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. My forthcoming book (The New
Evolution Diet, eBury in the UK; Evolutionary Fitness, Rodale in the
USA) integrates 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 prehuman 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
nutritionally 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,
and 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 deprivation 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 that 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 that 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 that 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 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, and osteoporosis, 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 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 fatter. 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. Thetypical 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 is a model of activity that conceivably could be 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 aerobicisors 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, workouts 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). Rollerblading, 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 makes 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. Wild animals 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 variationrepresents 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 = FrequencyBetagives 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, mixes
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. Thesehigh
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 motorneurons. 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 these 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, only elite, highly trained athletes can
produce a rate of 350 watts 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, and 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 rep 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.
Alactic Program
An alactic program that works well for me is the following.
4. Bench Push Offs: 12 plyometric moves--fall forward
to bench, push off to standing.
5. Leaps: 12 plyometric moves--one step jumps to high
bar, leap as high as possible.
6. Incline Dumb Bell Presses: high position, near the
ears at descent--1/5s, 5 times.
7. Concentration Curl: 1/5s, 6 times.
8. Calf Raises: 1 foot, no weight 30 times each. End
with calf leaps (jumping with both feet using calves only) about 15 times.
Plyometrics
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 backpack 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.
Personalizing Your 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 exercises that 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 Intensity
and Brevity
Power law training requires intense but brief workouts 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 rollerblading, 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 workouts 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 equipped 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 judgments 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 food-seeking 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 over train. And you will join the thousands who
quit out of sheer boredom.
I keep no records for this encourages the accounting
mentality that 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.
Goals set you up for failure. If you don't achieve them, you
will quit. You become impatient or see that it will take too long and you will
quit. In trying to speed your progress you will work out too often and imitate
the people in the gym around you who also do too many sets and do body builder
exercises that are not productive.
As to goals, don't set any. The ones you are likely to choose
are not functional. You will say I want to lose x pounds, but you really want
to lose fat not lean body mass. You actually want to gain lean body mass. Goals
that relate primarily to appearance are not deep enough to sustain you. They do
not relate to function and process.
You can't control the outcome, only the process. We really
aren't even in control of the process; the dynamics move us toward attractors,
not our intentions. Just accept that what you are doing is what your body and
mind were made to do and that this more active and metabolically challenging,
but playful and fun, lifestyle is how it is going to be from now on.
Your form will remodel to fulfill the functional demands you
place on your body. Get the derivatives right (the direction and magnitude of
change), don't worry about the levels. Goals are just ways to set yourself up
for failure. Train adaptively. As you monitor where you are, adapt your
training to move toward a target that is framed with respect to where you are
at that time and where you want to head. Setting goals is still a mental habit
carried over from the body as mechanism kind of thinking.
By keeping your work outs brief and exhilarating you won't
get bored. By adding lots of outdoors activity and play, you will enjoy the
power and fitness you are achieving. 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. 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 over train. And
you will join the thousands who quit out of sheer boredom.
Lean Body Mass and Health
Intermittent, intense and brief workouts 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. 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 lean body mass to monitor his or her
health status.
Aging is a slow form of lean body mass loss. What we call
aging is sedentary aging and carbohydrate abuse. The accumulation of damage
from hypoexertion and hyperinsulemia over a longer time scale is what aging is
in Western countries. 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
Evolutionary Fitness eating is simple, but it isn't
everything. One must consider food intake in the context of activity patterns.
You are an open energy system--- energy flows through your metabolic pathways
out into the environment around you. You must attain a rate of energy flow or
flux that is more characteristic of ancestral patterns so that appetite becomes
a reliable clue to food intake. A higher rate of flux will also be a key to
directing nutrients to muscle, bone, brain, and organ tissue rather than to
fat. Here are some keys to Evolutionary eating that are balanced against the
practical reality that we live in the 21 century rather than in 40,000 BC. I do
not try to eat like a Paleolithic ancestor, but I do use the insights of the
scientific literature on the Paleolithic diet to guide my food choices and
eating patterns. I also pay close attention to the scientific literature on
nutrition and exercise; but I use evolutionary reasoning to interpret this
literature because it is full of contradictions.
Homo sapiens is an omnivore; your diet must contain an ample
variety of fresh plant foods and lots of amino acids and essential lipids. The
only universal characteristic of ancestral and living hunter-gatherer diets is
the almost complete absence of grains and simple carbohydrates. There were no
simple carbohydrates like sugar and pasta in the evolutionary past. The Ice
Ages were times of protein plenty and scarce fat and carbohydrate. Fruits were
tough and fibrous, not the refined, sweet stuff we have today. The closest
thing to a simple carbohydrate was honey that was rare and guarded by wild
bees. There were no grain or cereal sources of carbohydrates in the ancestral
diet. 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).
Human metabolism cannot handle protein levels above 35 per cent over a long
term. Cofactors, in the form of fat or carbohydrate, are required in order to
utilize protein. So, variety and quality are the key objectives of the
Evolutionary Fitness Diet.
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. It's another
one of those 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 foods with low nutrient content and
who 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.
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 because the wild animals they hunted were very
lean. Modern meat contains around 33% fat as opposed to 4% fat in wild game.
And, there is a higher proportion of saturated to unsaturated fat in
grain-fattened modern meat. Consequently, even a diet moderate in fat, say 40%,
is high in saturated fat when it is composed of modern meats. In addition, most
individuals who eat moderate or high amounts of fat get it from fast foods and
bakery products and eat few vegetables or fruits. The fat in modern grain-fed
animals and in fried foods and baked goods is heavily weighted in Omega 6 fatty
acids relative to Omega 3 acids and contains large amounts of hydrogenated
fatty acids. Taken together, this imbalance of Omega 6 to Omega 3 fatty acids
and the novel fat molecules that result from hydrogenation can play havoc with
cell membrane health and function. Remember, your brain, nervous system and
vascular system are comprised primarily of membranes; any dysfunction in these
critical areas can be devastating.
A preference for fat was adaptive in the ancestral habitat,
but is maladaptive in a modern world awash in abundant sources of fat.
Nonetheless, fat intake is essential. 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. The problem is to
balance fat requirements against its over-abundance in the American diet and to
achieve the desired fatty acid profile that is more heavily weighted to
saturated fats in the American diet than in the Paleolithic diet. A similar point
can be made for minerals: calcium, potassium, and magnesium are too low relative
to sodium in the American diet and are far from the Paleolithic ratios.
Seeds did not become a major component of 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. Processing and hydrogenation
alter the shape of the fatty acids and these altered shapes play havoc in the
cell membrane function. They are readily oxidized to form free radical chain
reactions that damage body tissue. Fat imposes a load on the body's antioxidant
defenses. People who eat modern sources of fat and few vegetables tend to be
deficient in antioxidants that may put them at risk to cardiovascular disease
and cancer (oxidative stress appears to play a role in both diseases).
The intolerance that many people show to grains, eggs, milk
and seafood is 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.
The other trigger to food intolerance is through the
mechanism of molecular mimicry. Milk and grains contain proteins that were
foreign to human metabolism until some 10,000 years ago. The space of proteins
is vast, on the order of 20200 proteins can be formed from the 20
amino acids. The immune system must recognize self from non-self and proteins
that are foreign from those that are not. Some of the proteins in milk and
grains mimic those found in pathogens and trigger an immune response. Others
increase the permeability of the human gut and thus permit undigested protein
remnants to pass into the intestines and blood stream where they may trigger an
immune response. The rising incidence of autoimmune diseases such as lupus,
multiple sclerosis, and arthritis is another indicator that there is a mismatch
between a human metabolism of ancient origin and modern food.
Epidemic carbohydrate intolerance is another clue that we are
not yet adapted to a post-agricultural, post-industrial, information age diet.
Epidemiological evidence suggests that the populations most at risk are those
groups that adopted agriculture recently: These groups include the Eskimo,
Pima, Navajo, Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, Asian Americans, and
Northern Europeans. To emphasize once more, a 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. You
should get your carbohydrate from fresh vegetables, which are also the major
source of minerals, flavonoids, and phytochemicals in your diet.
Stay cool and exposure your skin to fresh air and sunlight.
Don't be warm and cozy all the time. End your shower with a cool rinse over
your legs. Wear as little as you can tolerate for your workouts. If you can't
stay warm working out, you aren't going at it at a high enough pace. (Carrying
a trendy water bottle slows you down too and ties up equipment for others.)
Expose your skin to fresh air by wearing shorts in cold weather to hike. Bare
your arms to the air and the sun, but be sensible about the amount and
intensity of the exposure.
Vitamin D deficiencies are common, particularly in cold
climates. Children are particularly vulnerable, as are African-Americans (dark
skin produces less Vitamin D than a light skin) and the elderly. The new
practice of wearing sun blocks and covering the skin increases the likelihood
of Vitamin D deficiency, with a consequent risk for bone density. Life is full
of these trade-offs--preserve your skin, risk your skeleton. You can change the
terms of the trade-off by eating the Evolutionary Fitness diet that is high in
calcium from dark, leafy vegetables and bones.
Eat when hungry. For me, that is at about 3 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.
On the other hand, eating should not be too regular. Energy intake must be
varied and there should be long intervals between your evening meal and
breakfast. Compress your caloric intake into a 6 or 8-hour window every now and
then. This mimics the Paleolithic alteration between feast and famine days.
But, there are even more important reasons to do this.
Research (and my experience) suggest that a compressed eating
window, with no reduction in caloric content, can provide the low body fat and
life extension benefits of caloric deprivation, the only know intervention
shown reliably to extend life. Why caloric deprivation extends life is not
known, but one reason may be that the calorie-deprived rats are compared to ad
libitum fed rats and both are caged. In other words, the other rats with which
the calorie-restricted are compared are pigging out. Another reason may be that
caloric deprivation activates a moderate adrenal response and helps to retain
an adaptive response to stress. But, that can be achieved by eating in a narrow
time window, with a relatively long fast over night. The night fast also
promotes growth hormone, a known factor in staying lean and retaining muscle,
neural, and cardiovascular mass.
Three square meals a day will make you fat. Foods eaten every
day can become toxic. Variety and quality are the essentials of a healthy diet.
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 and with the natural phytochemical antioxidants abundant in fresh
vegetables and fruits.
The beauty of the 40,000 BC eating model is that you eat no
canned, frozen, packaged, or manufactured food. Your diet consists of fresh
fruits and vegetables, eaten raw whenever possible, and lean meat. I do not eat
raw meat because I no longer trust our food supply. The model offers a
conservative strategy for ridding your diet of empty calories while it guides
your food choices to highly nutritious foods. 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.
Conclusion
Does evolutionary training work? There are theoretical
reasons why power law variation and intermittence are the right features of
human activity. And, there is abundant evidence of the effects of anaerobic
activities on body composition. Few researchers have studied the models
developed here, but the theory, evolutionary reasoning, and the indirect empirical
evidence are compelling. It is the right technology for the human body. It
works so well for me it feels like I'm cheating. I see other people in the gym grinding
sets for 2 hours and working out 5 or 6 days a week and they accomplish so
little. They don't have the muscularity, power, leanness or symmetry that
evolutionary training produces.
Power law training is so productive I spend very little time
in the gym, usually from 1 to 2 hours a week depending on whether I am doing
hierarchical sets or alactic training. At 72 years of age, I look like an NFL
defensive back: 6' 1", 205 pounds with a dense and athletic musculature
and less than 8% body fat. I can almost slam dunk a basketball and can hit a
golf ball out of sight. Based on body composition, strength, flexibility,
reaction time, and blood profile, a research institute rates my biological age
at 32. 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.
