Summary of Daniel Lieberman's Exercised

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The Ironman World Championship is a legendary test of endurance that takes place in the paradisiacal setting of Kona, Hawaii. It is the equivalent of swimming 77 lengths of an Olympic-sized pool. Many of the triathletes look apprehensive as they wait for the starting gun, but their spirits are buoyed by a band of Hawaiian drummers and thousands of cheering spectators.
#2 I watch the elite triathletes jump off their bikes, lace on running shoes, and then head off on foot to begin their 26. 2-mile run along the coast. The most dramatic finishes occur at midnight as the seventeen-hour deadline approaches.
#3 I flew to Mexico to meet with Tarahumara Native Americans, famous for their long-distance running. I had heard that they were a secret tribe of ultra-healthy superathletes, but when I met them, I didn’t see any running. Many of them were overweight or had paunches.
#4 What I observed at Ironman was bizarre, and I began to question the sanity of my own efforts to train for a marathon. I had heard and read numerous accounts about how Tarahumara men and women have their own Ironman-like competitions, but I had never seen any Tarahumara running on their own.

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Diététique
• diététique
• Macrobiotics
• Macrobiotic diet

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 27 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669392231
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Daniel Lieberman's Exercised
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Ironman World Championship is a legendary test of endurance that takes place in the paradisiacal setting of Kona, Hawaii. It is the equivalent of swimming 77 lengths of an Olympic-sized pool. Many of the triathletes look apprehensive as they wait for the starting gun, but their spirits are buoyed by a band of Hawaiian drummers and thousands of cheering spectators.

#2

I watch the elite triathletes jump off their bikes, lace on running shoes, and then head off on foot to begin their 26. 2-mile run along the coast. The most dramatic finishes occur at midnight as the seventeen-hour deadline approaches.

#3

I flew to Mexico to meet with Tarahumara Native Americans, famous for their long-distance running. I had heard that they were a secret tribe of ultra-healthy superathletes, but when I met them, I didn’t see any running. Many of them were overweight or had paunches.

#4

What I observed at Ironman was bizarre, and I began to question the sanity of my own efforts to train for a marathon. I had heard and read numerous accounts about how Tarahumara men and women have their own Ironman-like competitions, but I had never seen any Tarahumara running on their own.

#5

I met Ernesto, and witnessed a traditional Tarahumara rarájipari footrace. The race involved two teams of men, eight on each side. The first team to complete fifteen circuits or to lap the other won.

#6

The Tarahumara race is similar to the Ironman competition in that it is a simple community event that is part of an ancient tradition. While there are no trophies or prizes for the winners, the race is a serious competition.

#7

The theory of the natural human states that humans who live in a savage state of nature are uncorrupted by civilization. This theory has been warped into many forms, including the myth of the noble savage, which states that nonwesternized people are naturally good and decent.

#8

The myth of the athletic savage states that humans can easily run ultramarathons, scale enormous mountains, and perform other seemingly superhuman feats without training. However, nearly every day of their lives, hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers engage in hours of hard physical work.

#9

The myth of the athletic savage implies that running an ultramarathon or performing other feats of extraordinary athleticism is somehow effortless for the Tarahumara and other indigenous peoples compared with Westerners.

#10

To truly understand what normal humans do and think about exercise, we must study people from a variety of cultures, not just Americans and Europeans who are, comparatively speaking, WEIRD.

#11

The Hadza are a group of hunter-gatherers living in Tanzania. They have been studied extensively, and many things have been learned about their way of life. However, many of these studies have ignored the degree to which the Hadza’s way of life is changing as a result of contact with the outside world.

#12

The Hadza are a group of hunter-gatherers who are very active. They spend only three hours and forty minutes a day doing light activities, and two hours and fourteen minutes a day doing moderate or vigorous activities.

#13

The typical human workday used to be about seven hours, with much of that time spent on light activities and an hour of vigorous activity. Modern people like me have been transformed by civilization, but most hunter-gatherers engage in modest levels of physical effort.

#14

The Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations organization, created the PAL metric to measure people’s energy expenditures. Your PAL is calculated as the ratio of how much energy you spend in a twenty-four-hour period divided by the amount of energy you would use to sustain your body if you never left your bed.

#15

The average PAL of industrialized adults in the developed world is 1. 67, and many sedentary individuals have even lower PALs. The declines in physical activity are relatively recent and largely reflect changes in how we work.

#16

While animals are driven by deep instincts to move, exercise as we define it – discretionary, planned physical activity for the sake of physical improvement – is a uniquely human behavior.

#17

The first generalization, that adult exercise is modern, is obvious. Early farmers had to work as hard as if not harder than hunter-gatherers, and for the last few thousand years, farmers primarily exercised to prepare for fighting.

#18

We have also medicalized exercise. By this, I mean we pathologize a lack of physical activity, and we prescribe particular doses and types of exercise to help prevent and treat disease.

#19

The treadmill is an example of how modern exercise has become medicalized, commercialized, and industrialized. While these are all good things, they rarely make exercise more fun.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The Jewish God is insistent that we rest on the Sabbath, because for the first Jews, who were subsistence farmers, resting was a necessity. But for hunter-gatherers, who do not store provisions, a Sabbath would be unnecessary and cause a week of hunger.

#2

While humans live in a world of constant activity, apes, who evolved from similar ancestors, are more active than we are, and this is normal. Humans are unusual in how much they work and rest, and this is due to evolution.

#3

Your resting metabolic rate is the rate at which your body burns energy when you are not being physically active. It is calculated by measuring the amount of oxygen you consume and carbon dioxide you exhale while sitting quietly.

#4

To calculate your total daily energy expenditure, you must drink a very expensive, harmless water that contains a known quantity of rare heavy atoms and then collect samples of your urine over the next few days. This allows you to calculate the rates at which both the hydrogen and oxygen atoms leave your body.

#5

The fact that doing nothing is so costly for humans is evident in the fact that we spend so much energy just maintaining our bodies. We need to spend so much energy just to keep our bodies functioning, even if we are doing nothing.

#6

During World War II, scientists conducted the Minnesota Starvation Project, in which they tried to determine the effects of long-term food deprivation on the human body. They gave 36 volunteers a diet of 1,570 calories a day, and required them to maintain the same physical activity levels.

#7

The starvation diet test was conducted on 1,570 calories a day, and the men lost weight rapidly. Their bodies became lethargic, and their sex drive evaporated. But the men’s resting metabolic rates plummeted even though they lost weight.

#8

The key lesson to take away from the Minnesota Starvation Project is that human resting metabolisms are flexible. We can spend less energy on maintenance, or we can spend less energy on expensive processes that keep us in balance.

#9

We use energy in large part because of the way Darwinian evolution acted on millions of generations of our ancestors. We spend calories on physical activity because that is how our bodies have evolved to spend them.

#10

The theory of natural selection is that over generations, heritable features that cause organisms to have more surviving offspring will become more prevalent while features that impair reproductive success will become rarer.

#11

The most fundamental trade-off between inactivity and activity is whether to spend calories on being physically inactive or active. The compromises your body makes between these functions depend on your age and energetic circumstances.

#12

The trade-off perspective explains the transformations that happened in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. When calories are limited, it always makes sense to divert energy from nonessential physical activity toward reproduction or other functions that maximize reproductive success.

#13

Humans are capable of more speed and less endurance than dogs, but we tend to be cautious about spending calories. We rarely see adults leap out of their cars and sprint until they are exhausted like children and dogs do.

#14

The left panel of figure 4 shows the total active energy expenditure of the three groups. The Westerners spent the most calories per day, despite being the least active group. The correction for body fat took the comparison between the three groups and made the Hadza spend twice as many calories per pound of fat-free body mass than chimpanzees.

#15

The evidence shows that hunter-gatherers don’t work particularly hard, but they are still more physically active than chimpanzees. In fact, over the course of a year, an average Hadza woman spends more than a thousand calories more than a similar-sized chimpanzee female.