Originally Posted by livedarklions

I grew up in Minnesota and I live in New England. Since I've also lived in New Orleans, I'm very well versed in extreme temperatures at both ends and have plenty of experience exercising in such conditions.

So I reproduced the quote I objected to in the first place just to show how far off the beam you have gone--that activity levels are going to "plummet" if you follow your version of what this article is recommending; or something. Honestly, you seem to be arguing now that the "science" as you understand it, proves too much, and that the real recommendation this article should have been making based on the literature is not to go outside at all. Obviously, that's absurd and is completely unsupported by the very same articles--no, they don't clearly identify the statistical cause of the increased rates of death in cold weather but that's because that data most likely doesn't exist. You've taken the fuzziness of population-level data and concluded from it that you should take from that fuzziness the broadest interpretation of the implications possible. What we do know is that cold has a certain number of effects on individuals, primarily but not exclusively CV and respiratory, and that there is a subset of the population who has limited ability to physically cope with those types of effects. You want to argue that people with heart disease don't have to worry about a factor that's going to increase the amount of CV effort needed to produce the same results, knock yourself out.

Yes, exercise warms the body. That is heat is energy expended by your body, and your CV and other systems are working hard to generate it. The point is your body expended a lot more energy getting up to those warm temperatures than it would if the air temperature was warmer, so your heart is working harder at baseline already and you're now increasing the load on it higher than you would normally.

As to the lungs, your logic is completely off the wall. It is absolutely undeniable that cold dry air would be incredibly irritating to the lungs if the body did not have mechanisms for warming and humidifying that air as it's inspired. That's the reason most people's noses run in the cold The more you inhale and exhale, the closer you get to the boundaries of the body's ability to do such regulation. I don't doubt for a second that most people can train up to increasing their capacity to do this, in a former life, I have done such things. I now can't because the scar tissue in my lung appears to be irritated more easily. I honestly don't care if you think that's a valid excuse, I don't know why you think you're qualified to tell other people much of anything about what does or doesn't constitute a "health reason".

I waited until my cardiac testing showed that I had suffered no significant coronary damage from my clot-induced heart attack before I started back to intense exercise, and I'll take my personalized risk assessment from myself rather than you, thank you very much. I do know that my activity does not "plummet" during the winter despite my lack of bicycling activity--if it makes you feel less butthurt that saying that that claim was full of crap and faulting you for basing an entire argument on that absurdity indicates that I was "triggered", fine. I get annoyed when people start making claims that things that happen every day are somehow impossible. If you think activity has to plummet if we don't exercise in the cold, I take it you're unfamiliar with the concept of a gym.