I am surprised that no one referenced Henry Rollins' essay, The Iron:
https://www.oldtimestrongman.com/articles/the-iron-by-henry-...
Through the years, I have combined meditation, action, and the Iron into a single strength. I believe that when the body is strong, the mind thinks strong thoughts. Time spent away from the Iron makes my mind degenerate. I wallow in a thick depression. My body shuts down my mind.
The Iron is the best antidepressant I have ever found. There is no better way to fight weakness than with strength. Once the mind and body have been awakened to their true potential, it’s impossible to turn back.
The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.
This is one of those cases where my instinct is to believe the result because I agree with the basic conceit.
Given the state of replication in social sciences, though, I'm inclined to be very skeptical of the paper at first blush, given that it is a meta study [1]. Especially since many of the studies cited in the meta studied show no effect or a negative effect, and it's completely possible that additional studies showing no effect or a negative effect were never published or even terminated early because null results are uninteresting.
It good to see a focus on weightlifting, and I'm glad to see that research like this is proving the same sort of benefit. It seems as though it's kind of faux pas to focus on strength when other options like cardio are available. The standard for physical excellence these days has become the marathon, triathlon, or iron man, where I think that a long term focus on strength training is it's own unique reward, and it's own unique challenge, taking years and years of hard work and focused dedication to achieve peak performance, as opposed to a marathon where (a quick google says) one can achieve with 20 weeks of training.
Perhaps this is a good time to dig up an article which presents one mechanism I found interesting a few years back.
https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(14)01049-6
It turns out skeletal muscle is important as metabolic tissue, with implications for brain function among other things.
And this story from a few years back was a great read as well
"Resistance exercise training significantly reduced depressive symptoms among adults regardless of health status, total prescribed volume of RET, or significant improvements in strength. Better-quality randomized clinical trials blinding both allocation and assessment and comparing RET with other empirically supported treatments for depressive symptoms are needed." https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...
I can't read the full paper, but it seems like "weightlifting"/"lifting weights" may not have been the only exercise throughout the 33 studies. It also seems like any kind of resistance exercise, regardless of how you did it or how well it worked, made people less depressed. If that's true, you could lift 2-lbs weights for 10 minutes and feel better.
This surprises me a bit, because I attended a lecture at Karolinska Instituted by Jorge Ruas in 2017 about a series of papers produced by his research group where they actually seem to have figured out why developing more red muscle - which is the endurance muscle, not the kind you produce with weight-lifting - protects against depression.
In short, red muscle it produces KAT enzymes that break down kynurenine, which is a substance produced by stress that is associated with all kinds of mental illnesses, like inducing depression, if it remains at elevated levels for longer periods of time. So it protects you from depression by removing one of the substances that causes it. IIRC, kynurenine is then turned into kynurenic acid, which then activates white fat and turns it into "beige fat", a kind of almost-brown fat (so the healthier kind). So it has even more benefits!
I asked during the Q&A if they recommend endurance exercise, or weightlifting, and they said that in their tests, it was specifically the muscles that you develop during endurance training that produce this protective enzyme.
[0] https://ki.se/en/news/how-physical-exercise-protects-the-bra...
I think there's some truth to this. I get a very different "high" after a session of lifting heavy vs 90 minutes of running or cycling. I feel like with weight lifting I get more a testosterone high and much less of an endorphin high.
The effect isn't good when you properly design the study.
> In this meta-analysis of 33 clinical trials including 1877 participants, resistance exercise training was associated with a significant reduction in depressive symptoms, with a moderate-sized mean effect. Total volume of resistance exercise training, health status, and strength improvements were not associated with the antidepressant effect; however, smaller reductions in depressive symptoms were derived from trials with blinded allocation and/or assessment.
This repeats many findings. Exercise seems to work as a treatment for depression until you start using good quality study design when the benefits over placebo reduce.
Can confirm this from 100% ancedotal evidence.
This is a topic I'm interested in, because I have NO interest in exercise.
Do I think it would help my health? Yes, outside of some absurd circles, absolutely.
Do I think it would improve my self-confidence? Probably, if I stuck with it, but I sincerely doubt that I would because of the heavy incentives against it.
Am I just being obstinate and stubborn if I acknowledge it would likely help but am still not doing it? I have no safe answer to that question. "No" is clearly wrong, but "Yes" dismisses the problems.
Here's my problem: Exercise is extremely uncomfortable. It's hot, humiliating, and painful. If I push through that...it's 10 seconds later and I'm more hot, more humiliated (even with no one else around) and in more discomfort. I can push through again, but my brain is well aware of what to expect. There's no "endorphin high", no sense of satisfaction. Those are at least many days off in even the smallest of quantities (for me at least - people that cheerfully tell me of their "good pain" just make me feel more misunderstood/disregarded/ a failure). All the benefits are theoretical and in future, with benefits that equal the costs even further out, while all the costs and pain are up front. Humans are bad at managing such equations - I certainly am.
Even this awareness is a sense of failure. Am I making excuses, or do I really feel more pain and less "good pain" than other people? Either answer is not good for me. And these are what my brain focuses on while suffering. Listen to music? Read a book? Watch a movie? Everything is made harder because I'm literally struggling, and so every moment of discomfort progresses at a snail's pace. I've been exercising for...45 seconds?!
I know I can't get a training montage that is effortless, but there has to be something that makes me far more able to sit down and struggle through a mental activity for hours than to struggle through a physical activity for 5 minutes, much less the actual time (and repeated time) needed for any improvement. Not that mental exercise is easy - I have plenty of mental tasks I've been procrastinating on - but I have successes there where I have none in the physical arena.
I've tried various ways - small frequent things at home, team things, sport-focused, fewer high intensity things, just taking walks. So far the closest success was fencing, where I started to feel some of my aches and muscle pains were satisfying while hurting...but every class was an effort, both to sacrifice the time and to face the pain, and once I dropped I stayed dropped. That was 20 pounds ago so I know trying again would be MORE painful than before.
I'm left interested in the result while having no interest in attempting (again) without some reason to think this time will be different.
Any exercise reduces depression, even just walking or something as simple as doing dishes.
The brain needs a lot of oxygen. This is obtained from blood. Which needs to circulate. Which comes from exercise.
This is such a no-brainer, how do they even make an article about it?
I believe it. Weightlifiting has many benefits.
To what degree? A simple Google search will reveal plenty of body builders and athletes who have committed suicide despite plenty of weight training.
Sure there are other factors influencing their decision, but "just lift weights!" is too general of a prescription to help.
In my experience, people who are significantly depressed can't make time in their lives for exercise. One of the indicators that they are coming out of a depressive period is that they return to exercise routines that the abandoned on the downslope.
So -- I strongly suspect survival bias here. It might even be true that weightlifting is an effective treatment for depression, but it would be awfully hard to get a negative result because you can't get depressed people to do it.