Exercising Every Day Can Ruin Your Life [OUTDATED]
UPDATE: The following article is considered redacted and out of date, but is here for reference. For my updated thoughts of exercising, please refer to this article.
Abstract
There is a cost to exercising every day. Exercising wastes time and money. Doing it every day will be very harmful in the long run, and leave thoughts of deep regret.
Intro
Is exercise really beneficial for humans. For some, yes, it helps mentally (relieve stress), financially (professional sports), and physically (to lose weight to prevent worse things from happening). But overall, I think that exercising every day is not worth it. Exercising a lot is not that good, for an average person. We’ll take a look at what a misinformed person thinks is very ‘good’, ‘healthy’, and ‘ideal’: a person whomst exercise 30 minutes every day. Here’s why it’s not good:
Calculations for Calories Burnt
DISCLAIMER: CALCULATIONS DONE IN CAD$
Let’s say someone exercises an average of 30 minutes every day, at moderate-intensity, which will burn around 200 calories, to be conservative [I will be conservative for most calculations, to show how even minimally exercising every day can be bad]. That will mean that person will burn 1400 calories in one week, or 73,000 calories in one year.
If that is an average person, then they would clearly eat to replenish the calories burnt (if they don’t eat, they will lose weight — through muscle, fat, etc. That is why I am assuming the person is average; not someone who is 300lbs overweight consumes at a calorie deficit for example).
We will now be conservative and assume that the person exercising every day will eat average; not super expensive or healthy nor fast food takeout every day.
So I will use 1 Jamaican Beef Patty (@ $1.50 each, at a convenience store on average) as the reference food. That is because it is not the cheapest calorie-price ratio (think of white rice), but it is still considerably cheap. It can serve as a full meal for some people. An average Patty will have 320 calories in it.
I will use individual prices as reference (not wholesale); although it may not seem realistic, since I was ultra conservative in previous calculations (including the fact I assume that people will pay $1.50 to consume 320 calories). So that price of a Patty will equate to $0.0046875 per calorie.
So from before, 73,000 (excess calories per year) * $0.0046875 = $342.1875. A person will likely be spending an extra $340 on food every year, just because they need to replenish. At first, this may not seem much. Even seems weird how I am using a Jamaican beef patty each time, when maybe a person can just add on some rice and cook a extra slice of meat or something for their meals instead of going out of their way to get a Patty. That can save even more money. However, that was made to balance out some other calculations.
Seeing the image above, an average person exercising for 30 minutes will burn way more than 200 calories, without factoring in metabolism or other physical differences. And most people whom exercise for 30 minutes every day might spend even more time burning calories doing warm-up, cooldown, etc (not included in this post since calculations are way too variable for those). So that is why I assumed 200 calories/30 minutes exercise which includes rest days, days where more exercise is done, days where 20 minutes are done (since its hard to dedicate exactly 30 minutes to exercise every day).
It Gets Worse :(
$340 per year does not seem like much. Until you factor in the ~30 minutes every day. It can be spent on a lot of better things, such as work, education, etc. I will assume that an average person exercising 30 min/day will earn $13 per hour, just under the minimum wage, during the time exercised.
This is rather inaccurate due to the economic disparities of younger people more likely to exercise, the amount of jobs, people to take care of, etc. But I will keep it at $13/hour since it seems reasonable, and I am keeping it as conservative as it can be realistic. Also some people may not have jobs, but I will assume $13/hour be used since (as an example) school is basically an investment towards the future profession (and generally, people who stay in school will be earning a lot more than $13/hour when they are adults).
So 30min/day = ~182 hours/year = 182*13 = $2366. Adding that to the $340/year from before, gives you ~$2700 per year spent (wasted) because of exercising 30 minutes per day. $2700 is a lot of money, and that can be put into other things.
Given how conservative most calculations are, just imagine how much more a person spends if they buy higher quality foods, or decide to exercise even more.
In addition, I am not even going to start talking about other things, such as electricity/hydro money (more clothes to wash, driving somewhere to work out), or specific sports (paying for new shoes/equipment/gear). That $2700/year will increase a lot more (potentially even reaching 5 digits) if I am even going to start talking about it.
This is just a conservative observation with conservative calculations, to give people a general idea of the absolute minimum sacrifices needed to exercise 30 minutes/day everyday.
Exercising comes at such a large cost. Is it a good investment? If so, why is everyone not exercising 30 minutes per day? Are there better things to do besides exercising?
Conclusion
It is good to know that not everyone is fully exercising 30 minutes/day. As shown above, there is a good reason why the average person will not exercise 30 minutes/day. Unless you do not have a job, or already have millions on millions in the bank, there is no reason to spend so much money exercising.