Pleistocene exercise
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
By Brooke Williams
I’ve spent much of my adult life wondering about the huge difference between the life we were built for and the life we’re living.
We live in bodies that haven’t changed significantly for 100,000 years, and we’re using them in a world that has little use for what may be the most finely tuned, most adaptable and highly evolved organism ever to live on earth. Granted, our spectacular brains have allowed us to “think” our way to the top of the food chain, to our current but what might be temporary position as the most mighty and powerful species on earth, if we do say so ourselves. But what hope do we have as a species if we completely ignore the other half of who we are – our bodies – where deep in our bones and muscles and flowing in our blood are all the tools required to pass on life to the next generation, which is the every and only goal of any organism?
Perhaps by using all that we’ve been given by millions of years of evolution, we might not only survive, but live in a manner that takes the lives of other organisms into consideration.
I’ve let my body go over the past few years. Fortunately, my good friend, Jack Turner, told me in quite a nice way that he had noticed that some of my former muscle was now a memory, that I was beginning to “sag.” He suggested I go with him to Mountain Athlete (
www.mtnathlete.com), a new gym south of town. I told him I didn’t want to join another health club. He told me, “Don’t worry, just show up,” which I did.
At first glance, the place seems much more like a repair shop for road machinery than a health club. There are bars and kettle balls and a giant tractor tire we lift and move, jump on, hit with a sledge hammer. There are tons of weights and duffle bags filled with sand, which we pick up, throw over our shoulder and sprint with. There’s a metal sled that Rob (the chiseled owner who was a marine drill sergeant in a former life) makes us drag around the building with a chain.
Rob is very methodical about having us do different workout routines each time, and he’s great at knowing just how much weight and intensity we need for the maximum benefit. He really loves watching us sweat and hearing us grunt.
Although Rob doesn’t talk about it, and his website doesn’t mention it, what happens at Mountain Athlete is evolutionary – not in the sense that it is new, but that it is so old – 40,000 years, 100,000 years, the same thing our ancestors have been doing since the beginning of time.
Paul Shepard, the scholar I’ve written about before whose work is an exploration of who we are in an evolutionary sense, wrote in his book, “The Tender Carnivore,” that the most effective exercise program we could do would emulate the lives our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. According to Shepard, during the perfect workout we would sprint, climb trees, pick up heavy weights and carry large loads over long distances – very intense efforts for short periods of time.
In his essay, “Evolutionary Fitness,” Dr. Arthur DeVany refers to Kung San Bushmen women who cover huge distances carrying a baby and/or a load of plants they’ve gathered weighing as much as 35 pounds. He references a historical report of five Indian men who trapped five 2,000-pound bison in a 10-foot deep pit, where they killed them with spears. They pulled them out, skinned and butchered them, and then they carried as much as they could back to camp. This, DeVany believes, is the work our bodies were built to do.
Although there’s no bison to kill at Mountain Athlete and there’s no 10-foot pit, if I keep this up, I may end up with the body I’m supposed to have.
Brooke Williams is the Executive Director of the Murie Center in Moose. Check out their new Web site: www.muriecenter.org. PERMALINK:
Pleistocene exercise | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local
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