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Letting you in on our debate/discussion, part 1
publication date: Oct 8, 2010
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author/source: Arthur De Vany
There is no distinction that is important between MovNat and Evolutionary Fitness forms of exercise. The gym is just a convenient place where people can apply power law variation in a safe way. I am outside as much as I can be and use the desert and golf course below to run sprints and track Roadrunners as they hunt; a definite power law pattern of burst/rest activity and periods of complete stillness. I scramble over the rocks below often, but with care.
It is important not to get hurt or injured. Fitness is not a Black Swan kind of thing, but injuries are disastrous negative Black Swans. There are upper bounds on fitness gains, so the benefits are easily outweighed by dramatic injuries. When you know your way around a gym, you see that it is cognitively challenging if you make it that way. A fast-paced workout over a variety of movements and weights and intensities is a total challenge to the body and the mind. On a treadmill, you cognitively disengage---doing it on autopilot. During an intense exercise session, you must remain cognitively engaged and deeply so. Cognitive engagement is a matter of will and challenge. What I particularly like about the higher intensity, intermittent training I do is that it toughens you; you feel up to any challenge when you have finished. I am careful not to rehearse failure, as so many body builders do, by never doing any exercise to full failure. I rehearse success. I feel that I am in a fight or flight situation each time I am in the gym. I exercise as though my life depended on it, which it does. My HGH and BDNF are off the scale after an Evolutionary Fitness workout. Brevity and intensity are the keys. I see no reason not to apply high technology to my workouts and do, with many sophisticated movements and techniques that produce great results in little time. And with no danger of injury. My tennis is cognitively challenging (particularly at my stage of learning the sport) and is a pure burst/rest form of activity. Did you know that the distribution of strokes in a tennis point is a power law? Most are over quickly, some are extraordinarily long (at least for professionals). Modern life is a life of compressed variation, which is probably why experiments show that enrichment and complexity are beneficial. We live a life of routine and more or less normally distributed activities. This is not the natural, power law pattern. We also eat too regularly, another area where power law intermittency is important. All hormones are released in pulsate fashion of bursts, not a steady drip. Intermittency in activity and food intake restore this pattern. If there were only two exercises I could do, they would be sprinting intermixed with easy walking and pulling things like logs or my 6000 pound Range Rover. Arthur De Vany Professor Emeritus Economics and Mathematical Behavioral Sciences UCI asdevany@uci.edu 435-817-3228 On Oct 6, 2010, at 5:20 AM, Francis Heylighen wrote: First, it may be worth noting that I appear to have established an excellent connection with Erwan Le Corre. Erwan is, together with new ECCO member Art De Vany, one of the best known proponents of the paleo lifestyle, and the originator of the MovNat exercise philosophy, which I greatly admire. The reason I haven't invited him to join ECCO is that he is not a scientist, but a fitness instructor busy with more concrete matters than our usually very abstract discussions. However, in my exchanges with Erwan I was struck by his intelligence and the depth of his insights in nature and the human condition. Moreover, he has invited two people with a science background, Robb Wolf and Jamie Guined, to join his MovNat team, in order to back up his approach with research. One of those has also reacted to my post below. There may be synergies between the MovNat approach, which is more practical and exercise-oriented, and our more theoretical ECCO approach. I'll keep you informed... I would in particular like to start a debate between Art's recommendation of power-law patterned exercises in a gym, and Erwan's more complex style of exercise in nature. Both seem to fit in with my nascent theory of complex challenges, but Erwan's approach seems more in line with evolution, and with the results of the "enriched environment" research. I am planning to investigate the "enriched environment" literature in more depth, as I suspect there are important things there to learn about the effects of complexity on cognition and fitness... |