What is Exercise?
To exercise is basically to exert. To exert means to produce some vigorous & intense action. I’ll come back to this question about 250 words down the article….
Why Exercise?
Exercise is a relatively modern concept in the history of mankind. I don’t think any human needed to care for exercise a few hundred, max thousand years back. (Also, please note, other than pets, no animals need exercise!). But to understand why exercise is necessary, we need to go back much more..to the Caveman’s times. The Cavemen lived lives full of physical challenges. Hunting wild animals, fighting or flighting predators and other threats was a daily routine. The relaxed life was probably frequently and abruptly interspersed with moments of action & exertion. The Caveman’s body was evolved to coordinate physical movements, which were fast and involved a fight or flight response. I’m not sure if they ever attempted to run 40 kms in one go, but sudden and violent bursts of sprinting, climbing, jumping, pushing, pulling, lifting etc must have been part of daily routine.
Fast forward lakhs of years…today, we wield a remote or a mobile with fingers safely ensconced in the comfort of our couch in the air conditioned home. Oh, actually not even that…we don’t even need to bother our thumb now to wield the remote or mobile…Alexa & Siri are to do the needful!
This is the essence of why we need exercise. The successive domestication of life through various stages of modernisation – like agricultural revolution, industrial revolution, and of course, the technology revolution – has brought us to a stage where doctors have started recommending a 30 minute walk in their prescriptions as exercise. Imagine recommending a 30 minute walk to the Caveman! I’m now in a position to answer the question….
What is Exercise?
Exercise nothing but a simulation of the Caveman’s lifestyle. We have domesticated our lives in the name of modernisation,our lifestyle has changed, but deep within the Caveman still resides – our genes and physiology are more or less unchanged since the Caveman’s times. By exercising, we are giving the Caveman a simulation of his good old times. This enables us to align our bodies with our evolutionary physiology. Let’s dig deeper. We need to elaborate the simulation.
What Simulation do we need as an Exercise?
As I said earlier, the archetypal response of the Caveman for any physical challenge was – Fight or Flight. It is this response that you need to stimulate during exercise. Remember this,
While exercising, you should be either preparing to fight or flight. Period.
When you’re preparing to fight, you’re looking for strength exercises. When you’re preparing for flight, you’re looking for agility.
As a hunter & gatherer, you were fit to live only if you could do both - fight & flight. Absence of either of these would have thrown you out of the genetic pool! As a modern man ( or woman), you are fit only if you work on both strength & agility. Only then you’re in a perfect sync with your Caveman self! You should be both fighting AND flighting fit!
Thus exercising typically involves a combination of push, pull, squeeze, lift, throw, jump, sprint, climb etc. Whatever you choose to do as an exercise, keep this ultimate objective in mind – to be fighting fit or flighting fit.
How to Exercise
In other words, we are now trying to find an answer to the question, “how to improve your capability for a fight or flight response?”.
Answer this first – What separates a couch potato from Usain Bolt?
What separates the two is a combination of genes and training. Bolt has arguably a lot superior genes than an average person on the street, including me and most of you. This fact is not in our control. We all probably work with some genetic limitations. If we can imagine genetic limitations as concentric circles, probably Usain Bolt and the likes exist at far outer orbits than the lesser mortals like you & me.
You & I exist on one of the inner circles. But here’s the thing – while there may be a limitation genetically endowed to you, such that you may never reach out to the outermost ring that belongs to the Bolts of the world, you do have a range to work in….and this is where Exercise steps in.
To inverse the argument, if Usain Bolt gives up on his training and stoops to a lower level of fitness regime, he will descend into lower orbits. This can be seen in various professional athletes who give up on their fitness regimes after retirement, and immediately drop in their fitness levels.
Exercise, from this perspective, has a two step objective:
- To locate you on the concentric circles, i.e. to explore your current level of fitness
- To push you to higher orbits, i.e. to expand your level of fitness
Exercise is about expanding your limits, which itself is done by exploring them first!
Forget Usain Bolt…it’s all about you. Your only competition is with “The Man in the mirror”. It’s all about being the best version of yourself, isn’t it!
From this perspective, let’s redraw your own concentric circles.
While, there may be some genetic limitations. But most of us, leave most of our genetic capability unexplored. Our body, as Nassim Taleb puts it, is AntiFragile – it gains with mild stressors. Exercise is that mild stressor. Through exercise, the body is pushed to its limits. This sends shock signals to the system. This shock orients the subsequent nutrition to rebuild the muscles during rest/sleep. This time, the body rebuilds for more capacity.
This brings me to some very important points.
Morning Walk is not an exercise
Did I just earn your disagreement & disapproval? Exercise, as I defined in this article, is something that pushes you to outer rings of your genetic abilities. A gentle walk in the park, with airpods, may have some meditative effects, but do not mistake it to be an exercise.
Exercise is no fun – It is not supposed to be fun. Any activity which endeavours to push to outer rings of fitness cannot be fun & frolic. Remember the facial expressions of weight lifters…that’s the expression you carry when you push your limits.
The Barbel Strategy
Expanding boundaries can mean flirting with danger. What if you cross your limits so much that your body cannot take it and succumbs to injuries, to say the least! To prevent this from happening, the exploration & expansion of limits has to be done with an iterative Trial & Error process called progressive overload:
- explore your limits (how many push ups can you do?)
- Firmly established (say 10 push ups, is max you can do)
- Try setting a foot outside your limits (Try doing 11 pushups, or try doing 10 with some books on the back)
The Barbell Strategy – Borrowing a term from Nassim Taleb for the second time in the article, fitness lies in ‘extremistan’. There are things which suffer from extremities, like glass, calorie and sleep. Then there are things which gain from extremities like success, business, fame, investing, and of course fitness & hypertrophy (increase and growth of muscles). For the things which lie in extremistan, a Barbell Strategy is the best – keep most of your exposure to extremely safe, risk free strategies; but take small exposure to the riskiest, potentially most explosive ones. Here is a sample depiction of the application of one such Barbel Strategy for exercise.
This is a full spectrum from lying on the couch to full pelt sprint. Notice, that I have treated sitting worse than lying on the couch. This is because, while lying on the couch is outrightly lazy and useless, sitting goes one step beyond and actually harms. Sitting on a chair is an unnatural posture, something that the Caveman never did.
Ok. Back to the Spectrum. Just look around…what most of us end up doing is that we sit most of the time and go for a gentle morning walk, treating it as an exercise. As I already explained, walking is not an exercise because, it does not make you explore & expand your limits. This is precisely the reason why you”ll see so many who have been doing morning walks for years, yet have not managed to get rid of their pot bellies.
Jogging is marginally better than walking, but jogging for long duration causes knee problems. Remember, seeing so many with knee straps! The benefits of jogging over walking are marginal, and gets outweighed by injury issues.
The Barbel Strategy, I Recommend
Stand & Walk for most of the time (morning walk included!). Replace most of your sitting with standing and walking. This is the “ maximum exposure to extremely safe, risk free strategy” of the Barbell.
For very brief periods – a few seconds to a few minutes a day/week, you sprint, full pelt, as if being chased by a goon with a dagger! This is the “taking small exposure to the riskiest, potentially most explosive strategy”. You can actually take it to further extremes by running uphill! This brief encounter with speed helps you explore your fitness limits. Your heart pumps blood to your legs, your lungs go into overdrive to pull in the requisite oxygen, your leg and core muscles are put to test, your eyes focus on the path, your hands move in harmony with your torso so as to lend perfect balance & thrust. This orients your mind, body & behaviour to just one activity – flight & survive! And since you do this for a few seconds, you don’t hurt your knees.
This Barbell Strategy is a perfect simulation for the Caveman inside you. When you practice this, the Caveman is at peace. This Sit-Sprint Spectrum is just one of the examples for the flight simulation. You can design similar other Barbell Strategies for fight as well as flight simulations involving body weight exercises, swimming, Gymnasiums, Outdoor Games, Trekking, Mountaineering, Cycling etc.
Pick whatever form of exercise you want, as long as it –
- It enhances either your strength (fight) or agility (flight)
- It has a Barbell – 90% of time activity with absolutely safety; 10% of time, some extreme activity which
- propels yourself to outer fitness orbits through progressive overload
What works for the body, works for the mind as well. You can frame similar Barbell Strategies for mental health. When you are fresh, like first thing in the morning, or just after a holiday, engage yourself with the most challenging & creative tasks. The more you use your brain, the more you discover its usefulness!
Exercise, by the way, is just one of the three pillared foundation to good health. This article is best read as a subset of the following article of mine.