Maybe not a drug. But if the improvements in health come from bio chemical signals, it should be possible to activate those signals without engaging in exercise. Eventually?
Strictly speaking, any intervention other than exercise is going to give you a subset of the total stimulation. A drug acting on the tissues directly would bypass the neurological component, for example.
If the idea is to avoid the effort of exercise, perhaps it would be worth considering the possibility that the effort itself is essential.
If we were good enough to have drugs that could work with that precision we’d eliminate an enormous category of things. The side effects are usually the scary things. We have drugs that can cure the symptoms of depression and anxiety - they just so happen to be insanely addictive, cause respiratory depression, loss of coordination, and you quickly build a tolerance to them.
It would take a lot of different drugs to simulate what exercise does.
- Impact and stress strengthening the muscles, bones and tendons / ligaments
- energy use that leads to better sleep
- increased blood flow, development of new capillaries, stretching of blood vessels
- if you exercise outside, exposure to sunlight
- the release of all the associated neurochemicals
I have a suspicion that anything designed to mimic exercise would hurt as much as the actual thing given that so many of the benefits of exercise involve damaging bone and tissue then repairing it
Steroids. You will be growing muscle while sitting on a couch, even better than someone that naturally trains. However, you very likely will develop asymetries or other weird complications because you didnt properly work out.
My point is that, even though we might find even more ways to improve/modify our bodies, they will come with slew of risks that are just not worth it if you can achieve it naturally.
On another note, I feel like there is severe muscle inflation in media which would distort how fit a person should be. You really do not need to kill yourself in the gym or hop on a some reddit-approved juices to get very fit. Just gotta experiment and find a comfortable full body workout that you can do consistently, like you brush your teeth every day.
Actually, that's not how steroids work. It's a common misconception that one can take "roids" and just sit on the sofa while munching on potato chips and get shredded and pack on muscle but in reality what the steroids do are to move ones natural limitations further away thus enabling larger muscle mass than naturally. But this still requires one to put in the work, i.e. the stimulus to trigger the muscle growth and to rest and eat properly.
They do work that way. Lots of studies show gains in muscle mass even with no excercise when people are on steroids. Consider average men who never excercise vs average women who never excercise. The men will have more muscle. That's what testosterone does, among other things.
That's part of why steroids were and sometimes still are used medically for people with cancer and other wasting diseases. It makes them eat more (they're usually strongly appetite inducing) but they also just help develop muscles even if sedentary.
(Of course it would be far more effective to also engage in high intensity resistance training.)
One completely random study result[0] supporting that couch + testosterone leads to bigger muscles. Maybe it is some puritanical thing, but not sure why this myth persists. Exercise + juice results in even bigger gains, but it is possible to increase muscle mass without hard work.
...The men in the testosterone groups had significant increases in the cross-sectional areas of the triceps and the quadriceps (Table 4); the group assigned to testosterone without exercise had a significantly greater increase in the cross-sectional area of the quadriceps than the placebo-alone group
Steroids are usually given to reduce inflammation and as immunosuppressants to stop the body from fighting back against whatever treatment is being given. The main method of weight gain with prednisone (the most common steroid) is water retention. Anabolic steroids are not commonly prescribed to cancer patients.
Cortico steroids usually result in muscle mass loss.
That's not how steroids work. Muscles need stimulus to grow even with steroids. What steroids do is make your body recover faster so you can train more often and build muscle right away.
> When I asked Ashley if it was possible to design a drug that mimicked the observed effects of exercise, he was emphatic that, no, this was not possible.
Time is short, I’ll take the walk and lift the weights but if I can get the results faster using biological engineering, I’m willing to spend and accept greater risk to make it happen (both for metabolic profile management a la GLP-1RAs and muscle growth). There is no extra credit for making life harder than it has to be, and we’re all dead eventually.
I was struck this past week to the extent that even a mild physical impairment can cause. I overdid it last week on a run and I spent this week nursing a swollen knee. What kind of exercise to do without involving my knee? I lift weights sometimes, but I can’t do that every day, and it also does not give me the mood altering effect that a good run does. I was drawing a blank glumly in an armchair when my wife suggested swimming at the local pool with pull buoys (so that I can keep my knee immobilized).
After a few experiments that felt more like drowning than swimming I finally got the hang of it. But it left me seriously worried about exercise in my future. After all, joint problems are likely going to happen again in my future. And I started to wonder: how do disabled folks do this? It must be incredibly difficult (and expensive!). I really am incredibly lucky across multiple fronts to have the life that I have.
Cycling is really good as it doesn't strain joints, merely gently lubricates it. I broke my knee and was put on the bike real quick, as soon as I had enough mobility to make a full round, for rehabilitation.
Yup, +1 for cycling! For me, it's some ankle cartridge destruction from an old fracture that finally put a halt to my formerly extensive trail & XC running & recreational racing. But cycling is coming back to the core of my exercise program (Mountain/trails: really miss road biking but traffic & drivers' attitudes seem to hazardous now). And not expensive either - plenty of bikes on Craigslist good enough to not give you bad habits and still get good exercise, even decade+ old race bikes.
It is really all about working with what capabilities you still have, and maximizing those. Even that may provide enough healing & fitness to get back to a bit of previously constrained activities.
I really feel for people who have never experienced a good trail ride. It’s possibly one of the most exhilarating things I’ve ever experienced. Even an ordinary trail ride puts a smile on my face.
