Exercised Quotes

“Make exercise necessary and fun. Do mostly cardio, but also some weights. Some is better than none. Keep it up as you age.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“Eating sensibly and exercising don't guarantee long life and good health; they just decrease the risk of getting sick.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“exercise is done against one’s wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“For generation after generation, our ancestors young and old woke up each morning thankful to be alive and with no choice but to spend several hous walking, digging, and doing other physical activities to survive to the next day. Sometimes they also played or danced for enjoyment and social reasons. Otherwise, they generally steered clear of nonessential physical activities that divert energy from the only thing evolution really cares about: reproduction.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“We evolved to be physically active as we age, and in turn being active helps us age well. Further, the longer we stay active, the greater the benefit, and it is almost never too late to benefit from getting fit.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“So can you exercise too much? Perhaps at extreme levels, and most certainly if you are sick with a serious infection or injured and need to recover. You also increase your risk of musculoskeletal injuries if you haven’t adapted your bones, muscles, and other tissues to handle the stresses of repeated high forces of Olympic-level weight lifting, playing five sets of tennis a day, running marathons, or overdoing some other sport that obsesses you. In other respects, the negative effects of too much exercise appear to be ridiculously less than the negative effects of too little. As my wife points out, the biggest risk of exercising too much is ruining your marriage, to which I would add that the biggest risk of exercising too little is not being around”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“When my colleague Dr. Aaron Baggish attached accelerometers (tiny devices, like Fitbits, that measure steps per day) to more than twenty Tarahumara men, he discovered they walked on average ten miles a day. In other words, the training that enables them to run back-to-back marathons is the physical work that is part and parcel of their everyday life.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“Everyone knows they should exercise, but few things are more irritating than being told to exercise, how much, and in what way. Exhorting us to “Just Do It” is about as helpful as telling a drug addict to “Just Say No.”
― Daniel Lieberman, Exercised

“When it comes to health news, a dose of incredulity is especially necessary because science and journalism are no less susceptible to humanity’s flaws than other endeavors.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“Pauling was a brilliant chemist, but his advocacy of vitamin C was quackery. Dozens of studies have found that taking antioxidant pills is no substitute for physical activity to fight senescence.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“One conspicuous benefit is cognitive: sleep helps us remember important things and helps synthesize and integrate them. It sounds like magic, but while we sleep, our brains file and then analyze information.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health

“As the philosopher George Santayana once quipped, “Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.” When it comes to health news, a dose of incredulity is especially necessary because science and journalism are no less susceptible to humanity’s flaws than other endeavors. Unfortunately for those who wanted to hear they were better off not exercising than running, the Copenhagen City Heart Study offered more truthiness than truth. Although the researchers sampled more than a thousand runners, only eighty (7 percent) engaged in strenuous exercise, and of that tiny sample only two died during the study. In addition, the researchers never looked at cause of death, making no distinction between traffic accidents and heart attacks. You don’t need a degree in statistics to realize the study’s conclusions were meaningless and misleading.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“You use more than thirty pounds of ATP during a one-hour walk and more than your entire body weight of ATP over the course of a typical day—an obviously impossible amount to lug around in reserve.15 Consequently, a human body stores in toto only about a hundred grams of ATPs at any given moment.16 Fortunately, before our first few steps deplete the leg muscles’ scant supply of ATPs, they quickly tap into another ATP-like molecule known as creatine phosphate that also binds to phosphates and stores energy.17 Unfortunately, those creatine phosphate reserves are also limited, becoming 60 percent depleted after ten seconds of sprinting and exhausted after thirty seconds.18 Even so, the precious short burst of fuel they provide gives muscles time to fire up a second energy recharging process: breaking down sugar.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“In sum, humans have been slowpokes ever since that fateful transition seven million years ago when our ancestors became bipeds.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“Although not all latter-day Americans sit as much as some alarmists suggest, we are more sedentary than earlier generations. There is evidence that the total time Americans spent sitting increased 43 percent between 1965 and 2009, and slightly more for people in England and other postindustrial countries.22 So I probably spend two to three hours more in chairs during a given day than my grandparents did when they were my age. My grandparents, however, were not much more sedentary than most hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers. Researchers have used accelerometers, heart rate monitors, and other sensors to measure activity levels in hunter-gatherers in Tanzania,23 farmer-hunters in the Amazonian rain forest,24 and several other non-industrialized populations.25 In these groups, people tend to be sedentary between five and ten hours a day. The Hadza, for example, spend about nine “non-ambulatory” hours on a typical day, mostly sitting on the ground with their legs in front of them, but also squatting about two hours a day and kneeling an hour a day.26 So while nonindustrial people engage in considerably more physical activity than average industrialized and postindustrialized people, they also sit a lot.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“Because desk jobs are here to stay for the foreseeable future, standing desks have been widely advertised as a panacea for excess sedentariness. Such marketing deceptively confuses not sitting with physical activity. Standing is not exercise, and as yet no well-designed, careful study has shown that standing desks confer substantial health benefits. Keep”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“In turn, the Hadza have become so used to visiting scientists that hosting the researchers who observe them has become a way to supplement their income. Sadly, visiting scientists who want to emphasize how much they are studying bona fide hunter-gatherers sometimes turn a blind eye to the degree to which the Hadza’s way of life is changing as a result of contact with the outside world. These papers rarely mention how many Hadza children now go to government schools, and how the Hadza’s territory is almost entirely shared with neighboring tribes of farmers and pastoralists, with whom they trade and whose cows tramp all over the region. As I write this, the Hadza don’t yet have cell phones, but they are not isolated as they once were. Despite these limitations, there is still much to learn from the Hadza, and I am fortunate to have visited them on a couple of occasions. But to get to the Hadza is not easy. They live in a ring of inhospitable hills surrounding a seasonal, salty lake in northwestern Tanzania—a hot, arid, sunbaked region that is almost impossible to farm.13 The area has some of the worst roads on the planet. Of the roughly twelve hundred Hadza, only about four hundred still predominantly hunt and gather, and to find these few, more traditional Hadza, you need sturdy jeeps, an experienced guide, and a lot of skill to travel over treacherous terrain. After a rainstorm, driving twenty miles can take most of the day. Many things surprised me when I first walked into a Hadza camp mid-morning on a torrid, sunny day in 2013, but I remember being especially struck by how everyone was apparently doing nothing. Hadza camps consist of a few temporary grass huts that blend in with the surrounding bushes. I didn’t realize I had walked into a camp until I found myself amid about fifteen Hadza men, women, and children who were sitting on the ground as shown in figure 2. The women and children were relaxing on one side, and the men on another. One fellow was straightening some arrows, and a few children were toddling about, but no one was engaged in any hard work. To be sure, the Hadza weren’t lounging on sofas, watching TV, munching potato chips, and sipping soda, but they were doing what so many health experts warn us to avoid: sitting.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“To go a step further, until a few hundred generations ago, all human beings were hunter-gatherers, and until about eighty thousand years ago everyone’s ancestors lived in Africa. So if we genuinely want to know about the exercise habits of evolutionarily “normal” humans, it behooves us to learn about hunter-gatherers, especially those who live in arid, tropical Africa. Studying hunter-gatherers, however, is easier said than done because their way of life has almost entirely vanished. Only a handful of hunter-gatherer tribes persist in some of the most remote corners of the globe. Further, none are isolated from civilization and none subsist solely on the wild foods they hunt and gather. All of these tribes trade with neighboring farmers, they smoke tobacco, and their way of life is changing so rapidly that in a few decades they will cease to be hunter-gatherers.10 Anthropologists and other scientists are therefore scrambling to learn as much as possible from these few tribes before their way of life irrevocably disappears. Of all of them, the most intensely studied is the Hadza, who live in a dry, hot woodland region of Tanzania in Africa, the continent where humans evolved. In fact, doing research on the Hadza has become something of a cottage industry for anthropologists. In the last decade, researchers have studied almost everything you can imagine about the Hadza. You can read books and articles about how the Hadza eat, hunt, sleep, digest, collect honey, make friends, squat, walk, run, evaluate each other’s attractiveness, and more.11 You can even read about their poop.12”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“The resulting paradox is that our bodies never evolved to function optimally without lifelong physical activity, but our minds never evolved to get us moving, unless it is necessary, pleasurable or otherwise rewarding. The plank is down in the post-industrial world and we struggle to replace physical activity with exercise an optional and often disagreeable behaviour. Despite being badgered to exercise by doctors, trainers, gym, teachers and others we often avoid it.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“The mantra of this book is that nothing about the biology of exercise makes sense except in the light of evolution, and nothing about exercise as a behavior makes sense except in the light of anthropology.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“To me, the apotheosis of what’s good and bad about contemporary exercise is the treadmill. Treadmills are incredibly useful, but they are also loud, expensive, and occasionally treacherous, and I find them boring. I sometimes use treadmills to exercise but struggle as I trudge monotonously under fluorescent lights in fetid air with no change of scene, staring at those little flashing lights informing me how far I’ve gone, at what speed, and how many calories I’ve supposedly burned. The only way I endure the tedium and discomfort of a treadmill workout is by listening to music or a podcast. What would my distant hunter-gatherer ancestors have thought of paying lots of money to suffer through needless physical activity on an annoying machine that gets us nowhere and accomplishes nothing?”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“First, physical activity has many direct effects on the brain. One is to flood the brain with mood-altering chemicals. As a reminder, exercise heightens the activity of transmitting molecules in the brain, notably dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine.131 These neurotransmitters induce sensations of reward, well-being, arousal, and memory enhancement. Most pharmaceuticals such as SSRIs used to treat depression and anxiety manipulate levels of these neurotransmitters.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health

“Astrocytes, which number in the billions, normally regulate and protect neurons and their connections. When needed, astrocytes also produce toxin-like chemicals to defend the brain from infection. According to this theory, Alzheimer’s occurs when astrocytes produce these toxins in the absence of infections, thus attacking other cells in the brain.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health

“Thus, athletes who exclusively weight train without also doing some cardio appear to be at as much risk as sedentary individuals of developing chronic high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health

“Simply put, an unhealthy lifestyle affects morbidity twice as much as mortality.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health

“While exercise restores most structures (what biologists term homeostasis), in some cases it may make things even better than before (this is termed allostasis).”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health

“Because environmental factors like diet, stress, and exercise partly influence epigenetic modifications, the older we are, the more of them we accumulate.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health

“(1) not overstriding, which means landing with your feet too far in front of your body; (2) taking about 170–180 steps a minute; (3) not leaning too much, especially at the waist; (4) landing with a nearly horizontal foot, thus avoiding a large, rapid impact force with the ground.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health

“different, and retrospective studies are complicated by not knowing if someone’s form resulted from or caused his or her past injuries.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health

“According to one estimate, the Achilles tendon and the spring in the arch of the human foot together return about half the mechanical energy of the body hitting the ground.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health