Evolutionary Fitness
http://www.socsci.uci.edu/econ/personnel/devany/Essay.html

© Arthur S. De Vany, 1995

Introduction

This is a sketch of the ideas that are developed more fully in the
book. The health and fitness strategies developed fully in the book are
based on a few key ideas:

1.The human mind and body are non-linear dynamic systems poised in a
far from equilibrium attractor. Health, fitness and diet are dynamic
concepts. Linear, static thinking (static homeostasis counting calories
in and calories out) is completely inadequate for devising effective
strategies for health and fitness.

2.Human form and energy metabolism are adaptations to the evolutionary
environment. Virtually all of our human and prehuman ancestors lived as
hunter-gathererers in an environment dominated by Ice Ages.

3.The major challenge in adapting our glucose-loving, primate derived
brains to the Ice Ages was to deal with the carbohydrate scarcity of
the Ice Ages. Insulin resistance in muscle and organ tissue is one of
the most important elements of that solution.

4.Insulin resistance spares glucose for the brain and was an essential
adaptation to the glucose scarcity during the Ice Ages. In a modern
world abundant in cheap and readily available carbohydrate, insulin
resistance sets us up for hyperinsulemia (chronically elevated insulin)
which is a major factor in almost all modern diseases.

5.Hyperinsulemia and hypoexertion (wasting away of the lean mass of
the body through inactivity) are the most important health risks (the
National Institutes of Health) in Western cultures.

6.A conservative and effective strategy for attaining superior health and
fitness is to counter hyperinsulemia and hypoexertion by incorporating
diet and activity patterns from our evolutionary past.

7.An evolutionary diet is abundant in simple, fresh plant foods and
minerals, relatively high in protein, moderate in fat, and low in
carbohydrate. It contains no grains, milk, beans or processed foods.

8.An evolutionary activity pattern is mixed and varied. It contains brief,
intermittent episodes of highly intense physical action mixed with languid
periods and play. Healthy activities mimic the patterns of wild animals
and contain elements of chaos and order. Such patterns are described by
power laws which are typical of self-organized, far-from-equilibrium,
dynamic systems.

9.Power law training, which is developed in the book, mimics the ancestral
activity pattern and promotes hormone drives that counter hyperinsulemia
and build lean body mass.

10.Most fitness programs, whether aerobics or weight training, are too
unvaried and routine; they result in overtraining, depletion of the body's
antioxidant stores, compromised immunity, and are a chronic load on the
body. They take too much time and are ineffective. Dieting has a 95%
failure rate, wastes lean body mass, and is unhealthful.

11.The evolutionary fitness diet and exercise program is very effective,
takes little time, and is fun. It is the right way to feed and care for
your hunter-gatherer body and mind.


Evolution of the Human Body and Mind

The story of human evolution is one of adaptation in a patchy and
dangerous environment. We are generalists, not specialists, and that is
why we are adaptive two-legged omnivores with broad territorial range,
small stomachs and big brains. Humans embarked on a risky strategy for
survival: we "chose" to live by our wits by exploiting a wide territory
and many foods along with opportunistic capture of high nutrient,
but fugitive and random, food sources. We lived virtually all of the
3 or so million years of human and prehuman history as scavengers or
hunter-gatherers. Exploiting our generalist niche led to the elegant
evolutionary design of the human body and mind. In order to exploit a
patchy environment with plentiful low grade nutrients and scarce and
variable high value nutrients, the human mind had to become clever. We
became adaptive opportunists. The human body had to solve the energy
storage problem. Given a random food supply and variable energy
expenditure, our metabolism is evolved to solve a complex stochastic
energy management problem.  Many of the characteristics of our metabolism
derive from the evolved solutions to the energy flow problem. We clearly
are designed to live at an energy surplus, not at the balance preached
by modern, steady state models of fitness. I won't go into that here,
but it is enough to say that, given random energy intake and expenditure,
a precise matching of the two is impossible and matching on average would
guarantee an early death. One answer to achieving stochastic energy
balance is male/female pairing. Another is the ability to carry high
density nutrients in our hands so that nourishment can be taken to safer
grounds and given to mates.  Yet another answer is our ability to store
energy as fat, along with the appetite to rapidly gorge fat-laden meat
and bone marrow. Our metabolism can turn against us when calorically rich,
but nutritionally depleted, food is all around us and available at little
expenditure of energy.  Life in a patchy resource environment requires the
capability to perform a wide variety of activities. Clearly, the body's
design tells us that extreme exertion of brief duration was an important
human attribute, essential for our survival and evolution. Our upright,
bipedal posture gives us the mobility to cover the range required of an
omnivorous generalist. A large brain is required for hominids to cover
the widest range known to any animal species. High value nutrients are
essential to the energy-demanding brain and small stomach required for
high mobility in a patchy savanna where high value nutrients are variable
and fugitive.  Our muscle fiber composition reveals that we are adapted
to extreme intensity of effort. And the energy sources of these fibers
shows that the highly intense activities through which our ancestors
"earned a living" were of short duration (anaerobic metabolism came
before aerobic metabolism, which was grafted on later and the quickly
exhausted fast twitch fibers are likely to be the most primitive of our
sources of movement).  Our ability to sweat, our relative hairlessness,
our upright and, hence, cool posture, our mobility, as well as our
temperature regulation and appetite mechanisms are designed to solve
the problem of keeping an energy-hungry, but delicate, brain alive in
an energetic body capable of high mobility and peak energy bursts.


Evolutionary Design

Evolutionarily elegant design economizes on processes and energy. As a
consequence many structures and processes serve dual functions. Evolved
design resulted also in many compromises. These dual and compromised
designs, which are reliable at the high and variable energy flows
of our active ancestors go awry at the low energy flux typical of a
modern, sedentary individual. Many of the metabolic disorders--obesity,
carbohydrate intolerance, diabetes--that we see today are a result
of these design compromises. These "Western Diseases" are rare among
hunter-gatherers and were not part of the human ancestral experience. They
reflect an adaptation of the human body, which was designed for high
energy expenditure and variable diet and activity patterns, to modern
life.  Because human metabolism is conditional on activity patterns, diet
alone is not sufficient to control body composition and obesity. The
body "reads" its food intake and hormone messengers in the context
of its activity patterns, so the message contained in a biochemical
messenger is decoded through the dynamic patterns of our actions. This
is why inactivity and food deprivation are so counterproductive in
controlling obesity. It is also why sedentism and its associated low
energy flux produce overeating.  The essence of human beings is that
they are complex, adaptive and self-organized systems. Adaptation is the
essential human characteristic and movement is the canonical form of its
expression. Self-organization is anchored by reference to a dynamic body
image which lets there be a self to serve as the fixed point from which
the world is perceived. Inactivity not only changes the human body,
it alters the very structure of our perception and understanding. S
sedentary life weakens body image which is the reference of an organized
and autonomous self. The result of inactivity is a lack of purpose
and will. It takes good dynamics to produce a coherent, self-organized
individual and actions that are metabolically challenging produce a good
body image which anchors a strong and convergent dynamics. The brain is
adapted to action and its structure and health depend on movement. Long
ago, Darwin noted that the brains of wild animals were larger and heavier
than the brains of domesticated animals.


Metabolic Revolutions

Two metabolic revolutions shaped the evolution of homo sapiens. One
important revolution was when archaic homo sapiens adapted to the
glaciations and made the transition from hunter-gatherer to big game
hunter. This was 100,000 years ago. This revolution supplied the dense,
high quality nutrients and lipids that let the brain expand. Brain size
expanded rapidly during the past 250,000 years, more rapidly than in the
preceding 2 million years. Brain expansion was preceded by an expansion
in body size, so much so that archaic humans show bodies with fully
modern features. They seem to have been at least as large as the latest
generation of well-fed Americans and far more powerfully built. It is
significant that the development of the magnificent human body preceded
the evolution of the human brain. Such a brain could not live and would
have no purpose but for the supremely adaptive human body whose actions
and perceptions it integrates.  The second metabolic revolution, and
arguably the most important revolution in the history of homo sapiens, was
the agricultural revolution beginning about 10,000 years ago in Asia and
near the Mediterranean.  Agriculture came later to Europe, perhaps only
6,000 or 2,000 years ago. Great Britain was still making its transition
to agriculture at the time Caesar's army entered around 100 BC. The
paleoanthropological evidence shows that with the agricultural revolution
there was a decline in stature, cranial capacity, and muscularity, along
with a general decline in health and nutrition. (How do they know our
preagricultural ancestors were muscular? The bones are thick and dense
and the points where muscles were attached are robust.) This metabolic
revolution substituted routinized, repetitive work of grinding intensity
and a diet of low variety and protein content for the metabolically
varied physical activities of hunting and gathering and the enormous
variety of food and high protein content of hunter gatherer diets. Within
a few thousand years much of humanity had come to rely on a few starchy
crops for the overwhelming bulk of their calories. The repetitive work of
agriculture and grain processing left their mark in the high incidence
of arthritis that is found in the skeletons of our agriculturalist
ancestors.  Even today, most of the third world lives on a few starchy
crops and they exhibit the damage that a high carbohydrate diet with
too little fresh plant and animal foods can inflict. Those people who
populate the areas where agriculture began earliest show what is called
a Mediterranean physical type characterized, according to Webster, as
medium or short stature, slender build and small heads. Third world
children, living in rural, agricultural areas, live almost entirely
on grains. They rarely eat fresh fruit or vegetables and eat meat even
less often. They achieve less stature and test performance than urban
children and suffer skeletal and dental deficiencies. It is easy to tell
from the skeletons of our ancestors whether they were agriculturalists
or hunter gatherers. The agriculturalists have bad teeth, bone lesions,
small and underdeveloped skeletons and small craniums compared to hunter
gatherers.  The important metabolic revolutions to follow agriculture
were the industrial and information revolutions. These energy conserving
revolutions lowered the level and variety of the metabolic challenges
we face still more.  Our ancestors are us. It was only 10,000 years ago
that agriculture changed the human lifeway from hunting and gathering to
settled agriculture. And the dramatic decline in human energy expenditure
of the industrial age occurred no more than 200 years ago. The information
and television age is no more than two decades old. In this brief time
span evolution has made few, if any, changes in what we inherited from
the prior 3 million years.


Fitness in a Modern World

The adaptive and variable energy demands of our ancestral existence are
gone. We live a low energy flux and metabolically unvaried existence
in bodies designed for another lifeway. We are hunter/gatherers in
pin-stripe suits, living a sedentary life and it is killing us in
ways our ancestors never experienced. Virtually all the degenerative
diseases--atherosclerosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, osteoporesis,
declining muscle mass--of modern civilization are unheard of among hunter
gatherers and were not part of our ancestral experience.  Most modern
fitness prescriptions are static and agricultural. These programs model
the body as a machine, not as an adaptive organism. Consequently, they
prescribe a regime in which the body is under-fed and over-trained. They
are not based on adaptation, but on steady state analysis. These
models assume the body is a linear process that maintains a steady
state. In fact, all bodily processes are highly non-linear and these
non-linearities must be exploited in any effective fitness program. The
key to exploiting the highly non-linear and dynamic adaptive metabolic
processes of the human body is to achieve the right mixture of intensity
and variety of activities.  Here is an example of the Zen-like twists that
adaptive, non-linear systems like human metabolism follow that confound
mechanistic thinking. The body uses fat in the aerobic (ST and lower IT)
zone. So, linear thinking suggests that to burn fat you should operate
in that zone. It would not surprise someone trained to understand the
adaptive capabilities of the human body that if you burn more fat the
body will find a way to produce more. And this is just what happens
when you flow energy through the aerobic pathway; your body releases
hormone messengers that signal higher fat production.  You do burn a
higher proportion of calories as fat in the aerobic zone, but that is
no reason to stay there. You burn more calories and more fat in total
when you train at high intensity. And you do not open the metabolic
pathways that cause your body to make more fat. Energy that flows over the
anaerobic pathway signals your body to make more muscle and to burn fat.
You incur an oxygen depth that raises metabolism for days after a high
intensity session. Above all, you bring adaptations that burn fat. As
the body remodels in response to the adaptive challenge presented by a
brief, high-intensity session, it preferentially burns fat. In addition,
you put on lean muscle mass that burns energy continuously. From 60 to
70 per cent of the energy you burn is at your basal metabolic rate. If
you gain lean muscle mass you raise your basal metabolic rate and, thus,
burn more energy 24 hours a day.  Mechanistic prescriptions fail because
they do not present the metabolic challenges and variety of the ancestral
environment for which our bodies are designed. If your personal trainer is
working you out three days a week, doing three sets of the same exercises,
or, worse, 5 or even 6 days a week, find another trainer. Working out 5
or 6 days a week doing many sets of exercises per body part and spending
over an hour per workout imposes a chronic load on the body for which it
is poorly designed to adapt. You are flooding your body with hormones that
consume lean body mass. These hormones also preferentially consume fast
twitch muscle, the very substance you are after for strength, lean mass,
and vitality. You are draining your adaptive capacity so that you cannot
build, or even keep up with the load. Worse still, you are compromising
your immune system. Virtually all the body's adaptive mechanisms are
designed to deal with acute, not chronic, stresses. Exercise should mimic
the activities of our ancestral existence; we are adaptive organisms
that thrive on variety, not machines designed for high volume routine.


The Evolutionary Model

The evolutionary model combines activities of varying intensity to
mimic our ancestral hunter-gatherer existence. The key is to hit the
right balance of intensity and variety. You have to live in the fast
twitch (FT) muscle fiber zone where your metabolic rate is many times
your basal metabolism for intermittent, brief intervals. Most sedentary
individuals live entirely in the ST region and never achieve the metabolic
peaks that are essential to adaptation. Grim aerobicizers and high volume
weight trainers live in the slow twitch (ST) and intermediate twitch (IT)
muscle fiber zone and do way too much work.  The evolutionary model of a
healthy lifestyle is to combine brief, but intense, work outs in a gym
(the FT zone) with a wide variety of activities that mix intensity and
duration randomly (mixing the IT and ST zones with brief spurts into
the FT zone). Roller blading, bicycling, walking, sprinting, tennis,
basketball, power walking, hitting softballs and so on are the sorts
of activities that mix IT and ST fibers with intermittent FT action.
Activities are spaced randomly according to a power law distribution
which not only fits the hunter-gather activity rhythms but also virtually
every process in a healthy human being---healthy heart beats, brain
waves, cellular ion channel pulses, and the coordination dynamics of
movement all have the distinctive signature of self-similarity and power
law variation. It is when these patterns show too much regularity that
organization and coordination break down; for example, epileptics show
too much, not too little, regularity in their brain waves. Heart attacks
are the result of too much regularity in contractions that leads to a
loss of coordination and seizure.  A power law looks like this: Most of
its mass is located at the low intensity activities and there is little
mass at the highest intensities. The evidence strongly indicates this
kind of intensity-frequency mix was typical of our ancestors. The far
left zone, at the peaks and with brief duration, is the FT zone. The
middle zone is the IT and ST zone and the long tail at the right is
the ST zone.  You need to live intermittently and briefly in the FT
zone to live according to our ancestral lifeway. You also need to enjoy
the variation at the far right tail and get plentiful rest. One of the
worst features of modern life is its compression in the variability of
our activities---both the right hand and left hand tails are compressed
relative to the variation in a power law. When the ends of the activity
distribution are compressed to the middle, our activities fall within a
narrow frequency band. A compressed distribution is a chronic stressor,
we get neither enough playful, intense activity nor enough rest. Animals
in the wild move according to power laws. Think of a lion or jaguar. They
are muscular and lean and spend long periods in languid rest and brief,
highly intense periods in the hunt.


Power Law Training

Why is a power law a good model of adaptive training? A power law
describes a statistical distribution of intensity and frequency of action
that is characteristic of a complex adaptive system functioning at
maximum efficiency. Power law variation represents a balance of order
and variability that is representative of self-organized, adaptive
systems. All humans are self-organized dynamic systems. Systems that
live in the critical region between order and chaos display power
law behavior.  How do you train according to a power law? A power
law of the form Intensity = Frequency-Beta gives the right balance of
structure and novelty. The music of Bach and Mozart contains the mixture
of structure and novelty characteristic of power laws. The power law
is a statistical distribution, meaning it describes probabilities, not
certainties. Hence, randomization is an essential element of power law
training. But, so is pattern. Your activities cannot become too random,
or they lose pattern and drift without memory. There will be some drift
in frequency so that there will be time periods when you will not do high
intensity workouts for two or more weeks (periodization falls out of the
power law naturally). At other times, you may have 2 or 3 high intensity
sessions in a row.  The real point is to embrace randomness and variety
within the context of structured repetitiveness. Good intuitive models
of power law variation are the movements of the wild lion or the music of
Bach or Mozart.  NBA basketball is an example of power law variation. Pro
basketball is not an aerobic sport, it actually is an anaerobic sport full
of power moves, quick bursts, sprints, and leaps mixed in with half time
rest, quarter breaks, pauses, free throws, time outs, and bench time. What
NBA players have is the ability to use these brief intervals to quickly
recover their phosphate energy stores (they use the alactic pathway
discussed below).  NBA athletes and NFL defensive backs provide evidence
that power law training makes you powerful and lean. NBA players are the
leanest and most powerful in any professional sport (their body fat is
around 5 to 7 percent). NFL defensive backs and running backs come close
(around 8 percent body fat). Like NBA players, NFL defensive and running
backs do burst/rest moves through out the game, randomly timed, with a
duration and intensity pattern that looks like a power law (patterns are
not bunched up around a mean, they are spread over all scales and with
the characteristic power law shape shown in the graph above).  A power
law distribution of activities means the intensity, spacing, duration and
volume of training are variable in order to present a constant novelty in
metabolic challenges while retaining enough structure and repetitiveness
to maximize adaptive capability. When you train like a hunter, you follow
a power law distribution of intensity and frequency. You distribute
activities so that you hit highly intense metabolic peaks briefly and
intermittently. This is the FT fiber region. You also scale intensity
within a set.



Ascending Threshold Sets

In order to hit all the fibers and scale intensity according to a power
law, I do supersets of ascending weight and descending repetitions. The
sequence is intended to move up the energy and muscle fiber hierarchy,
recruiting successively more muscle fibers and different fiber types
until all but the FT fibers drop out. This exploits the "size principle"
which says that the threshold of intensity needed to fire the muscles
increases with the size of the motorneuron. The FT fibers have the largest
motorneurons and, therefore, require the highest intensity to fire. Power
law training exploits this feature.  You apply the technology by doing
supersets of ascending intensity to force the ST and then the IT fibers to
drop out until only the FT fibers are left. I begin a set with a fairly
light weight, lifting and lowering the weight slowly to prefatigue
the ST fibers. Do this for 15 repetitions. Then, taking only enough
time to increase the weight, do 8 to 10 more repetitions at a faster
speed. Increase the weight one more time and do 4 to 6 repetitions at
high, but controlled speed. I also slightly increase the speed within each
set of repetitions, aiming at the FT fibers near the end of each stage.
I pause between stages of the superset just long enough to change the
weights and this 10 to 20 seconds is enough to regenerate the ATP and
PCr to do the next set. By the third phase, the lactic acid is burning,
but it will quickly be taken up because I don't do any more of that
exercise and move on to something completely different. (This is an
advanced technique. It takes conditioning and a tolerance for lactic
acid to get to this stage. To begin, do only two stages of the superset,
aiming for 12 and 7 reps. Then move on.) I may aim at 15 reps, 8 reps,
4 reps in each phase of the superset, but no one is counting; it is
always the acid burn that tells me when to stop, not some preset target
of reps.  I do not go to complete failure, ever. Failure at the last
rep is over rated because by then the high energy muscle phosphates are
gone and the lactic acid is limiting your power. You lose form and get
hurt when you push too hard on the last rep. You don't develop strength
using the muscle when its power is depleted and restricted by lactate,
it is better to use alactic training (see below) for power.


Alactic Training

Another variation in the power law technology I use in my training
is designed to work what is called the alactic energy pathway. This
training exploits power law variation as well; it just works farther
to the left on the power curve, well up the intensity scale into the FT
fiber region. In this region, the duration of effort must be extremely
short, on the order of a few seconds and milliseconds. Here, you imagine
an ancestor like homo erectus running on the grassy savanna to a patch
of trees to escape one of the formidable predators that roamed over
Africa 2 million years ago. Ancestral humans had the ability to sprint
at high speed as well as the endurance to trek over long distances
efficiently. Indians used to run down horses over a period of a week and
were able to catch deer sprinting (the deer escape in a characteristic
curve which the hunter knew and intecepted). The alactic pathway is what
supplies this energy in the first few seconds of the SPRINT; it is the
engine for the "fight or flight" response that permits us to make our
quickest and most powerful moves.  The alactic pathway is called that
because it relies on the high energy phosphates stored in our muscles
whose metabolism is rapid and does not produce lactic acid. Hence,
it is a-lactic. The muscles contain enough phosphates (PCr and ATP) to
generate extremely high force for up to 3 seconds. During that time the
movement is powered primarily by FT fiber. Beyond that time you begin
to use muscle glycogen and produce lactic acid. Those extreme physical
feats you hear about---mothers lifting cars off their children and so
on---draw on this high energy pathway. At peak intensity, some athletes
may generate up to 7,000 or 8,000 watts. This power is generated in very
brief episodes, for example, in a high jump a power of 4,000 watts is
produced in 0.02 seconds. For durations exceeding a minute, a rate of
350 watts can be produced only by elite, highly trained athletes for no
more than 4 or 5 minutes. Beyond a second or two at high power levels,
lactate begins to accumulate and limit performance. These data fit a
power law perfectly in the way power declines with duration (see the
power curve above). They are further support for the power law training
techniques developed in my book.  I do sets that I call 1/5s or "one,
fives" because that describes how to do them. I do one repetition, then
put the weight down for 5 seconds. Then do another rep and put the weight
down another 5 seconds. Then another, and so on for a sequence of about
4 to 8 repetitions. That's it, then move on to the next exercise. What
you have done is to achieve between 4 and 8 high quality repetitions
without building lactate. The 5 second pause between reps is enough to
regenerate the muscle phosphates if you are in reasonable shape. Up to
10 seconds pause is appropriate until you have acquired the ability
to recover quickly. You can use reasonably heavy weight without the
risk that goes with doing multiple repetitions with heavy weights.
Alactic training is much safer and more productive of strength than
training to full failure. The reason is simple, doing multiple repetitions
builds lactic acid which limits your power and ability to handle heavy
weight. By doing just 1 rep and resting 5 seconds you retain nearly
all of your muscle power. This lets you handle heavier weight and do
quality movements. You never force yourself to work to failure, as many
muscle magazines and training authorities seem to recommend. There is no
danger because you use a weight that is below your maximum and do not
try to force a depleted muscle through another repetition. There is no
straining to try to do that "last rep".  The theory that the "last rep"
is the best one is wrong in my opinion. You have little strength left
by then because the high energy phosphates are gone and the lactic acid
limits your strength. This means that the reps leading up to that last
rep must use a weight well below what will tax your muscle when it is at
full strength. Multiple reps build endurance, not power. Your endurance
is developed by the ascending sets discussed above. Also, much of what
passes for endurance is actually the ability to recover quickly from
peak effort (this is the kind of endurance NBA players have). By doing
a sequence of 4 to 8 or more 1 reps with 5 seconds in between, you train
your recovery ability so that you restore power quickly. Because phosphate
replenishment uses the aerobic pathway, and uses fat preferentially over
carbohydrate, you indirectly develop your aerobic capacity and burn fat
as well when you do alactic training.


Power Walking

Our ancestors walked a lot carrying heavy weight in order to move
camp and bring back as much of the kill as they could. Power walking,
laden with real weight on the order of 35 to 100 pounds, is an effective
modern version of what our ancestors did. Power walking with a back pack
or scuba diving weights around the waist dramatically increases the
intensity and effectiveness of walking. And it is about as effective
as jogging for aerobic capacity, without the pounding and damage. It
is what women among hunter gatherers do when they gather. For example,
Kung San women typically carry an infant on a seven mile trip foraging
for plant foods and return with a 35 pound load. They only do this 2 or 3
times a week for they live in a kind of natural affluence where food is
readily available.  Males among hunter gatherers do not carry the large
game our ancestors did, so they are not a good model of power walking
for males. Consider this instead as a model. A historical source reports
that 5 Indian braves drove 5 bison into a pit. After they killed these
2000 pound bison, they pulled them out of a pit more than 10 feet deep,
lined them up and skinned and butchered them. Then, they carried as much
as they could back to camp to get others to return for the rest. What
a wonderful model of fitness, combining speed, power, strength, and
stamina. You can be sure this successful hunt was followed by plenty of
rest and play and feasting.  This model is what I seek to emulate.


Personalizing Your Training

Everyone has to adapt their own workouts and activity patterns to
their own capacities and intentions. If evolution teaches us anything
it is that we are all different even though we share a large set of
common attributes and metabolic processes. For most people, a move from
mechanistic training to adaptive training would consist primarily of
cutting back on the number of sets and how often they work out. This
is combined with a pushing up of the pace and intensity and cutting way
back on the number of sets and length of the workout.  The sophisticated
variations on the power law that I use are not required and are there
when you gain condition and strength. A brisk and intense workout that
leaves you feeling challenged in each exercise, whatever your personal
level of fitness, is what we are after. One upper and one lower body
workout per week, of no more than 40 minutes duration, and one all around
workout per week of completely different exercises is a good model to
begin with. The all around work out should be focused on symmetry and
grace and the more intense workouts on the large muscles.


Symmetry

Symmetry is crucial for it is a reliable evolutionary clue to health and,
hence, it is something we find attractive. Tumors and pathologies produce
gross asymmetries and our love of symmetry reflects the reproductive
success of our ancestors who were sensitive to these clues. Stay away from
biceps and triceps stuff, they make you lose symmetry. Work on calves,
traps, neck and back. You look taller, another reliable evolutionary
clue that women use to find good genes, if you move more mass to the neck
and shoulder girdle and to the calves. And you will be more balanced and
powerful. A thick trunk is another evolutionary clue. It is a signal that
suggests pregnancy in the female and pathology in the male. I strive for
the X-LOOK---mass in the shoulder girdle, upper (not lower) chest and
back, the calves and lower quads. This requires strict form so that you
do not use your trunk to heave weights. If you work out like a grunt,
heaving and cheating on reps, you will look like a grunt.


Intensity and Brevity

Power law training requires intense but brief work outs and long intervals
between sessions. Intensity and brevity are the keys to promoting the
hormone drives that are essential to adaptation. So important are these
drives that one could say they are the real objective of the workout. A
workout that is over long depletes the adaptive hormones and causes a
surge in destructive hormones.  The open intervals between high intensity
sessions are filled with activity of intermediate and low intensity,
with a spurt into the FT zone. These activities include roller blading,
hiking with one of my grandchildren in a back carrier, or walking and
sprinting in deep sand at the beach, riding my motorcycle on back canyon
roads and high mountain dirt trails (wind chill is a very effective
device for shedding fat), shooting baskets, and so on. This is not a
frenetic schedule, filled with mandatory exercise. It is playful and fun,
not work.  Variation in weight, repetitions, and speed is consistent with
power law training because there is no characteristic scale in a power
law. Power law activities exhibit self-similarity at all scales. This
means for speed, weight, and duration. My work outs are randomly timed;
they may fall on two consecutive days, though this would be rare. At
the other extreme, they may be a week apart. I aim for one upper and one
lower body high intensity work out per week along with one easier, all
round work out. Sometimes, I feel like more and may do up to 4 workouts
of varying intensity during a week. Often only one or two workouts fill
out the week. An average workout is 25 minutes. No workout is more than
40 minutes, most are less. I often finish my whole workout while other
people are still doing sets on a machine or a body part. I never leave
the gym tired, just relaxed and feeling good.


Motivation

If you think about the challenges our ancestors faced it will help
you realize that what some fitness and motivational experts see as
motivational problems are actually evolved adaptations. Recognition and
acceptance go a long way toward helping you make healthy changes.

The fact that you are alive is a remarkable thing. The odds against it are
great. The genes you carry contain information from a continuous strand
of surviving organisms that extends 2 billion years back in time. You
are an improbable event and your existence is testimony to the toughness
and adaptiveness of the ancestral line from which you come. You are a
survivor, well equipped to live and be successful in the world for which
your body and mind are adapted. Recognize, however, that the world for
which your genes encode a successful design is not today's world; it
is the world of some 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.  Your brain and body
"expect" you to live as a hunter gatherer. They are highly adaptive by
design, for that is the key requirement of our ancestral lifeway. But,
a natural life is one of movement and action, of challenge and response,
of variety and adaptation. Your brain still "sees" sensory inputs as
though you are a hunter gatherer and, at the instinctual level, directs
your actions according to what spells adaptive success in the environment
of your ancestors. (Example: you freeze before a large audience because
your ancestors increased their odds of surviving when exposed on open
ground by freezing to escape detection.) If you accept that some parts
of this metaphor are true of you, you will be more relaxed and less
apt to punish yourself for things you do, or don't do (like get out and
move around).  Laziness and over-eating are adaptations that let your
ancestors pass their genes down to you. These labels place over-critical
value judgements on what are evolved adaptations. Energy was a precious
resource in the ancestral environment, and it still is in the third
world where people barely get enough to eat. What we call laziness is
an adaptive, instinctual behavior that kept our ancestors from wasting
precious energy in a world where high energy expenditure was required
for food. Because the agricultural revolution dramatically lowered the
price of carbohydrate, we have abundant and cheap food energy available
at nearly zero energy expenditure. Because cheap carbohydrate is all
around us, the caloric return to our food-seeking energy expenditures
is so high now that we have to find ways to expend energy in healthful
ways. Evolutionary training "tricks" the brain into thinking it is
still 40,000 BC and resets your metabolism as well.  Variety and play
are the essential human attributes. By keeping your work outs brief and
exhilarating you won't get bored. By adding lots of outdoor activity
and play, you will enjoy the power and fitness you gain. If you start
a new sport, or pick up one long neglected as you begin evolutionary
training, you will see how the power you gain improves your play. The
feedback between the training and your new power in the sport will
be habit forming.  (The evolutionary basis of sport seems clear. For
example, the number of players in most popular team sports today is
about equal to the number of prime age males that would be alive in a
typical paleolithic band of hunter gatherers.)

I fail to see how anyone can train 5 or 6 days a week in the gym and
for hours at a time. That is factory or agricultural work, not anything
human beings were evolved to do. And the paradox is that you will
gain less strength and fitness if you overtrain. And you will join
the thousands who quit out of sheer boredom.  I keep no records for
this encourages the accounting mentality which is the bane of adaptive
training. It is the burn and heart rate that tell you when you are in
the FT zone. Record keeping focuses you on the wrong goals. You begin to
think it is important how much you can bench press or how big your arms
are. It is what you can do outside the gym that matters, not what you
can do in it. Big arms ruin speed and coordination for they locate too
much mass far from the central axis of the body, creating a high polar
moment of inertia.  Goals set you up for failure. If you don't achieve
them, you will quit. You become impatient or see that it will take too
long and you will quit. In trying to speed your progress you will work
out too often and imitate the people in the gym around you who also do
too many sets and do body builder exercises that are not productive.
As to goals, don't set any. The ones you are likely to choose are not
functional. You will say I want to lose x pounds, but you really want to
lose fat not lean body mass. You actually want to gain lean body mass.
Goals that relate primarily to appearance are not deep enough to sustain
you. They do not relate to function and process.  You can't control
the outcome, only the process. We really aren't even in control of the
process; the dynamics move us toward attractors, not our intentions. Just
accept that what you are doing is what your body and mind were made to
do and that this more active and metabolically challenging, but playful
and fun, lifestyle is how it is going to be from now on.  Your form will
remodel to fulfill the functional demands you place on your body. Get
the derivatives right (the direction and magnitude of change), don't
worry about the levels. Goals are just ways to set yourself up for
failure. Train adaptively. As you monitor where you are, adapt your
training to move toward a target that is framed with respect to where
you are at that time and where you want to head. Setting goals is still
a mental habit carried over from the body as mechanism kind of thinking.


Lean Body Mass and Health

Intermittent, intense and brief work outs build muscle mass that
burns energy continuously. They promote hormone drives that keep you
young. They switch the body's metabolic pathways so that food goes
to muscle and organ mass and not to fat. The intensity is the key
to reaching the fast twitch fibers of the muscles, which are the key
fibers to staying young. A primary indicator of aging is loss of fast
twitch muscle fiber. Retaining your metabolic headroom through intense,
brief and variable training promotes retention of lean body mass, organ
and brain mass---you stay younger and smarter than joggers and dieters
who lose muscle, organ and brain mass. Aerobic exercise of long duration
and moderate intensity isn't the answer. It promotes free radical damage
through the oxidation of fat and when it is done often enough and at low
intensity, it catabolizes muscle mass. There is a suspiciously high rate
of cancer among marathoners.  Lean body mass is the primary indicator
of health status. Death is universal among persons who lose 40 per cent
of their lean body mass. Lean body mass is the most accurate predictor
of survival time for victims of starvation, trauma, infection, AIDS and
other acute diseases, regardless of the nature of the disease. So powerful
a predictor of health status is the rate of loss of lean body mass that
it seems to be part of the process of dying. Rapid protein wastage is a
mediator, not just an indicator of death.  Dieters beware. Rapid weight
loss wastes lean body mass. Starvation studies show that brain mass may
decline as much as 3 to 5 per cent with food deprivation. Other organs
lose far more mass. A pigeon lost 93 per cent of its fat tissue, but 45
per cent of its heart, 42 per cent of its skeletal muscle and 71 per cent
of its spleen on a starvation diet. These experiments are hard to do on
humans, but the Nazis did do such human experiments and found similar
rates of loss of lean body and organ tissue. Brain scans on anorexics
reveal that they have shriveled brains.  People who eat only once a day
waste lean body mass all day. They are awash in catabolic hormones that
use lean body mass to try to keep their brain alive on the glucose it
requires. When they finally eat, they eat so much they get a surge of
insulin that packs the energy in the food away in fat. Over time, their
body composition changes---they come to have this small body inside a
relatively inert shell of fat. They look large, but the active part of
them is small.  Don't keep track of your total weight, keep track of your
lean body mass. Your lean body mass is the real, metabolically active,
you. It is the tissue that allows you to function and think and live. If
you gain lean body mass, you lose fat and you keep it off because your
metabolic rate rises. Everyone should keep track of their lean body mass
to monitor their health status.  Aging is a slow form of lean body mass
loss. What we call aging is sedentary aging and carbohydrate abuse. The
accumulation of damage from hypoexertion and hyperinsulemia over a longer
time scale is what aging is in Western countries.

Adults lose about 5 per cent of their lean body mass per decade after
they enter their thirties. Most of the muscle they lose is FT fiber, for
they cease by some age to live in the FT region. They settle into the ST
region and, consequently, as they age their muscle fibers atrophy. The
40 per cent rule may hold here too. Progressive aging and deterioration
resulting in a 40 per cent loss of lean body mass may be a precursor
or mediator of the dying process. The aging just die over a longer time
scale than do acutely ill individuals.


Feeding

Feeding is simple.

1.Homo sapiens is an omnivore; your diet must contain an ample variety of
fresh plant foods and lots of amino acids and essential lipids. Hunter
gatherer diets contain an enormous variety of plant foods and are
high in protein (the median is about 35 per cent of calories from
protein). The only universal characteristic of ancestral and living
hunter gatherer diets is the almost complete absence of grains and
simple carbohydrates. There were no simple carbohydrates like sugar
and pasta. Fruits were tough and fibrous, not the refined, sweet stuff
we have today. The closest thing to a simple carb was honey, rare and
guarded by wild bees. There were no grain or cereal sources of carbs in
the ancestral diet.

2.Live at high energy flux and eat randomly, varying food intake to the
scale of activities. This includes the odd brief fast, as though hunting
is lean. The body regulates food intake naturally when you live at the
high energy flux of an evolutionary trainer. It is when we are sedentary
and live at low energy flux that our appetite mechanisms fail to match
energy intake to expenditure (the evidence shows that infants regulate
energy intake precisely and children only lose this ability when they
become sedentary).

Animals confined to feeding pens or cages eat more than they expend in
energy. That is how cattle are fattened for slaughter. Humans who live
at low energy flux because they are sedentary and inactive will over eat,
just like cattle in a feeding pen. Even though they are free to move about
and are not caged, their metabolism is trapped in a feeding pen mode.
It's another one of those evolutionary paradoxes. When we are inactive,
we trigger an eating response and eat more than we expend in energy. The
basis of this may lie in an adaptation that would let our ancestors
recover from the intense activities of the hunt by eating beyond their
energy requirements when they rest in order to rebuild tissue and energy
stores. The ability to eat beyond energy needs would be essential to the
survival of any organism that lived in the world of our ancestors with
its variable energy expenditure and intake.  The answer is clear: live
as though you are a free-ranging, adaptive human being, not like some
animal being fattened in a pen for the kill. It is hopeless to try to
attain the precisely balanced intake and expenditure of calories preached
by diet promoters. And it is impossible to do if you are sedentary for
you trigger this evolved over eating adaptation.  3.Our ancestors were
better nourished than all but a few of us because they ate low calorie,
nutritionally dense foods, all fresh and uncontaminated, and they ate
in large quantities to fulfill their high energy needs. Dieters who face
calorically rich, low nutrient foods and eat in small quantities face a
real risk of malnutrition. If they are sedentary the risk is even higher
because they must restrict food intake so severely.

I am more concerned with energy expenditure than intake, for it is energy
expenditure that determines energy flux and appetite. High energy flux
brings our appetite control mechanisms into the ancestral range where
they were evolved to operate.  4.Live as though you are in the world
that existed before the invention of agriculture. There was no grain or
cereal or manufactured food in the ancestral environment. Our ancestors
ate fresh fruits and vegetables and meat. They got no milk beyond the
age of 4. They ate no cereals and consumed no vegetable oils. Their
diets were not particularly low on fats; indeed, for a few million years
prehuman hominids may have lived on the fatty bone marrow and brains of
scavenged kills more than on fresh meat. Even when they became premier
big game hunters, humans preferred the fatty cuts of meat. Our brains
use glucose for energy (and hence our preference for sweets) but are
made of lipids. Some of these essential brain lipids can be gotten only
from animal fat. At least, that is where our ancestors got them.

Seeds did not enter the diet until about 14,000 years ago. Vegetable oils
are a completely novel substance in the evolution of human eating. The
processed oils now recommended so heavily by nutritionists are no more
than a few decades old. There is zero evidence to indicate that eating
this stuff is a good thing to do. And, it is well known that processing
alters the shape of the fatty chains making them nearly impossible to
metabolize and that they are readily oxidized to form free radical chain
reactions that damage body tissue.  The intolerance that many people
show to grains, eggs, milk and seafoods can, in part, be explained by
how recently they entered the human diet. Many of us are poorly adapted
to these foods, particularly if we are from a culture that began to
rely on agriculture or dairying recently. We are not adapted because
gene frequencies have not settled to the range where such individuals
become rare in the population.  That will happen only after enough time
has passed for the lactose-and grain-intolerant among us to leave fewer
children to carry our genes into the future than those who can eat the
stuff.  Epidemic carbohydrate intolerance is another clue that we are
not yet adapted to a post-agricultural, post-industrial, information age
diet. To emphasize once more, a universal in the omnivorous human eating
record as reflected in hunter gatherer diets and in the ancestral diet
is the absence of simple- and grain- or cereal-based carbohydrate. The
conventional wisdom and diet advice of the experts that you should eat
grain- or cereal-based carbohydrate flies in the face of the evolutionary
record.  5.Eat when hungry. For me, that is at about 4 times a day, often
more, but sometimes less. Eating once a day degrades lean body mass and
reduces your metabolism. Your lean body disintegrates and your fat mass
increases.  Nobody who wants to be lean and healthy should eat only once
a day. Eating must be varied between feast and famine days. Three square
meals a day will make you fat. Foods eaten every day can become toxic.

Take antioxidants. Our food sources of minerals and antioxidants are
not as rich as those of the ancient past. Free radical oxidation of
body tissues is one of the primary aging mechanisms. Scavenge these free
radicals with antioxidants and with the natural phytochemical antioxidants
abundant in fresh vegetables and fruits.

The beauty of the 40,000 BC eating model is that you eat no canned,
frozen, packaged, or manufactured food; all fresh foods, eaten raw
whenever possible, with the exception of meat and poultry, which I prefer
to cook because I no longer trust our food supply. You don't have to read
labels because nothing you buy to eat comes with a label (nature doesn't
do this). Some latitude is necessary (I do not believe in rigid rules for
anything anyway), but the 40,000 BC model is always guiding your choices.


Conclusion

Does evolutionary training work? There are theoretical reasons why
power law variation and intermittency are the right features of
human activity. And, there is abundant evidence of the effects of
anaerobic activities on body composition, lean body mass and insulin
sensitivity. Remember, carnivores don't jog, they sprint.



A few researchers have begun to study the models developed here and the
evidence is impressive. It is the only model of fitness that is based on
adaptive systems theory and evolutionary reasoning. Power law training
is the right technology for the human body.

It works so well you will feel like you are cheating. The body is a
decentralized, dynamic object; it quickly turns off to an over-arching,
central controller brain dictating its moves and energy sources. I
cover this in my "Mind as Movement" sections in the book. Among many
other reasons, it is this crucial feature of body/mind integration that
makes the other diet and fitness formulas fail; they are examples of the
Soviet, command and control approach to health and fitness and they fail
miserably. Their followers grind sets in the gym, pedal their stationary
bikes for hours, or jog the healthy variation out of their hearts. This
"top down" command and control approach breaks the mind/body unity and is
doomed to failure. Followers of such systems don't have fun and turn the
healthy stress of exercise into distress and even disease. The path to
fitness is indirect and non-linear; grim determination and Soviet-style
overtraining won't get you there. Episodic, intense, brief sessions that
are fun and end on a note of success (a marker of adaptation) rather
than grinding routine and fatigue (markers of failure and non-adaptation)
are the keys to success. None of these systems produce the muscularity,
power, leanness or symmetry that you get from evolutionary training.

Less is more. You cannot load a stressful diet and fitness program that
is predicated on undereating and overtraining (and virtually all of
the calorie counting aerobics-based programs are of this type) onto a
busy professional life. You can do Evolutionary Fitness and still have
a successful and productive life without the risk of poor nutrition and
over training. Power law training is so productive you will spend very
little time in the gym, usually from 1 to 2 hours a week. The intensity
of training like an adaptive hunter is exhilarating and the brevity
leaves you feeling fresh. You gain time for work and play. You also
gain a toughness and energetic plasticity that leaves you poised for
the many adaptive challenges that life brings.  In short, live, eat,
work and play like it is 40,000 BC while you enjoy what the modern world
has to offer. Take care of that hunter-gatherer mind and body that you
carry in that pin-striped suit.