That's a little pedantic, even for HN, don't you think? "Oh, it's not the exercise that's important, it's the stuff that happens BECAUSE you exercise."
It's not pedantic at all. I'm ~40 and don't exercise at all, yet I'm still perfectly fit. I presume it's due to doing groceries by foot several times per week, having a standup desk, and carrying the kid around. Perhaps genes help too. But the point I'd like to get across is: going to the gym isn't the sine qua non of making you fit. You can get enough "exercise" by simply living without a car, standing, and walking.
Now we've just traded one form of pedantry for another.
Some would say your activity is exercise. Or you could say exercise is only stuff done for no other reason than fitness, but your activity substitutes for exercise.
In any case, the first paragraph of the CNN article makes it clear the distinction is "a sedentary lifestyle". Clearly if you are active, you aren't sedentary.
Anyway, what the researchers studied is not self-reported fitness but treadmill testing as a measure of cardiovascular fitness. If your grocery- and kid-carrying habits allow you to do well on a treadmill test, then you "exercise" according to the parameters of what was studied.
If you check, you will find it is incredibly rare for health and fitness books and articles to define "health", "fitness" or "exercise". Body by Science[0][1] gets right to it on pages 2 and 3 to define all three:
Health: A physiological state in which there is an absence of disease or pathology and that maintains the necessary biologic balance between the catabolic and anabolic states.
Fitness: The bodily state of being physiologically capable of handling challenges that exist above a resting threshold of activity.
Exercise: A specific activity that stimulates a positive physiological adaptation that serves to enhance fitness and health and does not undermine the latter in the process of enhancing the former.
Not the person you replied to, but I know well a person who
* does zero exercise, other than a few short walks every workday
* has done very little exercise at any time in the last 20+ years
* is as sedentary as life allows him to be
* can do 10 pullups no problem
* has a "normal" BMI
Is that fit? Who knows, I certainly don't. Also maybe he's not very healthy despite some favourable metrics, I dunno. Could be a lot worse, though.
My point here was only to substantiate that exercise and fitness are not perfectly correlated, and thus support vladharbuz's top-level comment.
Pullups are more of a gymnastic activity that just requires your nervous system is trained to recruit the right muscles very intensely at the right time. I can do maybe 12-15 and am borderline overweight, just because I do them habitually.
3 is for men over 51. And that's the bare minimum, not get kicked out of the marines threshold.
To reach top rank scoring is more like 15-17 for most ages. Mid rank is about 11 or up.
Maybe 99% of the population can't do a pullup, but I feel that's an overestimate. In any case, that says more about our overall societal weakness than anything else.
What are your gym friends doing if they couldn't do more than a few? Are they strength training or just doing cardio? Serious question, I'm curious. With a few months training ar age 26 I was able to do 5 reps of my bodyweight + about 40 pounds IIRC. And now, even when I periodically stop strength training, I am rarely below 8-10 when I start again.
Chin-ups are hard, but they're not that hard if you train them or do any activity that works those muscles.
Grip strength is also an excellent marker of longevity/imminent death - but this is probably not a result of exercise, and certainly not grip-strength exercise. Science is not assuming that what seems like a very reasonable guess is true, and questioning such assumptions must be "pedantic." Instead, we do the experiments and know one way or another.
PS - one of the things that happens when most people exercise is more UV exposure as they walk, run or cycle: and previous studies have shown UV exposure to be more important for longevity than exercise per se.
As someone who exercises, I didn't think the comment was pedantic at all. I thought yours was actually.
A lot of people define exercise as either some sort of rigorous structured activity, or something that makes you sweat, or something that makes you huff and puff.
A lot of resistance training my do none of those things, but still result in a high level of fitness, including cardiovascular. So, it was helpful to see what exactly the study was referring to.
Conversely, a lot of people "exercise" regularly, but aren't particularly fit when measured against objective metrics.
