PedsEndoPhilly said:

Exercise transformation with training: went from barely able to walk a block to completing a 5K last month.

Thank you — that is the clearest version of this I have read, and I have read a lot of them. Sending this to two other people who asked me the same thing last week.

Clinical perspective, offered as context rather than as advice. The mechanism and the magnitude are separate questions. Agreeing that something happens says nothing about whether it happens enough to act on.

Dr.MetabolicMD said:

There is a difference between no evidence and evidence of no effect, and this subject is one where the two get swapped freely in both directions.

Pushing back on Dr.MetabolicMD here. I would resist the confidence. Half of what this board was certain about two years ago has since been quietly dropped, and nobody went back to correct the threads.

One concrete data point for the thread. For anyone reading later: the numbers in this thread are worth checking against a primary source before you act on them, including mine. Half the figures circulating in this community trace back to a secondary summary that dropped a qualifier.

Moderator note: good thread. Keeping it here rather than moving it, because the question is general enough to be useful.