Exercise Review: Born to run?

Doctors, fitness gurus and the media are constantly reminding us that exercise leads to healthier and longer lives and thinner and more attractive bodies. We identify actions of sporting ability and pay close attention to superhero actors with torsos that are close to pathology. So why, if all of this is so good for us, do most of us have relationships with exercise that goes from hate-hate to hate-hate? Why do we rely on monitoring technologies such as smartwatches to guide us through our daily “essential” steps?

The title “Exercise” is a nod: There is something neurotic, anxious, anxious about our obsession with physical activity. In the book, Mr. Lieberman talks about a dozen myths about physical fitness and health, giving each one a chapter. His lens is an evolutionary – a Harvard paleoanthropologist with specialized experience in human movement – and he studies the effects of athletic body movement in the laboratory and in different groups of people all over the world.

In one chapter, for example, Mr. Lieberman deals with the myth that sitting is bad for you. Sadly he discovers that the myth is true, but not as most accept. Despite conventional wisdom, slow posture does not lead to back pain, as can be seen both by research on office workers and comparison of sitting styles around the world. The real problem is that people don’t get up and move around enough. As scientists begin to realize, long-term inactivity and excess fat around our organs pose a risk of chronic inflammatory diseases, such as arthritis and type 2 diabetes. Lieberman? Don’t be inert for too long. Chill out. Get up. Or at least “shameless squirm.”

Up until about two million years ago, all of our ancestors lived in search of wild food. Human psychology and anatomy have adapted to these ancient ways of life in ways that are not so good today. Not that we are worse off for this history – in fact, 21st century Americans are living longer and healthier lives than any previous century. But sometimes the tricks we once developed to solve old problems go up in us today.

To understand the challenges of modern life, anthropologists rely on observations of the few living human groups in search of wild, farm-free food. Some of the best parts of “Exercise” are Mr. Lieberman’s accounts of his work and others by these modern supply groups, such as the Hadza people, who live in a dry corner, are relatively accessible in Tanzania. Their days include a few hours of physical activity to find food, dig up tubers, hunt, and collect honey. The Hadza spend much of their time sitting and socializing. Like other hunters who live on a bio-diet, they find Westerners ’obsession with exercise strange.

Anthropologists are keeping an eye on the overproduction of data from Hadza and other populations because today’s hunters are integrated into the world economy in complex ways. Mr. Lieberman is honest about this challenge, reporting how scientific research itself has become a booth business sustaining the Hadza community. The greatest danger is that individual research ideas will be spun into high scientific stories, which Mr. Lieberman calls “the myth of athleticism.”

On that score, “Exercise” makes significant progress in the subject of research that Mr Lieberman himself has become famous for – the psychology of human running. In the early 2000s, Mr. Lieberman drew together some skeletal scenes of old Homo erectus and psychological data from human runners to say that running endurance was part of what we humanly did. The idea was that ancient hunters used a slow but steady running pattern to keep track of animals and run them tirelessly.

In “Exercise,” Mr. Lieberman visits a group of people who inspired his running research, the people of Tarahumara in northern Mexico. The group was made famous in the 2009 book “Born to Run” by Christopher McDougall, which brought the story of their ultramarathon races to a wide audience. In “Exercise,” Mr. Lieberman describes his journey to observe the traditional Tarahumara path. He ponders counterintuitive observation: Tarahumara people who run races don’t train them. The long races that bring the community together are rare social events, but very few people participate directly. The racers ’experiences are similar to ultramarathoners in the U.S., with endurance and fatigue. But the cultural significance of the activity is unique – it is less of a competition than a “powerful form of prayer” which, for the runners, “promotes a state of spiritual passage” – makes it difficult to be general in any idea of human origin.

A few sections of “Exercise” suffer from too much focus on the caloric baseline. For living, breathing animals, the balance of energy and energy expenditure is as great as the financial balance for business. However, by reducing the rich pageant of life to metabolic inflows and outflows it is likely to make people’s lives as dry as an accountant’s ledger. That way, my favorite passage of the book is about dance. Dance in many societies is a ritual-related physical activity, a highly social activity with a deep symbolic meaning for the participants. It reminds us that beauty, joy and rituals are a way of life, and that physical activity can be sad and ecstatic.

For those hoping for a reason to hide in the closet during a gym class, this is not your book. Science proves in many ways that physical activity is valuable for a healthy life. Nevertheless, I welcome Mr Lieberman ‘s polite voice in a world where barefoot running and a paleo diet have disappeared. “of real people, they all move – happily – through their lives. Exercise is a start.

Mr. Hawks is a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.