Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

đź“– Exercised Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

11 min read

Why did I want to read it?

I’m very interested in Fitness and while I’m even a trained personal trained, I feel the lack of quality sources for principles that work around personal training. This book is written by a paleontologist.

What did I get out of it?

How much exercise and of what type?

How much

…the most commonly and widely promoted—advocated by almost every major health organization in the world—is that we do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic exercise per week, supplemented by two sessions of weights. (Location 4838)

(Moderate-intensity aerobic activity is defined as between 50 and 70 percent of your maximum heart rate; vigorous-intensity aerobic activity is 70 to 85 percent of your maximum (Location 4897)

Non-linear relationship and no optimal dose:

Of what type

Moderate intensity:

Thousands of studies since 1968 have firmly established the many diverse benefits of aerobic exercise. We will consider their effects on diseases later, but to summarize quickly, the most obvious benefits are cardiovascular, hence the term “cardio.” (…) A good cardio workout really does improve cognition and mood. (Location 5086)

HIIT:

If you regularly do the same thirty-minute leisurely jog or bike ride several times a week, consider adding a little HIIT to your weekly routine. (But please consult a doctor if you are thinking of trying this.) By some measures, a few minutes of HIIT provides as much benefit as, if not more benefit than, thirty minutes of conventional aerobic exercise, and it has the virtue of improving rather than just maintaining fitness (…) [BUT] it doesn’t burn as many calories, and it may increase susceptibility to injury. Most of all, it doesn’t deliver all the diverse benefits of regular aerobic activity. Have you ever heard of anyone who got fit doing just a few minutes a week of intense exercise? (Location 5119)

So, do everything!

…everyone benefits from mixing it up because weights, moderate-intensity aerobic exercise, and HIIT have different, complementary effects on the body. (Location 5144)

Raw highlights

Exercised (adjective): to be vexed, anxious, worried, harassed (Location 36)

Treadmill-like devices (Location 93)

modified in 1818 by the Victorian inventor William Cubitt to punish prisoners and prevent idleness. (Location 94)

pill, and why there is no optimal dose or type of exercise. (Location 200)

the training that enables them to run back-to-back marathons is the physical work that is part and parcel of their everyday (Location 377)

It’s time to discard once and for all ancient, insidious stereotypes about the physical superiority and virtuousness of people who don’t grow up surrounded by laborsaving machines and other modern comforts. (Location 388)

about as physically active as Americans or Europeans who include about an hour of exercise in their daily routine. (Location 483)

And yet for the last few centuries, experts have worried incessantly that we aren’t exercising enough. Nationalism is one major source of this anxiety. (Location 537)

And because we evolved from apelike ancestors who largely resembled chimpanzees and gorillas, that suggests it is evolutionarily normal humans who are unusual in terms of how much they work and rest. (Location 625)

because we evolved from apelike ancestors who largely resembled chimpanzees and gorillas, that suggests it is evolutionarily normal humans who are unusual in terms of how much they work and rest. (Location 625)

resting metabolism is what the body has opted to spend on maintenance, not what it needs to spend. (Location 740)

that your current state of physical inactivity is an ancient, fundamental strategy to allocate scarce energy sensibly. (Location 828)

The bottom line is that humans evolved to acquire and expend much more energy than chimpanzees. (Location 900)

we spend a lot more energy being active every day than chimpanzees, but that effort yields more calories that enable us not only to be more physically active but also to reproduce at about twice the rate. (Location 901)

The more calories we need, the more we are vulnerable to not having enough. Although the hunter-gatherer strategy is a boon to our reproductive success, it selects against wasting calories on discretionary physical activity. (Location 903)

sloth had nothing to do with physical laziness, but instead was a sort of mental apathy, (Location 916)

we need to override ancient, powerful instincts to avoid unnecessary physical activity, (Location 929)

Sabbath. In addition to helping the early Jews spiritually and physically, a weekly day of rest probably helped them fulfill another one of God’s commands, to be fruitful and multiply. (Location 932)

suggest that too much sitting may be hazardous simply because it causes weight gain. (Location 1181)

“non-exercise” physical activities for five hours a day, I could spend as much energy as if I ran for an hour. (Location 1185)

fat and sugar are essential fuels, they trigger inflammation when their concentrations in blood are too high.39 Put simply, regular movement, including getting up every once in a while, helps prevent chronic inflammation by keeping down postprandial levels of fat and sugar. (Location 1201)

Cortisol shunts sugar and fats into the bloodstream, it makes us crave sugar-rich and fat-rich foods, and it directs us to store organ fat rather than subcutaneous fat. (Location 1214)

Because the anti-inflammatory effects of physical activity are almost always larger and longer than the pro-inflammatory effects, and muscles make up about a third of the body, active muscles have potent anti-inflammatory effects. (Location 1226)

none of the mechanisms that inflame us—swollen fat cells, too much fat and sugar in the bloodstream, stress, and inactive muscles—are caused by sitting per se. Instead, they result from the absence of being sufficiently physically active, which usually means a lot of sitting. (Location 1232)

even if you are physically active and fit, the more time you spend sitting in a chair, the higher your risk of chronic illnesses linked to inflammation, including some forms of cancer. (Location 1258)

fact, people who rarely sat for more than twelve minutes at a time had lower death rates, (Location 1269)

Standing is not exercise, and as yet no well-designed, careful study has shown that standing desks confer substantial health benefits. (Location 1320)

Instead, leisure-time sitting best predicts mortality, suggesting that socioeconomic status and exercise habits in mornings, evenings, and weekends have important health effects beyond how much one sits during weekdays at the office.62 (Location 1326)

Apparently, we cannot think while cleansing our brains. (Location 1488)

For every hour spent awake storing memories and amassing waste, we need approximately fifteen minutes asleep to process those memories and clean up. (Location 1490)

there is no evidence that nonindustrial populations sleep more than industrial and postindustrial populations. (Location 1540)

people who sleep about seven hours tend to live longer than those who sleep more or less. (Location 1552)

From an evolutionary perspective, such variation is probably adaptive because we are most vulnerable when asleep in the dangerous night. Having at least one alert sentinel, (Location 1573)

prescribed. If you require quiet and dark to fall asleep, you are evolutionarily unusual. (Location 1624)

Slowly receding perceptions of nearby friends and family talking, a crackling fire, infants crying, and the fact that those hyenas are far away signal to the brain that it is safe to enter a deeper, unconscious stage of sleep. (Location 1628)

good dose of physical activity earlier in the day like a game of soccer, an hour or two of gardening, or a long walk helps sleep come more easily. These activities increase sleep pressure, and they stimulate the body to counter the initial fight-and-flight response with a deeper “rest and digest” response (technically the parasympathetic nervous system). (Location 1701)

Lack of sleep also wreaks havoc with the hormones that regulate appetite, increasing levels of a hormone called ghrelin that makes us hungry and simultaneously depressing levels of another hormone called leptin that inhibits the desire to (Location 1723)

At rest, about 70 percent of a body’s energy comes from slowly burning fat, but the faster we run, the more sugar we must burn. At maximum aerobic capacity we burn exclusively sugar. (Location 1976)

maximal oxygen uptake, or VO2 (Location 1980)

The farther you go, the more your maximum speed benefits from a high VO2 (Location 1988)

numerous such studies have found that genes explain about half of people’s athletic talent. (Location 2065)

Instead, athletic capabilities such as sprinting speed resemble other complex traits such as height. Height, for example, is highly heritable but influenced by more than four hundred genes, each with small effects that add up. (Location 2093)

Compared with 99 percent of humanity, these marathoners evince no trade-off between speed and endurance. Instead, they are evidence that you can run both fast and far. (Location 2116)

Although HIIT cannot stimulate your body to produce more fast-twitch muscle fibers, the ones you have will thicken, making you stronger and hence faster. (Location 2148)

Strength is how much force I can produce; power is how rapidly I produce it. Strength and power are not independent, but there is some trade-off between the two: (Location 2284)

In general, the more we load our bones, especially when we are young, the thicker they become. (Location 2374)

the men given just testosterone added about six pounds of muscle and got 10 percent stronger; (Location 2385)

The gym was also a cheerless basement that reeked of stale sweat and had no natural light. No one seemed to be having any fun (Location 2414)

Concentric contractions (Location 2432)

are generally less potent for building muscle than eccentric and isometric muscle actions. (Location 2433)

the Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius (faster, higher, stronger). (Location 2561)

Yet nonreactive adult humans can excel at purposeful, planned forms of hostility. This kind of proactive aggression is characterized by predetermined goals, premeditated plans of action, attention to the target, and lack of emotional arousal. (Location 2635)

evidence for violence among preagricultural societies was always there if you looked. (Location 2659)

we need to ask when humans became less reactively and more proactively aggressive. (Location 2661)

and A Clockwork Orange. (Location 2695)

The most widely discussed and audacious hypothesis, proposed by Owen Lovejoy, was that the first hominins were selected to become bipeds to be more cooperative and less aggressive. (Location 2700)

To entice these tottering males to keep coming back with food, females encouraged exclusive long-term monogamous relationships by concealing their menstrual cycles and having permanently large breasts (female chimps advertise when they ovulate with eye-catching swellings, and their breasts shrink when they are not nursing). (Location 2703)

to take care of children and fend off predators. Altogether, decreased size dimorphism, increased cooperation between and among the sexes, and the importance of women’s roles in hunter-gatherer societies have led anthropologists to speculate that humans have been less aggressive since the origins of the genus Homo. (Location 2734)

Enhanced upper-body muscularity in male humans might also have been selected for hunting, but we cannot rule out aggression. (Location 2747)

Another molecule that possibly affects facial masculinization is the neurotransmitter serotonin, which reduces aggression; less masculinized faces are associated with higher levels of serotonin.35 (Location 2755)

Experts hypothesize that bonobos self-domesticated because females were able to form alliances that selected for cooperative, unaggressive males with lower levels of androgens and higher levels of serotonin. (Location 2771)

scientists are testing the idea that humans also self-domesticated. (Location 2775)

On the one hand, our ancestors became hunters and thus must have benefited from plenty of brawn, especially among males; on the other hand, we became less reactively aggressive and more cooperative, which presumably reduced selection for being big and strong. Among the solutions to this contradiction are that humans fight and hunt upright and with weapons. (Location 2780)

Paradoxically, for the first time in history, wealthier people get more physical activity than the working poor.13 (Location 4550)

we have been selected to enjoy doing activities in groups, to assist one another, and to care what others think of (Location 4599)

endorphins aren’t produced until after twenty or more minutes of intense, vigorous activity, (Location 4636)

figure out how to distract your mind while you exercise with other things you find fun. (Location 4653)

Going to college is essentially a highly social commitment contract for adults (Location 4734)

My students compete for and agree to these conditions because they know they would not learn as much without the school’s nudges, shoves, and requirements. (Location 4735)

is an abnormal behavior from an evolutionary perspective but also never evolved to be therapeutic. (Location 5173)

  • Note: Key book

athletes who exclusively weight train without also doing some cardio appear to be at as much risk as sedentary individuals of developing chronic high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. (Location 5454)

regular exercisers report 12 to 23 percent lower levels of mental health problems than sedentary people (Location 5824)

chronic levels of cortisol, which has noxious effects on the brain. (Location 5848)

exercise is a fundamentally strange and unusual behavior from an evolutionary perspective. (Location 5884)

instead of shaming and blaming people who avoid exertion, we should help each other choose to exercise. (Location 5886)

that a philosophy for how to use one’s body is just as useful as a philosophy for how to live one’s (Location 5896)

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