Sublime

With the possible exception of laboratory rats on running wheels, we never observe animals doing anything resembling exercise. They hunt, gather, graze, mate, play, fight, and flee, but never do they perform repetitive movements for the sake of “staying in shape.” They move their bodies for pleasure, to explore, or stay alive, but otherwise, they e

Many of us are looking for the ideal set of movements that will take our performance to the next level. But for our purposes, specializations are suspect. In moderation, they can advance our skill, but over time, specialized, repetitive movements take their toll on joints and tissues, even the nervous system. And before long, the result is injury.

BOB COOLEY, creator and founder of Resistance Flexibility Technology® (RFT) at The Genius of Flexibility Center in Boston, Massachusetts,

In the repetitive motions of walking, the inner tuning of our springs is unconscious. Apparently even the spinal cord is rarely involved in controlling the movement—it is the local relationship between the mechanoreceptors in the fascial tissue and the surrounding “adjusters” of the muscles that are in charge. By finding the most efficient level of

‘There is a serious snag in the specialist way of life’, Desmond Morris said in his bestseller, The Naked Ape, which compares human and animal behaviour. ‘Everything is fine as long as the special survival device works, but if the environment undergoes a major change the specialist is left stranded’. So, for example, the koala subsists almost entir

the ability to optimise this system was something that most of us had either lost or simply never found. How we lived our lives was having a defining impact on how we moved and, as we had become more and more sedentary, our elastic system had responded by adopting our bad habits.

Animal niches tend to come from survivorship and physical environment. Human niches can come from society, ideology, physical geography, etc.

We didn’t see an antelope 5km away and just start running after it. It was simply not worth the effort and would lead to a negative calorie outcome. We developed a perception of effort in order to avoid expending energy for no reason.

les groupes humains peuvent avoir des systèmes sociaux distincts, mais ceux-ci ne sont pas déterminés génétiquement, et ils durent rarement plus de quelques siècles. Pensez aux Allemands du XXe siècle. En moins d’une centaine d’années, les Allemands ont adopté six systèmes très différents :