Paleolithic Cave Art Evolutionary Fitness
What Evolution Teaches Us About How to Live and Stay Healthy
Copyright ©1995 by
Arthur De Vany, Ph.D..
Essay
This essay is an extended summary of my research project exploring
what the evolutionary evidence tells us about how to stay fit and young.
My aim is to contribute to an evolutionary physiology and science of
exercise. It combines my experience as a professional and amateur
athlete, and as someone who has spent more than 40 years exercising, with
my scientific interests in evolution and complex adaptive systems. It
begins with the premise that our bodies and minds are adapted to an
ancient environment that passed more than 10,000 years ago. We evolved as
hunter-gatherers over at least three million years and that lifeway
shapes our attributes, behaviors, and capabilities as human beings. It is
by understanding the hunter-gatherer adaptation and incorporating the
activity and eating patterns of our ancestral lifeway that we can live a
natural and healthy life in a modern world that is very different from
the one in which human beings evolved.
In developing this idea, I take the Darwinian approach that has been
so successful in the new fields of evolutionary psychology and medicine
and apply it to physical fitness. This book will integrate what is known
of the conditions of our ancestral existence, what is known of the
lifestyles of the living hunter-gatherers, and the new sciences of
complex adaptive systems with modern research on metabolism and
physiology to find an effective model of a healthy lifestyle.
When the body is viewed as a far from equilibrium, complex adaptive
system exploiting evolved mechanisms, it becomes clear that conventional
thinking about diets and obesity is wrong. I argue that the evolutionary
evidence and modern research shows that high intensity, intermittent
training (activities that are personally challenging, but so brief as to
not promote exhaustion) combined with walking and playful activities is
the most productive form of exercise for any person of any age or sex.
Such exercise is productive because it is more like the activities
that were essential to the emergence and evolution of the human species.
High intensity, intermittent and brief training mixed with power walking
and play is closer than aerobic exercise, high volume weight training, or
sedentism to how our ancestors lived. Our brains and bodies are dynamic
objects and they thrive on challenge and movement; intensity brings key
adaptations in body composition and power and play integrates mind and
body.
We differ in no significant ways from our large and powerfully
muscled ancestors of the last Ice Age. We are hunter-gatherers and have
been for all of human and pre-human history. Only 15,000 years have
passed since the last Ice Age, not long enough for bodies suited for the
sedentary modern age to have evolved. If such bodies ever do evolve they
cannot have our minds, for the human mind lives in a brain adapted to an
energetic, versatile and dynamic body.
What follows is a sketch of ideas that are developed more fully in the
book.
Evolution of the Human Body and Mind
The story of human evolution is one of adaptation in a patchy and
dangerous environment. We are generalists, not specialists, and that is
why we are adaptive two-legged omnivores with broad territorial range,
small stomachs and big brains. Humans embarked on a risky strategy for
survival: we "chose" to live by our wits by exploiting a wide territory
and many foods along with opportunistic capture of high nutrient, but
fugitive and random, food sources. We lived virtually all of the 3 or so
million years of human and prehuman history as scavengers or
hunter-gatherers. Exploiting our generalist niche led to the elegant
evolutionary design of the human body and mind. In order to exploit a
patchy environment with plentiful low grade nutrients and scarce and
variable high value nutrients, the human mind had to become clever. We
became adaptive opportunists. The human body had to solve the energy
storage problem. Given a random food supply and variable energy
expenditure, our metabolism is evolved to solve a complex stochastic
energy management problem.
Many of the characteristics of our metabolism derive from the
evolved solutions to the energy flow problem. We clearly are designed to
live at an energy surplus, not at the balance preached by modern, steady
state models of fitness. I won't go into that here, but it is enough to
say that, given random energy intake and expenditure, a precise matching
of the two is impossible and matching on average would guarantee an early
death. One answer to achieving stochastic energy balance is male/female
pairing. Another is the ability to carry high density nutrients in our
hands so that nourishment can be taken to safer grounds and given to
mates. Yet another answer is our ability to store energy as fat, along
with the appetite to rapidly gorge fat-laden meat and bone marrow. These
adaptations to the ancestral environment can turn against us in a crowded
world where adaptive opportunism may have undesirable social
consequences. Our metabolism can turn against us when calorically rich,
but nutrionally depleted, food is all around us and available at little
expenditure of energy.
Life in a patchy resource environment requires the capability to
perform a wide variety of activities. Clearly, the body's design tells us
that extreme exertion of brief duration was an important human attribute,
essential for our survival and evolution. Our upright, bipedal posture
gives us the mobility to cover the range required of an omnivorous
generalist. A large brain is required for hominids to cover the widest
range known to any animal species. High value nutrients are essential to
the energy-demanding brain and small stomach required for high mobility
in a patchy savanna where high value nutrients are variable and fugitive.
Our muscle fiber composition reveals that we are adapted to extreme
intensity of effort. And the energy sources of these fibers shows that
the highly intense activities through which our ancestors "earned a
living" were of short duration (anaerobic metabolism came before aerobic
metabolism, which was grafted on later and the quickly exhausted fast
twitch fibers are likely to be the most primitive of our sources of
movement). Our ability to sweat, our relative hairlessness, our upright
and, hence, cool posture, our mobility, as well as our temperature
regulation and appetite mechanisms are designed to solve the problem of
keeping an energy-hungry, but delicate, brain alive in an energetic body
capable of high mobility and peak energy bursts.
Evolutionarily elegant design economizes on processes and energy. As
a consequence many structures and processes serve dual functions. Evolved
design resulted also in many compromises. These dual and compromised
designs, which are reliable at the high and variable energy flows of our
active ancestors go awry at the low energy flux typical of a modern,
sedentary individual. Many of the metabolic disorders--obesity,
carbohydrate intolerance, diabetes--that we see today are a result of
these design compromises. These "Western Diseases" are rare among
hunter-gatherers and were not part of the human ancestral experience.
They reflect an adaptation of the human body, which was designed for high
energy expenditure and variable diet and activity patterns, to modern
life. Because human metabolism is conditional on activity patterns, diet
alone is not sufficient to control body composition and obesity. The body
"reads" its food intake and hormone messengers in the context of its
activity patterns, so the message contained in a biochemical messenger is
decoded through the dynamic patterns of our actions. This is why
inactivity and food deprevation are so counterproductive in controlling
obesity. It is also why sedentism and its associated low energy flux
produce overeating.
The essence of human beings is that they are complex, adaptive and
self-organized systems. Adaptation is the essential human characteristic
and movement is the canonical form of its expression. Self-organization
is anchored by reference to a dynamic body image which lets there be a
self to serve as the fixed point from which the world is perceived.
Inactivity not only changes the human body, it alters the very structure
of our perception and understanding. Sedentism flattens the energy
landscape and weakens body image which is the reference of an organized
and autonomous self. The result of inactivity is a lack of purpose and
will. It takes good dynamics to produce a coherent, self-organized
individual and actions that are metabolically challenging produce a good
body image which anchors a strong and convergent dynamics. The brain is
adapted to action and its structure and health depend on movement. Long
ago, Darwin noted that the brains of wild animals were larger and heavier
than the brains of domesticated animals.
Metabolic Revolutions
Two metabolic revolutions shaped the evolution of homo sapiens. One
important revolution was when archaic homo sapiens adapted to the
glaciations and made the transition from hunter-gatherer to big game
hunter. This was some 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. This revolution
supplied the dense, high quality nutrients and lipids that let the brain
expand. Brain size expanded rapidly during the past 250,000 years, more
rapidly than in the preceding 2 million years. Brain expansion was
preceded by an expansion in body size, so much so that archaic humans
show bodies with fully modern features. They seem to have been at least
as large as the latest generation of well-fed Americans and far more
powerfully built. It is significant that the development of the
magnificent human body preceded the evolution of the human brain. Such a
brain could not live and would have no purpose but for the supremely
adaptive human body whose actions and perceptions it integrates.
The second metabolic revolution, and arguably the most important
revolution in the history of homo sapiens, was the agricultural
revolution beginning about 10,000 years ago in Asia and near the
Mediterranean. Agriculture came later to Europe, perhaps only 6,000 or
2,000 years ago. Great Britain was still making its transition to
agriculture at the time Caesar's army entered around 100 BC. The
paleoanthropological evidence shows that with the agricultural revolution
there was a decline in stature, cranial capacity, and muscularity, along
with a general decline in health and nutrition. (How do they know our
preagricultural ancestors were muscular? The bones are thick and dense
and the points where muscles were attached are robust.) This metabolic
revolution substituted routinized, repetitive work of grinding intensity
and a diet of low variety and protein content for the metabolically
varied physical activities of hunting and gathering and the enormous
variety of food and high protein content of hunter gatherer diets. Within
a few thousand years much of humanity had come to rely on a few starchy
crops for the overwhelming bulk of their calories. The repetitive work of
agriculture and grain processing left their mark in the high incidence of
arthritis that is found in the skeletons of our agriculturalist
ancestors.
Even today, most of the third world lives on a few starchy crops and
they exhibit the damage that a high carbohydrate diet with too little
fresh plant and animal foods can inflict. Those people who populate the
areas where agriculture began earliest show what is called a
Mediterranean physical type characterized, according to Webster, as
medium or short stature, slender build and small heads. Third world
children, living in rural, agricultural areas, live almost entirely on
grains. They rarely eat fresh fruit or vegetables and eat meat even less
often. They achieve less stature and test performance than urban children
and suffer skeletal and dental deficiencies. It is easy to tell from the
skeletons of our ancestors whether they were agriculturalists or hunter
gatherers. The agriculturalists have bad teeth, bone lesions, small and
underdeveloped skeletons and small craniums compared to hunter gatherers.
The important metabolic revolutions to follow agriculture were the
industrial and information revolutions. These energy conserving
revolutions lowered the level and variety of the metabolic challenges we
face still more.
Our ancestors are us. It was only 10,000 years ago that agriculture
changed the human lifeway from hunting and gathering to settled
agriculture. And the dramatic decline in human energy expenditure of the
industrial age occurred no more than 200 years ago. The information and
television age is no more than two decades old. In this brief time span
evolution has made few, if any, changes in what we inherited from the
prior 3 million years.
Fitness in a Modern World
The adaptive and variable energy demands of our ancestral existence
are gone. We live a low energy flux and metabolically unvaried existence
in bodies designed for another lifeway. We are hunter/gatherers in
pin-stripe suits, living a sedentary life and it is killing us in ways
our ancestors never experienced. Virtually all the degenerative
diseases--atherosclerosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, osteoporesis,
declining muscle mass--of modern civilization are unheard of among hunter
gatherers and were not part of our ancestral experience.
Most modern fitness prescriptions are static and agricultural. These
programs model the body as a machine, not as an adaptive organism.
Consequently, they prescribe a regime in which the body is underfed and
over-trained. They are not based on adaptation, but on steady state
analysis. These models assume the body is a linear process that maintains
a steady state. In fact, all bodily processes are highly non-linear and
these non-linearities must be exploited in any effective fitness program.
The key to exploiting the highly non-linear and dynamic adaptive
metabolic processes of the human body is to achieve the right mixture of
intensity and variety of activities.
Here is an example of the Zen-like twists that adaptive, non-linear
systems like human metabolism follow that confound mechanistic thinking.
The body uses fat in the aerobic (ST and lower IT) zone. So, linear
thinking suggests that to burn fat you should operate in that zone. It
would not surprise someone trained to understand the adaptive
capabilities of the human body that if you burn more fat the body will
find a way to produce more. And this is just what happens when you flow
energy through the aerobic pathway; your body releases hormone messengers
that signal higher fat production.
You do burn a higher proportion of calories as fat in the aerobic
zone, but that is no reason to stay there. You burn more calories and
more fat in total when you train at high intensity. And you do not open
the metabolic pathways that cause your body to make more fat. Energy that
flows over the anaerobic pathway signals your body to make more muscle
and to burn fat.
You incur an oxygen depth that raises metabolism for days after a
high intensity session. Above all, you bring adaptations that burn fat.
As the body remodels in response to the adaptive challenge presented by a
brief, high-intensity session, it preferentially burns fat. In addition,
you put on lean muscle mass that burns energy continuously. From 60 to 70
per cent of the energy you burn is at your basal metabolic rate. If you
gain lean muscle mass you raise your basal metabolic rate and, thus, burn
more energy 24 hours a day.
Too many people bring the wrong technology to their exercise. They
carry over the same technology they use in the office or factory, where
high volume and the ability to work long hours at routine tasks are often
the keys to success. Or they bring the technology of the research lab to
their exercise. Research on exercise physiology focuses almost
exclusively on aerobic exercise and creates a bias against anaerobic
exercise. High volume, repetitive exercise is the wrong technology for a
living organism and it is not the stuff the human body is adapted to do.
The right exercise technology is the one that shaped the human body; it
is the activity patterns characteristic of the hunting and gathering our
ancestors practiced 40,000 years ago, when the first fully modern homo
sapiens appeared on the scene. These same activity patterns are seen in
the movements of living hunter gatherers and wild animals.
If your personal trainer is working you out three days a week, doing
three sets of the same exercises, or, worse, 5 or even 6 days a week,
find another trainer. You are flooding your body with hormones that
consume lean body mass. These hormones also preferentially consume fast
twitch muscle, the very substance you are after for strength, lean mass,
and vitality. You are draining your adaptive capacity so that you cannot
build, or even keep up with the load. Worse still, you are compromising
your immune system.
Mechanistic prescriptions fail because they do not present the
metabolic challenges and variety of the ancestral environment for which
our bodies are designed. Working out 5 or 6 days a week doing many sets
of exercises per body part and spending over an hour per workout imposes
a chronic load on the body for which it is poorly designed to adapt.
Virtually all the body's adaptive mechanisms are designed to deal with
acute, not chronic, stresses. Exercise should mimic the activities of our
ancestral existence; we are adaptive organisms that thrive on variety,
not machines designed for high volume routine.
The importance of play to the human species is evident in the degree
to which adults retain juvenile characteristics. This form of
developmental delay (neoteny) let the brain grow relative to body size.
Neoteny allows us to retain the capability to adapt and invent and remain
playful well past the age typical of other species. The typical gym head
or jogger logging hours of weight or miles at moderate intensity is
working, not playing. He or she is engaged in a chronically stressful
activity, not healthy play. Neither of these methods for achieving
fitness is a model of activity that conceivably could been typical of our
evolutionary past. An adaptive hunter-gatherer designed for mobility,
variety and play cannot thrive on an industrial or agricultural program
for fitness. The human body is an organism, not a machine.
The Evolutionary Model
The evolutionary model combines activities of varying intensity to
mimic our ancestral hunter-gatherer existence. The key is to hit the
right balance of intensity and variety. You have to live in the fast
twitch (FT) muscle fiber zone where your metabolic rate is many times
your basal metabolism for intermittent, brief intervals. Most sedentary
individuals live entirely in the ST region and never achieve the
metabolic peaks that are essential to adaptation. Grim aerobicizers and
high volume weight trainers live in the slow twitch (ST) and intermediate
twitch (IT) muscle fiber zone and do way too much work.
The evolutionary model of a healthy lifestyle is to combine brief,
but intense, work outs in a gym (the FT zone) with a wide variety of
activities that mix intensity and duration randomly (mixing the IT and ST
zones with brief spurts into the FT zone). Roller blading, bicycling,
walking, sprinting, tennis, basketball, power walking, hitting softballs
and so on are the sorts of activities that mix IT and ST fibers with
intermittent FT action.
Activities are spaced randomly according to a power law distribution
which not only fits the hunter-gather activity rhythms but also virtually
every process in a healthy human being---healthy heart beats, brain
waves, cellular ion channel pulses, and the coordination dynamics of
movement all have the distinctive signature of self-similarity and power
law variation. It is when these patterns show too much regularity that
organization and coordination break down; for example, epileptics show
too much, not too little, regularity in their brain waves. Heart attacks
are the result of too much regularity in contractions that leads to a
loss of coordination and seizure.
A power law looks like this: Most of its mass is located at the low
intensity activities and there is little mass at the highest intensities.
The evidence strongly indicates this kind of intensity-frequency mix was
typical of our ancestors. The far left zone, at the peaks and with brief
duration, is the FT zone. The middle zone is the IT and ST zone and the
long tail at the right is the ST zone. Most people live in the right hand
zone. Even when they exercise they only make it into the IT zone and do
not trigger the adaptive metabolic pathways that open only when you enter
the FT zone.
You need to live intermittently and briefly in the FT zone to live
according to our ancestral lifeway. You also need to enjoy the variation
at the far right tail and get plentiful rest. One of the worst features
of modern life is its compression in the variability of our
activities---both the right hand and left hand tails are compressed
relative to the variation in a power law. When the ends of the activity
distribution are compressed to the middle, our activities fall within a
narrow frequency band. A compressed distribution is a chronic stressor,
we get neither enough playful, intense activity nor enough rest. Animals
in the wild move according to power laws. Think of a lion or jaguar. They
are muscular and lean and spend long periods in languid rest and brief,
highly intense periods in the hunt.
Power Law Training
Why is a power law a good model of adaptive training? A power law
describes a statistical distribution of intensity and frequency of action
that is characteristic of a complex adaptive system functioning at
maximum efficiency. Power law variation represents a balance of order and
variability that is representative of self-organized, adaptive systems.
All humans are self-organized dynamic systems. Systems that live in the
critical region between order and chaos display power law behavior.
How do you train according to a power law? A power law of the form
Intensity = Frequency- beta, gives the right balance of structure and
novelty. The music of Bach and Mozart contains the mixture of structure
and novelty characteristic of power laws. The power law is a statistical
distribution, meaning it describes probabilities, not certainties. Hence,
randomization is an essential element of power law training. But, so is
pattern. Your activities cannot become too random, or they lose pattern
and drift without memory. There will be some drift in frequency so that
there will be time periods when you will not do high intensity workouts
for two or more weeks (periodization falls out of the power law
naturally). At other times, you may have 2 or 3 high intensity sessions
in a row.
The real point is to embrace randomness and variety within the
context of structured repetitiveness. Good intuitive models of power law
variation are the movements of the wild lion or the music of Bach or
Mozart.
NBA basketball is an example of power law variation. Pro basketball
is not an aerobic sport, it actually is an anaerobic sport full of power
moves, quick bursts, sprints, and leaps mixed in with half time rest,
quarter breaks, pauses, free throws, time outs, and bench time. What NBA
players have is the ability to use these brief intervals to quickly
recover their phosphate energy stores (they use the alactic pathway
discussed below).
NBA athletes and NFL defensive backs provide evidence that power law
training makes you powerful and lean. NBA players are the leanest and
most powerful in any professional sport (their body fat is around 5 to 7
percent). NFL defensive backs and running backs come close (around 8
percent body fat). Like NBA players, NFL defensive and running backs do
burst/rest moves through out the game, randomly timed, with a duration
and intensity pattern that looks like a power law (patterns are not
bunched up around a mean, they are spread over all scales and with the
characteristic power law shape shown in the graph above).
Low intensity, ST activities are the high frequency activities in
the long right hand tail of the power law distribution. These ST
activities include maintaining posture, walking, and slow running.
Intermediate intensity activities, such as moderately paced jogging,
tennis, and aerobics, mix IT and ST fibers and their frequencies are
distributed over the middle range of the power curve. Less frequent, high
intensity activities like jumping, sprinting and high intensity training,
hit the FT fiber. These high intensity activities must be infrequent and
brief in duration as shown by the left hand tail of the power
distribution.
A power law distribution of activities means the intensity, spacing,
duration and volume of training are variable in order to present a
constant novelty in metabolic challenges while retaining enough structure
and repetitiveness to maximize adaptive capability.
When you train like a hunter, you follow a power law distribution of
intensity and frequency. You distribute activities so that you hit highly
intense metabolic peaks briefly and intermittently. This is the FT fiber
region. You also scale intensity within a set.
ASCENDING THRESHOLD SETS
In order to hit all the fibers and scale intensity according to a
power law, I do supersets of ascending weight and descending repetitions.
The sequence is intended to move up the energy and muscle fiber
hierarchy, recruiting successively more muscle fibers and different fiber
types until all but the FT fibers drop out. This exploits the "size
principle" which says that the threshold of intensity needed to stimulate
the motorneurons that fire the muscles increases with the size of the
motorneuron. The FT fibers have the largest motorneurons and, therefore,
require the highest intensity to fire. Power law training exploits this
feature.
You apply the technology by doing one long superset of ascending
intensity to force the ST and then the IT fibers to drop out until only
the FT fibers are left. I begin a set with a fairly light weight, lifting
and lowering the weight slowly to prefatigue the ST fibers. Do this for
15 repetitions. Then, taking only enough time to increase the weight do 8
to 10 more repetitions at a faster speed. Increase the weight one more
time and do 4 to 6 repetitions at high, but controlled speed. I also
slightly increase the speed within each set of repetitions, aiming at the
FT fibers near the end of each stage.
I pause between stages of the superset just long enough to change
the weights and this 10 to 20 seconds is enough to regenerate the ATP and
PCr to do the next set. By the third phase, the lactic acid is burning,
but it will quickly be taken up because I don't do any more of that
exercise and move on to something completely different. (This is an
advanced technique. It takes conditioning and a tolerance for lactic acid
to get to this stage. To begin, do only two stages of the superset,
aiming for 12 and 7 reps. Then move on.) I may aim at 15 reps, 8 reps, 4
reps in each phase of the superset, but no one is counting; it is always
the acid burn that tells me when to stop, not some preset target of reps.
I do not go to complete failure, ever. Failure at the last rep is
over rated because by then the high energy muscle phosphates are gone and
the lactic acid is limiting your power. You lose form and get hurt when
you push too hard on the last rep. You don't develop strength using the
muscle when its power is depleted and restricted by lactate, it is better
to use alactic training (see below) for power.
Each exercise is one brief superset with only 10 seconds rest
between. Then it is over and that is all I do for that muscle group and I
move quickly to the next group.
ALACTIC TRAINING
Another variation in the power law technology I use in my training
is designed to work what is called the alactic energy pathway. This
training exploits power law variation as well; it just works farther to
the left on the power curve, well up the intensity scale into the FT
fiber region. In this region, the duration of effort must be extremely
short, on the order of a few seconds and milliseconds. Here, you imagine
an ancestor like homo erectus sprinting on the grassy savanna to a patch
of trees to escape one of the formidable predators that roamed over
Africa 2 million years ago. The alactic pathway is what supplies this
energy in the first few seconds; it is the engine for the "fight or
flight" response that permits us to make our quickest and most powerful
moves.
The alactic pathway is called that because it relies on the high
energy phosphates stored in our muscles whose metabolism is rapid and
does not produce lactic acid. Hence, it is a-lactic. The muscles contain
enough phosphates (PCr and ATP) to generate extremely high force for up
to 3 seconds. During that time the movement is powered primarily by FT
fiber. Beyond that time you begin to use muscle glycogen and produce
lactic acid. Those extreme physical feats you hear about---mothers
lifting cars off their children and so on---draw on this high energy
pathway. At peak intensity, some athletes may generate up to 7,000 or
8,000 watts. This power is generated in very brief episodes, for example,
in a high jump a power of 4,000 watts is produced in 0.02 seconds. For
durations exceeding a minute, a rate of 350 watts can be produced only by
elite, highly trained athletes for no more than 4 or 5 minutes. Beyond a
second or two at high power levels, lactate begins to accumulate and
limit performance. These data fit a power law perfectly in the way power
declines with duration (see the power curve above). They are further
support for the power law training techniques developed in my book.
In working for power one wants to hit the alactic pathway. The ATP
and PCr energy sources for alactic power are quickly regenerated within 5
to 10 seconds for trained individuals. Those who are new to power law
technology may take longer to recover until they have worked at it
awhile. One can hit the alactic pathway to gain power and not build
lactic acid by doing what I call alactic training. It is very easy to do,
not tiring, and a real source of power. It hits the FT fibers more
completely than just about anything else.
I do sets that I call 1/5s or "one, fives" because that describes
how I do them. I do one repetition, then put the weight down for 5
seconds. Then I do another rep and put the weight down another 5 seconds.
Then another, and so on for a sequence of about 4 to 8 repetitions.
That's it, then move on to the next exercise. What you have done is to
achieve between 4 and 8 high quality repetitions without building
lactate. The 5 second pause between reps is enough to regenerate the
muscle phosphates if you are in reasonable shape. Up to 10 seconds pause
is appropriate until you have acquired the ability to recover quickly.
You can use reasonably heavy weight without the risk that goes with doing
multiple repetitions with heavy weights.
Alactic training is much safer and more productive of strength than
training to full failure. The reason is simple, doing multiple
repetitions builds lactic acid which limits your power and ability to
handle heavy weight. By doing just 1 rep and resting 5 seconds you retain
nearly all of your muscle power. This lets you handle heavier weight and
do quality movements. You never force yourself to work to failure, as
many muscle magazines and training authorities seem to recommend. There
is no danger because you use a weight that is below your maximum and do
not try to force a depleted muscle through another repetition. There is
no straining to try to do that "last rep".
The theory that the "last rep" is the best one is wrong in my
opinion. You have little strength left by then because the high energy
phosphates are gone and the lactic acid limits your strength. This means
that the reps leading up to that last rep must use a weight well below
what will tax your muscle when it is at full strength. Multiple reps
build endurance, not power. Your endurance is developed by the ascending
sets discussed above. Also, much of what passes for endurance is actually
the ability to recover quickly from peak effort (this is the kind of
endurance NBA players have). By doing a sequence of 4 to 8 or more 1 reps
with 5 seconds in between, you train your recovery ability so that you
restore power quickly. Because phosphate replenishment uses the aerobic
pathway, and uses fat preferentially over carbohydrate, you indirectly
develop your aerobic capacity and burn fat as well when you do alactic
training.
Even though you are doing only 1 rep, you don't try to do maximum
weight. Just use a challenging weight as low as 25 and as high as 10 per
cent below your maximum. You can even progress to a higher percentage of
your maximum as you to these 1 reps. With 1/5s you get up to 8 quality
reps at high weight.
An alactic program that works well for me.
Plyometrics are another form of alactic exercise. Plyometrics really
get the FT fiber. I find them to be quite safe (given my condition and
experience, that is) if you do not do drop jumps; that is, you jump up
rather than down from height. I leap to catch a high bar, trying to hit
my chin on the bar and starting a few feet away from the bar to extend
the distance. With a jump and walking back to the starting position this
is an alactic exercise (the return gives time to regenerate the
phosphates). If there is no high bar, jumping to touch a high point on a
wall will do.
Bench push offs are another safe use of plyometric technology. When
I do them I stand away from a low bench. Feet together. Fall to the bench
to catch it by your hands at chest height (you should be in a push up
position at this time). Then I explode with my arms to return to the
standing position, keeping my legs as straight as I am able and still
attain the starting position.
POWER WALKING
Our ancestors walked a lot carrying heavy weight in order to move
camp and bring back as much of the kill as they could. Power walking,
laden with real weight on the order of 35 to 100 pounds, is an effective
modern version of what our ancestors did. Power walking with a back pack
or scuba diving weights around the waist dramatically increases the
intensity and effectiveness of walking. And it is about as effective as
jogging for aerobic capacity, without the pounding and damage. It is what
women among hunter gatherers do when they gather. For example, Kung San
women typically carry an infant on a seven mile trip foraging for plant
foods and return with a 35 pound load. They only do this 2 or 3 times a
week for they live in a kind of natural affluence where food is readily
available.
Males among hunter gatherers do not carry the large game our
ancestors did, so they are not a good model of power walking for males.
Consider this instead as a model. A historical source reports that 5
Indian braves drove 5 bison into a pit. After they killed these 2000
pound bison, they pulled them out of a pit more than 10 feet deep, lined
them up and skinned and butchered them. Then, they carried as much as
they could back to camp to get others to return for the rest. What a
wonderful model of fitness, combining speed, power, strength, and
stamina. You can be sure this successful hunt was followed by plenty of
rest and play and feasting. This model is always on my mind when I think
of what fitness means.
YOUR PERSONAL TRAINING
Everyone has to adapt their own workouts and activity patterns to
their own capacities and intentions. If evolution teaches us anything it
is that we are all different even though we share a large set of common
attributes and metabolic processes. For most people, a move from
mechanistic training to adaptive training would consist primarily of
cutting back on the number of sets and how often they work out. This is
combined with a little pushing up of the pace and intensity of the
workouts and cutting way back on how long they are and on the rest
between sets.
The sophisticated variations on the power law that I use are not required
and are there when you gain condition and strength. A brisk
and intense workout that leaves you feeling challenged in each
exercise, whatever your personal level of fitness, is what we are after.
One upper and one lower body workout per week, of no more than 40 minutes
duration, and one all around workout per week of completely different
exercises is a good model to begin with. The all around work out should
be focused on symmetry and grace and the more intense workouts on the
large muscles.
SYMMETRY
Symmetry is crucial for it is a reliable evolutionary clue to health
and, hence, it is something we find attractive. Tumors and pathologies
produce gross asymmetries and our love of symmetry reflects the
reproductive success of our ancestors who were sensitive to these clues.
Stay away from biceps and triceps stuff, they make you lose symmetry.
Work on calves, traps, neck and back. You look taller, another reliable
evolutionary clue that women use to find good genes, if you move more
mass to the neck and shoulder girdle and to the calves. And you will be
more balanced and powerful. A thick trunk is another evolutionary clue.
It is a signal that suggests pregnancy in the female and pathology in the
male. I strive for the X-look---mass in the shoulder girdle, upper (not
lower) chest and back, the calves and lower quads. This requires strict
form so that you do not use your trunk to heave weights. If you work out
like a grunt, heaving and cheating on reps, you will look like a grunt.
INTENSITY AND BREVITY
Power law training requires intense but brief work outs and long
intervals between sessions. Intensity and brevity are the keys to
promoting the hormone drives that are essential to adaptation. So
important are these drives that one could say they are the real objective
of the workout. A workout that is over long depletes the adaptive
hormones and causes a surge in destructive hormones.
The open intervals between high intensity sessions are filled with
activity of intermediate and low intensity, with a spurt into the FT
zone. These activities include roller blading, hiking with one of my
grandchildren in a back carrier, or walking and sprinting in deep sand at
the beach, riding my motorcycle on back canyon roads and high mountain
dirt trails (wind chill is a very effective device for shedding fat),
shooting baskets, and so on. This is not a frenetic schedule, filled with
mandatory exercise. It is playful and fun, not work.
Variation in weight, repetitions, and speed is consistent with power
law training because there is no characteristic scale in a power law.
Power law activities exhibit self-similarity at all scales. This means
for speed, weight, and duration. My work outs are randomly timed; they
may fall on two consecutive days, though this would be rare. At the other
extreme, they may be a week apart. I aim for one upper and one lower body
high intensity work out per week along with one easier, all round work
out. Sometimes, I feel like more and may do up to 4 workouts of varying
intensity during a week. Often only one or two workouts fill out the
week. An average workout is 25 minutes. No workout is more than 40
minutes, most are less. I often finish my whole workout while other
people are still doing sets on a machine or a body part. I never leave
the gym tired, just relaxed and feeling good.
Motivation
If you think about the challenges our ancestors faced it will help
you realize that what some fitness and motivational experts see as
motivational problems are actually evolved adaptations. Recognition and
acceptance go a long way toward helping you make healthy changes.
1. The fact that you are alive is a remarkable thing. The odds against it
are great. The genes you carry contain information from a continuous
strand of surviving organisms that extends 2 billion years back in time.
You are an improbable event and your existence is testimony to the
toughness and adaptiveness of the ancestral line from which you come. You
are a survivor, well equiped to live and be successful in the world for
which your body and mind are adapted. Recognize, however, that the world
for which your genes encode a successful design is not today's world; it
is the world of some 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.
2. Your brain and body "expect" you to live as a hunter gatherer. They
are highly adaptive by design, for that is the key requirement of our
ancestral lifeway. But, a natural life is one of movement and action, of
challenge and response, of variety and adaptation. Your brain still
"sees" sensory inputs as though you are a hunter gatherer and, at the
instinctual level, directs your actions according to what spells adaptive
success in the environment of your ancestors. (Example: you freeze before
a large audience because your ancestors increased their odds of surviving
when exposed on open ground by freezing to escape detection.) If you
accept that some parts of this metaphor are true of you, you will be more
relaxed and less apt to punish yourself for things you do, or don't do
(like get out and move around).
3. Laziness and over-eating are adaptations that let your ancestors pass
their genes down to you. These labels place over-critical value
judgements on what are evolved adaptations. Energy was a precious
resource in the ancestral environment, and it still is in the third world
where people barely get enough to eat. What we call laziness is an
adaptive, instinctual behavior that kept our ancestors from wasting
precious energy in a world where high energy expenditure was required for
food. Because the agricultural revolution dramatically lowered the price
of carbohydrate, we have abundant and cheap food energy available at
nearly zero energy expenditure. Because cheap carbohydrate is all around
us, the caloric return to our foodseeking energy expenditures is so high
now that we have to find ways to expend energy in healthful ways.
Evolutionary training "tricks" the brain into thinking it is still 40,000
BC and resets your metabolism as well.
4. Variety and play are the essential human attributes. By keeping your
work outs brief and exhilarating you won't get bored. By adding lots of
outdoor activity and play, you will enjoy the power and fitness you gain.
If you start a new sport, or pick up one long neglected as you begin
evolutionary training, you will see how the power you gain improves your
play. The feedback between the training and your new power in the sport
will be habit forming. (The evolutionary basis of sport seems clear. For
example, the number of players in most popular team sports today is about
equal to the number of prime age males that would be alive in a typical
paleolithic band of hunter gatherers.)
I fail to see how anyone can train 5 or 6 days a week in the gym and
for hours at a time. That is factory or agricultural work, not anything
human beings were evolved to do. And the paradox is that you will gain
less strength and fitness if you overtrain. And you will join the
thousands who quit out of sheer boredom.
I keep no records for this encourages the accounting mentality which
is the bane of adaptive training. It is the burn and heart rate that tell
you when you are in the FT zone. Record keeping focuses you on the wrong
goals. You begin to think it is important how much you can bench press or
how big your arms are. It is what you can do outside the gym that
matters, not what you can do in it. Big arms ruin speed and coordination
for they locate too much mass far from the central axis of the body,
creating a high polar moment of inertia.
Lean Body Mass and Health
Intermittent, intense and brief work outs build muscle mass that
burns energy continuously. They promote hormone drives that keep you
young. They switch the body's metabolic pathways so that food goes to
muscle and organ mass and not to fat. The intensity is the key to
reaching the fast twitch fibers of the muscles, which are the key fibers
to staying young. A primary indicator of aging is loss of fast twitch
muscle fiber. Retaining your metabolic headroom through intense, brief
and variable training promotes retention of lean body mass, organ and
brain mass---you stay younger and smarter than joggers and dieters who
lose muscle, organ and brain mass. Aerobic exercise of long duration and
moderate intensity isn't the answer. It promotes free radical damage
through the oxidation of fat and when it is done often enough and at low
intensity, it catabolizes muscle mass. There is a suspiciously high rate
of cancer among marathoners.
Lean body mass is the primary indicator of health status. Death is
universal among persons who lose 40 per cent of their lean body mass.
Lean body mass is the most accurate predictor of survival time for
victims of starvation, trauma, infection, AIDS and other acute diseases,
regardless of the nature of the disease. So powerful a predictor of
health status is the rate of loss of lean body mass that it seems to be
part of the process of dying. Rapid protein wastage is a mediator, not
just an indicator of death.
Dieters beware. Rapid weight loss wastes lean body mass. Starvation
studies show that brain mass may decline as much as 3 to 5 per cent with
food deprivation. Other organs lose far more mass. A pigeon lost 93 per
cent of its fat tissue, but 45 per cent of its heart, 42 per cent of its
skeletal muscle and 71 per cent of its spleen on a starvation diet. These
experiments are hard to do on humans, but the Nazis did do such human
experiments and found similar rates of loss of lean body and organ
tissue. Brain scans on anorexics reveal that they have shriveled brains.
People who eat only once a day waste lean body mass all day. They
are awash in catabolic hormones that use lean body mass to try to keep
their brain alive on the glucose it requires. When they finally eat, they
eat so much they get a surge of insulin that packs the energy in the food
away in fat. Over time, their body composition changes---they come to
have this small body inside a relatively inert shell of fat. They look
large, but the active part of them is small.
Don't keep track of your total weight, keep track of your lean body
mass. Your lean body mass is the real, metabolically active, you. It is
the tissue that allows you to function and think and live. If you gain
lean body mass, you lose fat and you keep it off because your metabolic
rate rises. Everyone should keep track of their lean body mass to monitor
their health status.
Aging is a slow form of lean body mass loss. Adults lose about 5 per
cent of their lean body mass per decade after they enter their thirties.
Most of the muscle they lose is FT fiber, for they cease by some age to
live in the FT region. They settle into the ST region and, consequently,
as they age their muscle fibers atrophy. The 40 per cent rule may hold
here too. Progressive aging and deterioration resulting in a 40 per cent
loss of lean body mass may be a precursor or mediator of the dying
process. The aging just die over a longer time scale than do acutely ill
individuals. The aged lose lean mass and most of it is FT fiber. Because
they do not and cannot stress their skeletons, they lose bone density.
Their skeletons are vulnerable to falls and their muscles are not strong
or quick enough to keep them from falling because their FT fibers
atrophy. Keeping your FT fibers is the best way to stay young.
Feeding
Eating is dead simple.
1. Homo sapiens is an omnivore; it is not all that important what you eat
as long as it contains ample variety and lots of amino acids and
essential lipids. Hunter gatherer diets contain an enormous variety of
plant foods and are high in protein (the median is about 35 per cent of
calories from protein). The only universal characteristic of ancestral
and living hunter gatherer diets is the almost complete absence of simple
carbohydrates. There were no simple carbohydrates like sugar and pasta.
Fruits were tough and fibrous, not the refined, sweet stuff we have
today. The closest thing to a simple carb was honey, rare and guarded by
wild bees. There were no grain or cereal sources of carbs in the
ancestral diet.
2. Live at high energy flux and eat randomly, varying food intake to the
scale of activities. This includes the odd brief fast, as though hunting
is lean. The body regulates food intake naturally when you live at the
high energy flux of an evolutionary trainer. It is when we are sedentary
and live at low energy flux that our appetite mechanisms fail to match
energy intake to expenditure (the evidence shows that infants regulate
energy intake precisely and children only lose this ability when they
become sedentary). Animals confined to feeding pens or cages eat more
than they expend in energy. That is how cattle are fattened for
slaughter. Humans who live at low energy flux because they are sedentary
and inactive will over eat, just like cattle in a feeding pen. Even
though they are free to move about and are not caged, their metabolism is
trapped in a feeding pen mode.
Its another one of those wonderful evolutionary paradoxes. When we
are inactive, we trigger an eating response and eat more than we expend
in energy. The basis of this may lie in an adaptation that would let our
ancestors recover from the intense activities of the hunt by eating
beyond their energy requirements when they rest in order to rebuild
tissue and energy stores. The ability to eat beyond energy needs would be
essential to the survival of any organism that lived in the world of our
ancestors with its variable energy expenditure and intake.
The answer is clear: live as though you are a free-ranging, adaptive
human being, not like some animal being fattened in a pen for the kill.
It is hopeless to try to attain the precisely balanced intake and
expenditure of calories preached by diet promoters. And it is impossible
to do if you are sedentary for you trigger this evolved over eating
adaptation.
Our ancestors were better nourished than all but a few of us because
they ate low calorie, nutritionally dense foods, all fresh and
uncontaminated, and they ate in large quantities to fulfill their high
energy needs. Dieters who face calorically rich, low nutrient foods and
eat in small quantities face a real risk of malnutrition. If they are
sedentary the risk is even higher because they must restrict food intake
so severely.
I am more concerned with energy expenditure than intake, for it is
energy expenditure that determines energy flux and appetite. High energy
flux brings our appetite control mechanisms into the ancestral range
where they were evolved to operate.
3. Live as though you are in the world that existed before the invention
of agriculture. There was no grain or cereal or manufactured food in the
ancestral environment. Our ancestors ate fresh fruits and vegetables and
meat. They got no milk beyond the age of 4. They ate no cereals and
consumed no vegetable oils. Their diets were not particularly low on
fats; indeed, for a few million years prehuman hominids may have lived on
the fatty bone marrow and brains of scavenged kills more than on fresh
meat. Even when they became premier big game hunters, humans preferred
the fatty cuts of meat. Our brains use glucose for energy (and hence our
preference for sweets) but are made of lipids. Some of these essential
brain lipids can be gotten only from animal fat. At least, that is where
our ancestors got them.
Seeds did not enter the diet until about 14,000 years ago. Vegetable
oils are a completely novel substance in the evolution of human eating.
The processed oils now recommended so heavily by nutritionists are no
more than a few decades old. There is zero evidence to indicate that
eating this stuff is a good thing to do. And, it is well known that
processing alters the shape of the fatty chains making them nearly
impossible to metabolize and that they are readily oxidized to form free
radical chain reactions that damage body tissue.
The intolerance that many people show to grains, milk and seafoods
can, in part, be explained by how recently they entered the human diet.
Many of us are poorly adapted to these foods, particularly if we are from
a culture that began to rely on agriculture or dairying recently. We are
not adapted because gene frequencies have not settled to the range where
such individuals become rare in the population. That will happen only
after enough time has passed for the lactose-and grain-intolerant among
us to leave fewer children to carry our genes into the future than those
who can eat the stuff.
Epidemic carbohydrate intolerance is another clue that we are not
yet adapted to a post-agricultural, post-industrial, information age
diet. To emphasize once more, the only universal in the omnivorous human
eating record as reflected in hunter gatherer diets and in the ancestral
diet is the absence of simple- and grain- or cereal-based carbohydrate.
The conventional wisdom and diet advice of the experts that you should
eat grain- or cereal-based carbohydrate flies in the face of the
evolutionary record.
4. Eat when hungry. For me, that is at least 4 times a day, often more,
but sometimes less. Eating once a day degrades lean body mass and reduces
your metabolism. Your lean body disintegrates and your fat mass
increases. Nobody who wants to be lean and healthy should eat only once a
day.
5. I take antioxidants. Our food sources of minerals and antioxidants are
not as rich as those of the ancient past. Free radical oxidation of body
tissues is one of the primary aging mechanisms. Scavenge these free
radicals with antioxidants.
The beauty of the 40,000 BC eating model is that you eat no canned,
frozen, packaged, or manufactured food; all fresh foods, never fried,
always roasted, broiled, boiled, or whatever. You don't have to read
labels because nothing you buy to eat comes with a label (nature doesn't
do this). Some latitude is necessary (I do not believe in rigid rules for
anything anyway), but the 40,000 BC model is always guiding your choices.
In short, live, eat, work and play like it is 40,000 BC while you
enjoy what the modern world has to offer. Live on the power curve where
life and intelligence are maximized.
Does evolutionary training work? It does for me. At 59 years of age,
I look like an NFL running back: 6' 1", 205 pounds with a dense and
athletic musculature and less than 8% body fat. Based on body
composition, strength, flexibility, reaction time, and blood profile, a
research institute rates my biological age at 32. Evolutionary training
is so productive I spend very little time in the gym, usually from 1 to 2
hours a week. The intensity of training like an adaptive hunter is
exhilarating and the brevity leaves you feeling fresh. You gain time for
work and play. You also gain a toughness and energetic plasticity that
leaves you poised for the many adaptive challenges that life brings.
