My guilty pleasure is Quora, which I dip into if a question intrigues me. Sometimes I “archive” the more interesting topics here.
“If Paleo Fitness is supposed to be great, has anyone measured the fitness of Amazon Native to see how they perform? Specifically, what is their blood pressure, heart rate, VO Max, Mile Run time, Pull-ups, Push-ups, Deadlifts?“
Generally people in traditional societies have remarkable health markers, which is the basis for claiming that prior lifeways are more healthful. I think you would find, though, that in terms of actual, functional fitness that takes a person into a high-quality-of-life advanced age, the sheer number of pull-ups/pushups, the mile run time, or max power production, eg, in a deadlift, is simply irrelevant. Those things are not what constitute “great fitness.” A lot of the gym/fitness-test-based metrics for fitness are not actually about fitness itself but rather run the gamut from impressive speed to impressive strength to cool tricks you can do with the human body. For the first 3, which are actual health markers, some of the groups who have been studied extensively (eg, Hadza people) are absolutely in better shape and retain their good markers later in life than most Westerners – yes, even for VO2 max.
As I understand it, Paleo Fitness, the book, is not actually about paleolithic or nomadic/seminomadic lifeways per se – it’s about trying to bring our overall activity level up to something consistent with evolutionary pressures. It emphasizes spontaneity and “play”-style movements, and Edwards also emphasizes how aversive and frankly hostile a lot of the general claims about fitness/exercise are (“sweat is your fat crying,” “no pain, no gain”). He seems like a wonderful person, and his recommendations look like fun! But it’s only “Paleo” in a snappy, eye-catching sense: Edwards is coming from the basic idea of the mismatch between human body evolution and the modern, “developed”-society patterns of sitting on your butt all day, sure, but he is offering correctives to that mainly from the play angle rather than “how can I do heavy work.” (Indeed, one of his catch phrases is “Working out is not working out” precisely because structured exercise like performance-oriented running or lifting programs are enjoyable to very few people, and – starting every January – abandoned by people in droves.)
10,000 years ago, food insecurity was possibly the greatest threat to human groups, and food acquisition required a fair bit of movement, so you wanted to be up to it but you also didn’t want to waste calories. Ancient people were kind of on the “see food” diet – they didn’t survive by passing up calories, or by expending more than they took in just to test themselves. Part of what any fitness program is about includes calorie deficit, simply because our built environments are awash in calories in a way that our brains haven’t caught up with. So modern fitness programs are, in many ways, from a completely different world to that inhabited by people still living by ancient lifeways. If you showed any fitness book to people living hunter-gatherer lifestyles, they’d probably wonder why anyone needed it. If you told people that it was valuable to have a very fast mile time or a huge deadlift, they’d probably think you were nuts, even if they might well also think it would be cool to see someone demonstrate that. Ironically, one of the most impressive “paleo” activities out there, and one that no fitness program claiming “Paleo” roots ever emphasizes, is simply being able to follow a large animal at a walking pace until it collapses from exhaustion. That combination of terrain familiarity, strategy, orienteering, and sheer endurance is a form of fitness Paleolithic people could actually use.
Links:
My answer at Quora
Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding, by Daniel E. Lieberman
Paleo Fitness, by Darryl Edwards with Brett Stewart and Jason Warner