spEEdfrEEk Posted January 15, 2004 Share Posted January 15, 2004 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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