Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

So let’s banish the myth that resting, relaxing, taking it easy, or whatever you want to call inactivity is an unnatural, indolent absence of physical activity. Let’s also refrain from stigmatizing anyone for being normal by avoiding nonessential exertion.

Chief among these myths is the notion that we are supposed to want to exercise. There is a class of people whom I define as “exercists” who like to brag about exercise and who repeatedly remind us that exercise is medicine, a magic pill that slows aging and delays death. You know the type.

In other words, typical hunter-gatherers are about as physically active as Americans or Europeans who include about an hour of exercise in their daily routine.

1 One prominent physician has declared that chairs are “out to get us, harm us, kill us” and that “sitting is the new smoking.”2

A multiyear analysis of almost five thousand Americans found that people who broke up their sitting time with frequent short breaks had up to 25 percent less inflammation than those who rarely rose from their chairs despite sitting the same number of hours.

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.

When my colleague Dr. Aaron Baggish attached accelerometers (tiny devices, like Fitbits, that measure steps per day) to more than twenty Tarahumara men, he discovered they walked on average ten miles a day. In other words, the training that enables them to run back-to-back marathons is the physical work that is part and parcel of their everyday lif

We are exercised about exercise.

Without seeming like a madman or an idiot, how would I explain to a hunter-gatherer, a farmer in Pemja, or even my great-great-great-grandparents that I spend most of my days sitting in chairs and then compensate for my idleness by paying money to go to a gym to make myself sweaty, tired, and uncomfortable on a machine that forces me to struggle to