Evolution itself makes us shy away from sports - but all is not lost
Barefoot professor
A new book by Harvard professor of evolutionary biology will be released in Russian this fall Daniela E. Lieberman Exercised. I do not know how to gracefully translate this word, in the publisher, it seems, too. Let's take the word "Exercised" as an option.
This scientist has written several best-selling books, is known as the barefoot professor (prefers barefoot running) and as the man who walked 40 horses out of 53 participating in race for endurance in the mountains of Arizona. I hope he put on his shoes there. And at the same time, as a child, Lieberman was a completely unsportsmanlike child, he began to run late, and set his speed record, according to him, while running away from a hyena in Kenya.
Running as a guarantee of human survival
In his book, Lieberman argues very convincingly that daily mobility is not a whim. nutritionists and anti-aging specialists, and an indispensable condition for a prosperous (and long!) life person.
Our strength and endurance have evolved over the course of evolution. Those who survived and spread their genes were those who were better able to obtain food, could move over longer distances, and run away from predators faster than their fellow tribesmen. That is, in the process of human development as a separate type, physical training was linked with evolutionary adaptability and was one of the most important factors in survival, longevity and health.
We evolved to be able to walk for a long time. This is evidenced, for example, by the special shape of the pelvis and the movable lower spine, not to mention the extended heel bones and long legs.
In the same time evolutionarily, energy saving is inherent in us. The professor describes an experiment, as a result of which a group of young men engaged in hard physical labor, at first, were very well fed (more than 3 thousand people). calories), then the calories were cut in half. Having dropped all possible fat, their body went into a resource-saving mode: the heart contracted by 30 percent less, the number of corpuscles in the blood was reduced, even earwax was produced noticeably less. And the most important thing for us is that people were constantly lying outside of work, even sexual urges came to naught. This suggests that our bodies are not disposed to waste energy on unnecessary movements. The body is not our helper here.
Keep fit without training
But there is good news as well.
To benefit from physical activity, It is not at all necessary to kill yourself in the gym and carry out exhausting multi-kilometer runs.
The Tarahumara Indians ("light feet" in translation) have a ritual akin to collective prayer - arivete marathons (for women, 25 miles) and rarajipari (men, 30 miles, sometimes up to 70 miles). Moreover, people run for a reason: women push a hoop covered with cloth in front of them, and men kick a wooden ball. At night, they also illuminate their way with a torch. Their loads are quite comparable to those experienced by IRONMAN athletes, but the only difference is that the Indians do not train a single day. It does not even occur to them - to run on purpose or perform some extra body movements outside the usual daily routine.
It's just that their routine is associated with mobility - hunting or cultivating fields. Their life is training.
To be continued...
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