if anything to do with what I'm wearing when it happens.
5Alexei
I play DDR at home (all you need is a DDR pad and a computer). It solves all the problems except the sweat. But since it's at home, I would think you wouldn't mind that as much (plus you can have a towel nearby). I find this the most convenient exercise ever, since I can do it at home, any time, and for free.
0Alicorn
I once owned a DDR pad, but either it or the adapter I used to hook it up to my computer had a delay that made it unplayable. So I don't have one anymore, and this therefore fails the expense criterion. You presume incorrectly.
4Alexei
Unless you are playing on high difficulty, you can comfortably play on a cheap pad ($16 + $4 adapter). As for sweat, it seems like there might be two things going on there. One is you overheat, which you can control with a fan or something. Two is the actual sweat, which is annoying, but by no means bad in of itself. If you sincerely dislike it, you can self-modify to find it acceptable (might be worth doing anyway). There are plenty of resource on LW for how to do that.
0Alicorn
Nope. (I overheat strangely. It's like my interior and my surface area aren't connected. Aiming a strong fan at me will prevent exterior but not interior overheating. If I just stay under the fan after I stop exercising, I will get too cold on the outside while still being too hot on the inside.) Not helpful. I may look into the inexpensive pad and adapter, though.
5dspeyer
I can't be sure, but drinking cold water throughout might help.
2Alicorn
You know, it might. I don't like water but that's not among my listed problems, so if I come up with a solution for which overheating (as opposed to sweating, which this wouldn't affect) is the only problem, I will attempt this patch. Thanks!
1pthalo
If you don't like water, but like lemonade (or some other drink that can be served chilled and isn't too expensive), filling a water bottle with it can be nice. If it's too sweet, it'll make you thirsty, but watering it down fixes that. I tend to add just enough syrup/juice/whatever to water to make water palatable. (i dont like water either). i know a person who has a medical condition that gets worse with exercise. they have to avoid it as much as possible because they can feel poorly for weeks afterwards (even moderate amounts of exercise, like walking too much). The condition in question is not a heart condition, but it is possible that there are other conditions that react poorly to exercise for different reasons than the one my friend has. So you should definitely consult with your doctor AND listen to your body. If you feel really crummy after exercise, you should be doing smaller amounts of exercise to build up your strength. If you feel really crummy after a tiny amount of exercise, you probably shouldn't be exercising. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. solution to sweat: deodorant solution to sunshine: a wide brimmed hat and sunscreen, if the problem is sunburn, or a sensitivity to light, or heat. other solutions to sunshine, if you are a night owl: rollerblading at night -- is safer than walking since you can zip by other people. is also less hot and sweaty. bicycling at night. these sorts of things are best done in well lit areas another solution to sunshine: if you are in a building with an elevator, take the stairs at least part way up. if you have a washing machine, hang your clothes up on a clothesline to dry (i have a clothesliine over my bathtub. they're easy to make. i don't have a dryer, and hanging up heavy, wet clothes can be tiring, especially lifting them up over your head. you can also flush toilets with a heavy bucket of water (you dont have to empty the entire bucket, just a little bit will do. this saves quite a bit on the water bill as
3Alicorn
I do like lemonade, but I can only water it down a little before it starts tasting like water. Deodorant does not work well enough and is not properly applied to all relevant locations. I have textural issues with sunscreen, and don't like the directed warmth and brightness of the sun even through it. (I walk outside on a sunny day and it's like I can feel myself crisping up. Or steaming if it's humid.) Hats worsen the sweat problem on the scalp. Skating is unkind to my ankles; skates cost money. Bikes cost money and I don't trust myself to bike safely in traffic. Helmets worsen the sweat problem on the scalp. I take stairs when they're handy most of the time. I don't like the texture my clothes have when they are hung dry. (I know this because sometimes I get a broken dryer and then strew my clothes around my room to dry rather than spending more quarters.) I do mean to learn to bake bread, but can't regularly count on being able to knead it; I routinely have small wounds on my fingers. (Don't say gloves. No form of glove I am aware of both lacks texture issues for me and would be okay to knead bread with.) Audio books have been mentioned. Cans of beans: interesting. May try that and see if it generates noticeable amounts of sweat. Yoga is physically painful to me in ways I am fairly sure are not supposed to happen.
2taryneast
Me too... and I'm Australian (where sunscreen is a necessity). I'm currently loving being in the UK and not needing it. I also don't wear makeup or use moisturiser for much the same reason (and suffer the social penalty for doing so in a business setting). I did eventually find one sunscreen that I could actually use - one put out by the Australian Cancer council (their "everyday sunscreen"). Understandably, however, it's not available anywhere else but Aus... though you might be able to find it (and try it) online if you're not in Aus yourself. It is the only sunscreen in the world (and I've tried very many) that you can't actually feel after you put it on... and I'm the sort of person that can feel the moisturisers that are guaranteed to be unfeelable...
0pthalo
Fair enough. I have textural issues too although mine seem to have different triggers than yours. But it influences what foods I can eat (nothing squidgy, which might be a made up word, but it means mushrooms and anything else that feels like i'm eating a condom), what clothes I can wear (i can only wear nylon tights if i wear thick white socks underneath), even what kind of books I can read (smooth textures are the worst for me, my hands break out in sweat and i get a fight or flight response). i've used cotton gloves before to soak up some of the sweat from my textural problems, but any other type of glove would exacerbate it. i have to be really careful with what kind of socks i buy as well. -- no i'm not suggesting you knead dough in cotton gloves. yeah, i had a feeling the deodorant thing wasn't going to be too helpful -- it's nice for armpits, but you can't slather it on your face or hands or feets or other places. and deodorant does nothing for the heat rash you get under the bra after sweating. it's true, bicycling and rollerblading cost money if you dont already have the equipment (i already have rollerblades, so its cheaper for me to use them than to take a bus -- my rollerblades have saved me a lot more money than their initial cost, but that is only the case if you know you are going to be able to use them for transportation). I think it's probably best to just avoid the sun as much as possible. another thing that is potentially exercise, if you like kids, looking after one for a while. true, you can just stand there and watch, but joining in tends to be a bit of a workout. yoga should not be painful. you may be stretching too far. for example with lotus position (where you twist your legs up like a pretzel), you shouldnt do that until your body is ready to do that. instead, just put your feet together, and try to get the knees as close to the ground as you can without it hurting -- if this means your thighs are at a 45° angle compared to your tors
1Benquo
Seconded. The good kind of stretching is about teaching your muscles to relax (i.e. lengthen) on demand. When you feel pain that means you are putting strain on your connective tissue instead. This can lengthen the tissue over time but that's not good for most people.
4Strange7
Thinking about the overheating... you might try getting some plastic-coated 5-lb hand weights, using them for arm exercises while watching a movie, and storing them in the refridgerator when not in use. Blood vessels are relatively close to the surface in the palms of the hands and soles of the feet, and I remember an experiment in forced thermoregulation which took advantage of that. Of course, it also involved a special suction-glove to increase blood flow, which is probably out of your price range.
0Alicorn
The weights themselves are almost certainly out of my price range. I just don't care enough about getting this done to work around my monetary neuroses. It turned out that my roommate has some 3lb weights (not covered with anything that would respond interestingly to refrigeration) and I was messing with those; my hands were not excessively warm during this process, so cooling something I hold in my hands would be of minimal help.
2Benquo
The thermoregulation experiment suggested that cooling the hands is a relatively efficient way to cool the whole body. I don't think many people feel like their hands get too hot while they exercise, but there are apparently gains in endurance when exercisers keep something cold on their hands. These gains are most likely due to the body taking longer to overheat. You could find out whether this works for you by timing how long something takes to produce noticeable overheating or sweat, then timing the same thing on a later day in very similar conditions, holding ice packs or something like that in your hands. If you don't want to induce extra overheating or sweat for the sake of the experiment, you could try holding something cold while doing something you have to do anyway (e.g. sometimes I have to go outside on a hot day). That way the worst likely outcome is not much worse than before unless you really hate holding cold things.
0Strange7
The weights only need to be made of something with reasonably high thermal mass, and the coating only needs to have thermal conductivity in a range that will allow the transfer of heat from your hands to the weights quickly enough to be useful but not quickly enough to be painful. My theory here is that your core is well-insulated under most of your skin, but that the soles of your feet and palms of your hands are effectively gaps in this insulation. Under this theory, I would not expect your hands to feel hot when you're exercising, since they contain no major heat source and have ready access to a major heat sink (the outside world). Cooling your hands just makes them a better heat sink for the rest of the body, reducing the need to sweat.
0Alicorn
I suppose I'll pop the weights in the fridge and see what happens; couldn't hurt.
-1EvelynM
I also overheat, then get too cold after exercise. For the overheating, I find that if I drink more water, I feel a bit better. I also run cold water over my wrists to cool down quickly after a workout. Cooling down quickly causes me to overshoot, so I need to have a clean, dry shirt to put on, and a sweater or sweatshirt, handy to cope with the chills. I don't like the sweating either, but I try not interpret it in a negative way. "No one cares if look like I'm sweating." "Sweating is a good way of removing toxins in the body. " That sort of thing.
3Richard_Kennaway
I do the Five Tibetans every morning, and they may meet these requirements. * They don't raise a sweat on me, except for the 5th. I can't say whether they will for you. * I do them indoors. * They are free. * They only take 10 minutes -- much less if you're not doing the full 21 reps of each exercise. How long does it take for you to be bored? This isn't the only thing I do for fitness, but it does seem to have a significant effect for me. The other things I do probably don't meet your requirements: using a bicycle for transport whenever practical (sweat and sunshine), running (ditto), taiko drumming (sweat, sweat, and more sweat), lifting weights (my own, bought with money), and taking the stairs, not the lift (sweat?).
4Alicorn
These do not seem to violate any of my listed requirements (possible exception being sweat, but I would have to determine that empirically). So, in accordance with the exercise, I will at least try them once I know what's up with my heart problem. However, I suspect that they will be physically painful (several components of the series look like they will cause or exacerbate the sort of headache I tend to get, and forms of yoga in general that I have tried in the past were distinctly unpleasant).
0NancyLebovitz
Can you go into more detail about what sort of movements are apt to give you headaches?
0Alicorn
I have only an ostensive definition, not an intensional one. The bits that stuck out to me were the spinning (this would worsen an existing headache but probably not cause one), the leg raises (which would not directly cause a headache but would lead to a sort of strain that might), the leaning in the third rite and the head-dangling in the fourth and fifth (it sounds like I'd wind up with my head upside-down or close to it, which could worsen or cause a headache). Sudden sharp head movements (voluntary or otherwise) also do this, and this is one reason, along with worsened kinetosis, that I can no longer ride roller coasters.
0NancyLebovitz
If you're learning the Tibetans, you start with three repetitions of each move, and only add one or two repetitions per week until you're up to 21 reps. If you need to do them slowly, they might require more strength, and that might mean you'd add more repetitions more gradually. I don't know whether your concern with spinning is related to dizziness. If so, I'll note that I've got some evidence that Feldenkrais' theory that dizziness is caused by holding one's breath has something going for it, and the Tibetans are a good way to work on breathing while turning. The fourth involves keeping your head level with the ground. T5T offers leaving your head vertical through the move as an option, or leaving your head and shoulders on the ground. The fifth does involve having your head at about a 45 degree angle facing down, but not dangling. You can do the movements slowly and get the benefits from them.
0Richard_Kennaway
BTW, I'd advise caution with no.2, the straight leg raise, as it demands quite a lot of the abdominals. It can be substantially eased by letting the legs bend at the knees.
0NancyLebovitz
That's interesting. I've never had any problems with #2, and my abdominals aren't in in great shape-- I've never been able to do an unassisted sit-up. Even when I was a kid, I needed to put my feet under something. The fourth Tibetan is the big challenge for me-- my chest and shoulders are very tight, and it took me a while to even realize that was the problem rather than the universe being out to get me. I've managed one rep of #4 that felt right-- like a coherent stretch across the front of my body. One of the good things about T5T was realizing that I didn't have all the possible problems with the Tibetans. Another was one of the warm-ups (hands behind head, circle upper body) which improved my awareness enough that I could realize I was pulling against tightness in #4 rather than just having unspecified difficulty. Some of the material about breathing in that book gave me some sense (no doubt incomplete) of how much I hold my breath. ---------------------------------------- I was going to start the second paragraph with '#4', and that paragraph appeared in large boldface. Markdown, stop helping so much!
1NancyLebovitz
I do the Five Tibetans, too, though not with utter reliability. Notable effects: they get rid of lower back pain for me. They strengthen the muscles around my knees. I believe they're the reason I was able to fall safely when I slipped on some ice the winter before last. (Previously, when I fell on ice, I'd twist something and sprain it.) Normally, I can do at least one of them better than usual. This cheers me up. I'm inclined to think that by doing them slowly and/or doing fewer of them, you could avoid working up a sweat. There's free information about the Tibetans online, but I strongly recommend The 10-Minute Rejuvenation Plan: T5T: The Revolutionary Exercise Program That Restores Your Body and Mind-- it's by a teacher who's taught 700 students, and has a good warm-up set and a lot of advice on modifying the Tibetans if you find them difficult.
2Bagricula
Dance in the shower? Even fairly restrained dancing over an extended period can elevate your heart-rate and trigger many of the benefits of exercise. If you have a shower and live in an area where cold water is provided for free, then there is no cost. Additionally, this should address your sweat issue much like swimming in a pool. It is indoors which eliminates sunlight. Vis-a-vie the boredom constraint. Dancing to music by itself may be a varied enough activity to keep you mentally engaged. If this is insufficient you might consider audiobooks or talk radio. Complications: 1. Safety. If you dance too vigorously then you may slip or injure yourself. You will know better whether this is a very likely issue. If it is, you may be able to mitigate with protective clothing (either purchased such as no slip water-shoes/socks or made from household objects; feasibility depending on your particular budget constraint and safety concerns). 2. You may not have a sufficiently strong set of external speakers to overcome the noise of the shower. If so, you might mitigate by (1) reducing the water flow for your shower, (2) purchasing or building louder speaks (for example, build a cone out of cardboard to amplify and direct the volume.) 3. Just cold water may be too cold for you. To mitigate either (1) add hot water (and possible add cost), (2) exercise outside the shower first to raise your body temperature, (3) acclimate yourself to colder water (this has been done by many people in the past either by necessity or due to a specific purpose such as Channel swimming).
0Alicorn
I doubt I could hear anything with content over the shower itself no matter how good my speakers were, and I have pretty terrible balance in general. (I rarely actually fall, but I have to touch walls a lot to make that not happen.)
1Bagricula
Run the experiment: For entertainment - try different levels of water flow with your existing speaker setup and see if there's any overlap between the range of "audible entertainment" and "acceptable cooling." The experiment is fast and cheap. Edit: You may not be able to find the right level of cooling without first doing some exercise nearby to heat yourself up. For safety - Assuming you've found an optimal level of water flow, try dancing at various levels of intensity with a friend present in the bathroom to catch-you/call-an-ambulance/help in case of severe accident. Not quite as fast as the first experiment, but contingent on it and still free and relatively easy - plus amusing for a friend
3Alicorn
Dancing in the shower with someone to catch me? Okay, to be fair, I didn't mention modesty issues in my original post, but I didn't really think anybody was going to suggest something that involved immodesty... (The shower curtain in my home is transparent.)
0Bagricula
Ha. Here you go just piling on additional constraints! Could you wear a bathing suit that'd provide sufficient modesty?
0Alicorn
I could indeed do that. Hmm. (Not sure if Ade wants to watch me dance in the shower, though.)
2BillyOblivion
* Sweating is going to happen. Exercise hard, take a cool down lap and a cool to cold shower. * Sunshine is (and I'm saying this as someone who spent over a decade in the Goth scene, and still is into the music) absolutely critical. It does wonderful things for your body's chemistry. * Life costs. You may not always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get. Now, before you can build yourself a workout you have to have a reason for doing it. There are many combinations, but they boil down to: 1) Rehab of injuries. if this is the case you need to consult a therapist and work out exactly your regime, but I doubt it. 2) Body re-composition--commonly called "losing weight", but is more accurately called "reshaping this mess". 3) Getting stronger 4) Building Endurance (you could argue that this is a subset of 3, but in practice it's different enough) There are some others, but they are usually either a subset (body building is really an extreme of 2 and some of 3 for example). Once you have your goals clearly defined some of your other objections can be worked around, except possibly for the sweat thing. The one thing "we" can do is keep the workouts of high intensity (meaning short and hard (get your mind out of the gutter)) so that you don't have time to get bored, and you minimize the length of time you sweat. This won't work if your goal is to do the Leadville 100 (http://www.leadvilleraceseries.com/page/show/309879-run-series), but if you just want nicer hips and a little thinner belly, it isn't that hard. One suggestion--and this WILL involve sweat--is to find a 25 or (better) 35 pound kettle bell and do kettle bell swings 3 mornings a week when you first get up. Do as many as you can in 5 minutes, then take a walk around the block to cool down. Shower and go to work. This will work your legs, lower back, shoulders and abs. It won't turn you into super$GENDER but if you currently do nothing, it'll help. As you do these try to do longer and
6Alicorn
Not helpful. You don't have to believe me, I guess, if you think I'm lying about what things are and are not horrible for me, but if you're going to disbelieve me, maybe don't give me advice?
0[anonymous]
Is it completely unthinkable that your aversions to sweat and (especially) sunshine are related to phobias or some other neurological/physiological problems that should perhaps be addressed at some point? Sunshine really is good for you. My wife used to hate it, made nutritional and cognitive-behavioral changes, and now likes it. I know that's not helpful short-term. But long-term, it seems like there's some other problem going on that is causing your surface aversions that you should at least not completely dismiss off-hand.
3Alicorn
The sweat thing is probably autism-related. The sunshine thing is some combination of that and me being ridiculously pale. I take vitamin D, have a family history of skin cancer, and do not experience depression, so I probably shouldn't be working too hard on learning to like sun. Sweat would be more beneficial to learn to like, and if you know of an actual disease that has hating sweat as a symptom, do let me know. But the vague concern that it might be something other than a very strong sensory preference like my other very strong sensory preferences is not actionable.
-3BillyOblivion
It's not a question of belief, it's an issue of presentation. Here is what you wrote: "Sunshine is horrible (and other environmental issues)." That is not saying "I have medical issues", it's saying (wrist to forehead) I don't LIKE going out in the SUN! There are lots of things in life that just flat out suck. There is no way to make worthwhile gains without struggle, effort and dealing with stuff you don't like. To put my earlier statement a completely different way, you have a choice. On one side is exercise and sweat, on the other side is where you are now. If you are happy the way you are now there is no need to exercise. Otherwise you're going to need to sweat, the choice you then get to make is then a matter of intensity and duration. Physical exercise causes muscles to use either blood sugar or fat to get the muscles to contract. This is an exothermic reaction causing the muscles to heat up. Exercise sufficient to cause physiological changes causes the muscles to heat up enough to cause sweat. You don't notice this when swimming because it's constantly being washed away. There is no big red fucking easy button that gets you magic results. There are shorter paths to a solution, depending on your goals (for example if you PURELY want to lose weight you can do things like intermittent fasting, low carb diets and ice baths), but you asked about exercise. If you have physical issues with sun then the appropriate thing to say is "I have $DISEASE" which prevents me from spending lots of time outside". Being light skinned with a family propensity to Melanoma is not a reason to avoid the sun, being light skinned with a family propensity to Squamous Cell cancer IS a reason to take precautions, especially if that family tendency is towards the cancer going metastatic. Now that we have more information we can work with something. You don't have to completely avoid the sun, you just have to limit your exposure (duration, clothing) to it and do things to minimize th

I wish to make the world a place where "Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I'm not taking your advice" elicits the same reaction as "Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I'm not taking your advice", rather than being told to man up and being psychanalyzed by strangers.

I'm going to start with the subset of the world named Less Wrong.

4AdeleneDawner
Well put!
3NancyLebovitz
Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight is a very interesting book about sensory defensiveness-- having trouble, sometimes serious trouble, with sensory experiences that don't bother most people. It's correlated with autism, but isn't the same thing, and is sometime misdiagnosed as autism, neuroticism, or lack of willpower. There are people who specialize in helping with sensory defensiveness. They are cleverly camouflaged as occupational therapists, so they are unlikely to be found.
2Risto_Saarelma
Exercise can be fun if your brain is wired in a certain way, but needing to basically pointless busywork for physical maintenance is still stupid. There might be some entertaining flareups of cognitive dissonance from people who like to view being a diligent exerciser as a terminal value once there's technology for keeping the body in excellent working order without doing pointless stuff that makes you sweat. For instance. Also, how come no-one talks about different people probably having quite a bit different endorphin reactions to exercise? It's pretty likely that they exist, but people still act like they are good exercisers because they make better choices as rational actors, not because it gets their brain pumped full of happy juice.
0MixedNuts
Very good idea which we need to test a lot. I'm very afraid it might do bad things later on, build muscle mass but not do anything about fat or many other problems, build too much of a type of muscle and not enough of another, eat something that shouldn't be eaten to build muscle from it, or create weird dietary needs. But let's go test it!
-3zaogao
Downvoted because it is a general argument against any claimed rational action. Why do people who work at existential risk act like they make better rational choices when really they just get a different neurochemical responses? (Hint: Everything we do is for some neurochemical response) For an action to be rational in your mind, does it need to obey some Kantian-esque imperative where the actor can't gain pleasure from it? Are people who loathe exercise but do it anyways more rational?
1Risto_Saarelma
Was wondering why people don't look into differences in neurochemical responses at all, when they seem to be a pretty big factor in this case, different thing than arguing against any rational deliberation on it at all.
1zaogao
" I wish to make the world a place where "Sunshine and sweating feel awful, so I'm not taking your advice" elicits the same reaction as "Putting my hand on a hot stove feels awful, so I'm not taking your advice" " This would be nice. Now when I undertake this rejection challenge and come up with a reason for why I'm are not doing x-action, I can compare that reason to a hardwired physiological reaction. I will then feel satisfied that I am not doing (x-activity) for a good reason that I cannot change, because one surely cannot be expected to put their hand on a hot stove. In this way I will feel satisfied that I am in my current position for a good reason, and can happily fall back into acceptance.
1zaogao
And Alicorn, I don't know the particular nature of your aversion to sunshine, and maybe it is deeply hardwired like most people's aversion to a hot stove, so I am not speaking to you in particular. All I am saying is that reasons to not do something come in different strengths and in with different amounts of permanence. There are some dislikes that are able to be overcome through repeated effort, such as talking to strangers or eating vegetables. There are dislikes that can be overcome through mindfulness, (I will start this essay because of how it fits into my long term goals), or through environment (I will start this essay at a quiet Starbucks) or, my personal favorite, through chemical means ( I will start this essay once I finish this bottle of Laphroaig.) Maybe I misread MixedNuts statement and he/she was merely saying that for some people, sunshine and pain aversion are essentially the same, which I could buy. All I'm saying is I think there is a need to iterate this exercise through each of your reasons for not doing activity-x in the hope you can either find fundamental issues (putting your hand on a hot stove) or issues that can be resolved (working out in a walk in refrigerator.)