Not Exercising is normal

Personally I hate going to a gym and have wondered is this really something humans like doing. Exercise as we know is relatively new phenomena and probably started less than 50 years ago when humans started  to lead industrialized life which made day to day life sedentary. Running tens of kilometers of treadmill going nowhere seemed to me last thing to do. All the huffing and puffing in order to get your body exercised.

]If you consider evolution it is perfectly normal to keep away from doing any physical exercise as humans body is trained to conserve energy and use it whenever needed like for doing chores, hunting or other livelihood activities. So if you feel like never taking the stairs or a possible walk or a gym membership eating dust in your bag, you can go ahead and blame it on genes and evolution,

Born to run

Recently I picked up reading Born To Run a book on the Mexican tribe called Tarahumara (pronounced taraoomarah) who live in the extreme conditions of Copper Canyons. And basic idea is that these folks are crazy runners, they can run continuously for hours all together without any gears or major support. Their body is tuned for running. They also play a game called raraji-pari which involves running and chasing a ball for hours.

In India we have our own people who can carry quite a bit weight on their heads like Gas Cylinders (weighing 15KGs) in hilly areas. It is quite easy to see women folks doing back breaking physical work that many men in cities will never be able to pick the courage to do it.

Now be it Tarahumara or the gurkhas or other men or women who will do extreme physical work and possess extreme endurance. But do you know one thing, they don’t train daily or buy that expensive shoes with AI controlled soles or the sweat absorbing clothing or some fancy energy drink. They live normal lives doing normal chores and sometimes do some runs or races maybe for fun of it.

Humans lived a life of hunter gatherers for a long time and the body has gained traits that provided us with endurance for walking or running. There is some evidence that when there were no tools for hunting human did a form of hunting that is called persistence hunting where a group of people will keep chasing an animal for hours until it is so tired and eventually collapses. This needed short sprints with long walks for hours. Today we may have forgotten the qualities needed for persistence hunting and there may very few hunter gatherers who live in the world today but humans are not able to adjust the industrialized world.

Being sedentary is not a option for them and that keeps their body tuned for endurance =.

How much exercise is needed?

Since most of the people in the industrialized has become sedentary and so it is important to do something about being physically active.

Something is better is nothing. Exercise is getting medicalized  to certain extent these days but at a minimum recommendation is to at least do 150 minutes of moderate exercise. Here is where your 10000 steps thumb rule also comes in handy. Ideally this should involve cardio and weights. It has been observed that when a person does physical exertion, the body needs repair and sometimes this repair makes things better than earlier and this is how exercise helps the body.

Doing something is better than nothing. Enjoying the exercise is also important else there is a chance of dropping it after once the enthusiasm goes down. It is important to keep doing it as we age. Finding what we can do on a regular basis be it climbing stairs instead of lift, walking to get the grocery instead of the scooter or car and actually hitting the gym doing cardio, weights, aerobics or other forms of exercises. The

Another book that talks on these lines is Exercised by Dan Leiberman. I got this as audio book recently and this was a first audio book that listened to on a free Audible account.

Bottomline is doing moderate physical exercise is beneficial for human body and the whole idea is to do your bit whatever you can. Many folks who are physically active doesn’t help people who are not to become active in whatever.

There maybe many ultra marathoners or ironman enthusiasts but here also like many other areas a middle path is probably good enough. 

Let me know what you all think 🙂

Cover picture is generated by Dall-E on Microsoft Copilot