Primitive Connections

I’ve always been a sucker for “old school” and retro.

I like Tom Jones and AC/DC. I really love the sound of a worked over big block V8. I even miss girls with pubic hair like you used to see in Playboy in the 80s.

Retro? Maybe. Hotter than a day at the beach on the sun? Definitely.

So it got me wondering - has my love for things of the past coloured my glasses rosy? Were we better off way back when? Going into a debate on the state of the economy, cost of living, etc. is well beyond my scope of understanding, but let’s just look at the physical side of things.

Homo Sapiens has been around for about 250,000-400,00 years, depending on who you listen to. Largely thought to have originated in Africa, Sapiens migrated out of Africa 70,000-50,000 years ago. Fast forward to now and things have obviously changed dramatically.

No more hunting for food. No more living in caves. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the two biggest inventions of humankind were developed only in the last seconds of our evolution.

While Benjamin Franklin is largely acknowledged as being the discoverer of electricity in the 18th century, its not until the late 19th century that uses for it actually become available. Men such as Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and Bell were all at the forefront of what is termed the Second Industrial Revolution.

In addition, the motor car, widely credited to Karl Benz in 1883, is also a relatively modern addition to our way of life. The first production line, mass producing of cars was by Oldsmobile in 1902 and later taken on in a much larger way by Henry Ford in 1914.

Let me just let all those numbers seep into your brain for a second.

We’ve been around for 250,000 years.

We’ve had electricity for less than 200.

We’ve had cars for less than 100 years.

In other words, cars have been around for only 0.04% of human evolution.

I can hear what you’re saying - so what, right?

Just bear with me though…

When you wake up in the morning, what do you do? Probably sit down to eat breakfast. Then to go to work, what do you do? You sit down to drive your car, or take the train, bus whatever. But you sit. At work, what do you do? If you’re like most people these days you sit down. Then to go home you reverse the process - sit down to get home, sit down to eat your meal then to “relax” you probably sit in front of the TV.

Yet go back just over 100 years and how did you accomplish all that? Chances are that you walked to work. And that while at work you probably had a job that was far more physically intensive than your current job. Its estimated that housework alone in the 1800s had a caloric expense of over 1500 calories! For most people that is nearly a day’s food intake. Imagine how lean you’d be if you did another 1500 calories worth of cardio training each week let alone all the other walking and manual work necessary back then.

Let’s take this a step further.

If you decide that like most modern Homo Sapiens you actually need to get in slightly better shape what do you do? Most likely you join a gym, because we all know that to get in shape you have to go to the gym, right? And what do the idiots at the gyms like Recreation have you do? They tell you to sit down and do Lat Pulldowns, or Chest Press or even worse - go to a Spinning class!

If you’ve spent all day sitting down, do you really need to go and sit down some more? Wouldn’t your body most need to do the exact opposite of the thing you’ve spent your whole day doing? Using indoor cycling as an example there is plenty of evidence to show that cyclists have high rates of lower back troubles brought about by loading while in spinal flexion. And that’s for elite cyclists, guys who have strength and flexibility well beyond that of mere mortals. So if even they get damaged backs from cycling, how well will Sally Housewife and Joe Average cope with it? And that’s not even taking into account the poor teaching methods of most group exercise instructors. No surprise when I speak with the participants after a class they all complain of sore lower backs and necks! But hey, no pain, no gain, right?

Sitting, in my opinion, is probably the single biggest long term problem that we cause ourselves. We are born to be upright, ground based animals. Somewhere along the way we have deliberately decided to try to outrun evolution. But here’s the thing about evolution - it takes a loooong time. Remember that the modern inventions that allow us to travel in luxury and comfort have only been around for 0.04% of our time on this rock. The other 99.96% has been spent upright and moving. How long will it be before we actually evolve into a species that better copes with sitting? While I can’t claim to be an expert on evolutionary science I can safely say that it certainly isn’t going to be while anyone I currently know is alive.

Your future, and that of the human race, if you don't get out of your damn seat and start moving around.

Spinal issues aside there is also another, very large problem with traditional gym based exercise other than the encouragement to perform all exercise from a seated position. It all goes in a single direction. I’m not sure about you, but my life is 3D. I can’t just train in a single direction and expect that it will actually have carryover into my real life. Sure, my stomach my get flatter or my arms bigger but how is that going to help me get my shopping out of the car, do the gardening and most of all, protect my spine against the daily stress of sitting?

The body has certain primitive movement patterns that create all others - squat, lunge, bend and straighten the trunk, rotate the trunk, push and pull in both vertical and horizontal planes plus our gait (walking or running). That’s it. All of these are supposed to be done from a standing position.

About 50 years ago, when the bodybuilding scene took over as the major health past time people started looking at exercise differently. Because the focus switched from developing these primitive patterns to increasing the size of certain muscles people started to look for ways to make themselves more comfortable. They started making machines.

And just like in the Terminator these machines are here to destroy us. While their intentions were good what they have actually done is gotten us away from what our bodies were designed to do. I don’t know about you, but I don’t often have to pull myself up from out of a chair like you do in a Lat Pulldown. I don’t often have to push something very heavy away from myself while seated, like in a Chest Press. I do all those things from a standing position.

So why on earth do gyms insist on telling people that these machines are the best way to achieve “fitness”? Wikipedia describes Physical Fitness as “the body’s ability to function efficiently and effectively in work and leisure activities, to be healthy, to resist hypokinetic diseases, and to meet emergency situations. Fitness can also be divided into five categories: aerobic fitness, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and body composition”. Given that we already know that most of daily lives and leisure activities are suppoosed to be done from a standing position, what then, are they trying to help us achieve? Are they trying to ruin our posture further? Are they trying to further subdivide our body into ever smaller parts?

Fitness is a systemic, whole body entity. It is derived from eating and drinking the way we were designed. It is gained by training the body in the manner we were born to - upright, ground based and holistically. Your body is no mere collection of assorted parts linked together randomly. It is one unit, perfect and complete. Every action, from simple pressing overhead to running flat out on broken ground requires a massive amount of sensory input, proprioception and cooperation from all the othe parts.

Treat it as a whole and perhaps it will work better for you.

So how then, can we take the above and turn it into something useful? Something that will bring about real world gains in strength, fitness, body composition and most importantly how we feel about ourselves?

The answer lies in returning to our roots somewhat. Our ancestors did things either very explosively, or very slowly - run away from the sabre tooth tiger, or walk 4 days to find new plains to hunt on. The in between was largely irrelevent. Sadly, most gyms, most Personal Trainers and most people seeking to improve their health spend too much time focusing on the in between.

Tell me how 3 sets of 12 on the Chest Press would help?

We need to spend time cultivating maximal strength, purely aerobic cardiovascular work and lastly performing some kind of hybrid strength and cardiovascular work, such as KJ’s VO2Max protocol. My next post will outline the why’s and how to’s. Your homework in the meantime is to get out of your seat and move around some more.