Exercised

 

In Exercised, Harvard professor of evolutionary biology Daniel Lieberman explains that to truly understand exercise science, you must first understand something about human evolution and anthropology and how the body evolved to handle exercise. The mantra of this book is that nothing about the biology of exercise makes sense except in the light of evolution, and nothing about exercise as a behavior makes sense except in the light of anthropology.

 

That avoidance of exercise makes sense because exercise is a fundamentally strange and unusual behaviour from an evolutionary perspective. When all is said and done, exercise, despite its manifold benefits, requires overriding deep, natural instincts. So instead of shaming and blaming people who avoid exertion, we should help each other choose to exercise. But as the last few decades have shown, we won't succeed solely by medicalizing and commodifying exercise; instead, we should treat exercise the way we treat education by making it fun, social, emotionally worthwhile, and something that we willingly commit ourselves to do.

 

As Lieberman wrote, "nothing about the biology of exercise makes sense except in the light of evolution, and nothing about exercise as a behavior makes sense except in the light of anthropology." Using this evolutionary/anthropological framework, Lieberman sets out to explain how the body works when at rest (sitting and sleeping), when active (walking, running, lifting, fighting, dancing), and what this means for establishing effective exercise habits in the modern world. Along the way, he explains many of the myths associated with exercise and health. The word "myth" probably explains his take on these. Among some of the exaggerations are: is sitting as bad as smoking, do we need 8 hours of sleep each night, is the wear and tear of running bad for the knees, is a glass of red wine really as good as spending an hour at the Gym, is exercise useless for losing weight, and others.

 

 

The author used evolutionary and anthropological perspectives to explore and rethink dozens of myths about physical inactivity, activity, and exercise. Are we born to exercise? Is sitting the new smoking? Is it bad to slouch? Do you need eight hours of sleep? Are humans comparatively slow and weak?Is walking ineffective for losing weight? Does running ruin your knees? Is it normal to exercise less as we age? What is the best way to persuade people to exercise? Is there an optimal kind and amount of exercise? How much does exercise affect our vulnerability to cancer? 

 

The first thing to understand is that humans spent most of their 200,000-year evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers, with the invention of agriculture occurring only around 10,000 years ago and the modern industrial revolution beginning only about 200 years ago. The key to understanding our relationship to exercise, therefore, is found in the study of these hunter-gatherer groups.

 

Three useful definitions:

Physical activity (noun): any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that expends energy.

Exercise (noun): voluntary physical activity that is planned, structured, repetitive, and undertaken to sustain or improve health and fitness.

Exercised (adjective): to be vexed, anxious, worried, or harassed.

 

Below are some points that I jotted down that I found interesting while reading this book.

• It behooves us, however, to remember that exercise is a truly odd sort of medicine. It is largely medicinal because the absence of physical activity is unhealthy. Further, exercise not only is an abnormal behavior from an evolutionary perspective but also never evolved to be therapeutic. Instead, we evolved to spend energy

• Make exercise necessary and fun. Do mostly cardio, but also some weights. Some is better than none. Keep it up as you age

• Eating sensibly and exercising don't guarantee long life and good health; they just decrease the risk of getting sick

• Exercise is done against one’s wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.

• We evolved to be physically active as we age, and in turn being active helps us age well. Further, the longer we stay active, the greater the benefit and it is almost never too late to benefit from getting fit

• "Everyone knows they should exercise, but few things are more irritating than being told to exercise, how much, and in what way. Exhorting us to "Just Do It" is about as helpful as telling a drug addict to "Just Say No."

• You use more than thirty pounds of ATP during a one-hour walk and more than your entire body weight of ATP over the course of a typical day—an obviously impossible amount to lug around in reserve.15 Consequently, the human body stores in toto only about a hundred grams of ATPs at any given moment.

• How Much and What Kind of Exercise Are Best? This one is easy: cardio is better than weights for obesity. As we will see later, weights help counteract some of the metabolic consequences of obesity, but cardio is better for preventing and reversing excess weight.

• Aging is inexorable, but senescence, the deterioration of function associated with advancing years, correlates much less strongly with age. Instead, senescence is also influenced strongly by environmental factors like diet, physical activity, or radiation, and thus can be slowed, sometimes prevented, and even partly reversed. The distinction between aging and senescence may seem obvious, but the two processes are frequently confused.

 

 The bottom line is:

We didn’t evolve to run marathons, play tennis, go jogging etc. Nor did we evolve to sit around all day.

Move often. Eat fresh food. The cardio is good. Cardio with some strength training is better. Just pumping weights is not as good as cardio. Walk sometimes. Jog sometimes. Go hard sometimes. You don’t stop moving because you get old. You get old because you stop moving.

The body keeps the score

 

The Body Keeps the Score.

The Body Keeps the Score is a non-fiction book about how the body stores trauma and what you can do about it.

My most distressing takeaway from this book was how common trauma is. Author Bessel van der Kolk discusses how people from all walks of life suffer from trauma.

I finally wrote a review on this book, a bit longer than expected, but I think it’s worth reading if you haven’t already read it.

Discussions of PTSD still tend to focus on recently returned soldiers, victims of terrorist bombings, or survivors of terrible accidents. But trauma remains a much larger public health issue, arguably the greatest threat to any country’s national health, and it’s a hidden pandemic.

One can see the awareness programmes on diseases like cancer, AIDS, etc. But we seem too embarrassed or discouraged to mount a massive effort to help children and adults learn to deal with the fear, rage, and collapse—the predictable consequences of having been traumatised.

In today’s world, your ZIP code, even more than your genetic code, determines whether you will lead a safe and healthy life. People’s income, family, structure, housing, employment, and educational opportunities affect not only the risk of developing traumatic stress but also their access to help address it. Poverty, unemployment, inferior schools, social isolation, and the widespread availability of guns are breeding grounds for trauma.

Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people. 

We are fundamentally social creatures; our brains are wired to foster working and playing together. Trauma devastates the social engagement system and interferes with cooperation, nurturing, and the ability to function as productive members of a clan.

In this book, I have learned how many mental health problems, from drug addiction to self-injurious behaviour, start off as attempts to cope with emotions that became unbearable because of a lack of adequate human contact and support.

People can learn to control and change their behaviour, but only if they feel safe enough to experiment with new solutions. 

The body keeps the score: if trauma is encoded in heartbreak and wrenching sensations, then our first priority is to help people move out of flight or fight states, re-organise their perception of danger, and manage relationships. Where traumatised children are concerned, we should place more focus on the chorus, physical education, recess, and anything else that involves movement, play, or other forms of joyful engagement.

All of us, but especially children, need the kind of confidence that others affirm and cherish. Without that, we can’t develop a sense of agency that will enable us to assert: "That is what I believe in; that is what I stand for; that is what I will devote myself to." As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains, cross deserts, and stay up all night to finish projects. Children and adults will do anything for people they trust and whose opinions they value.

But if you feel abandoned, worthless, or invisible, nothing seems to matter. Fear destroys curiosity and playfulness. There can be no growth without curiosity, and no adaptability without being able to explore through trial and error.

Resilience is the product of agency—knowing that what you can do can make a difference. Many of us remember what playing team sports, singing in the school choir, or playing in the marching band meant to us, especially if we had coaches who believed in us, pushed us to excel, and taught us we could be better than we thought was possible.

Trauma constantly confronts us with our fragility and with man’s inhumanity to man but also with our extraordinary resilience.

He also has an entire chapter on alternative therapies such as mindfulness, meditation, breathing exercises, and yoga. He stresses the importance of becoming aware of one’s own body, and not just in the sense of noticing when you are hyperventilating or your heart is jumping out of your chest—although these are good things to notice too—but also where memories feel like they are stored in your body. You know where it is uncomfortable to be touched or, in yoga, which positions make you feel vulnerable and why that might be.

 When people think about trauma, they generally think of it as a historical event that happened some time ago. Trauma is actually the residue of the past as it settles into your body. It’s located inside your own skin. When people are traumatised, they become afraid of their physical sensations; their breathing becomes shallow; and they become uptight and frightened about what they’re feeling inside. When you slow down your breathing with yoga, you can increase your heart rate variability, and that decreases stress. Yoga opens you up to feeling every aspect of your body’s sensations. It’s a gentle, safe way for people to befriend their bodies, where the trauma of the past is stored. Studies show that yoga is equally as beneficial—or more beneficial—than the best possible medications in alleviating traumatic stress symptoms.

And last, but not least, most great instigators of social change have intimate personal knowledge of trauma. That brings to mind Maya, Angelou, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King.