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.