How to avoid a public health crisis on 25 minutes’ exercise a day - A Daniel Lieberman book

I doubt you will ever read a better book about health and fitness for all ages than Exercised by anthropologist, professor and runner Daniel Lieberman.

It’s not one of those five-minute inspirational reads. To give the book its full title, Exercised – The science of physical activity, rest and health is 339 rigorously researched pages long, not counting acknowledgements, sources and footnotes. And it contains everything we need to know about why it’s good, indeed essential, for us get and stay fit.

One of the book’s reviewers, professor and author Neil Shubin wrote: “Exercised will change the way you think about exercise, diet and your own wellbeing”.

I picked up Exercised at a book sale for a couple of dollars, as I recall, and I’ve never spent my money better. I’ve read some chapters two or three times, highlighted a lot of the content, and incorporated some of the findings into my own training routine.

Prof Lieberman is nothing if not thorough. On field trips over many years he’s researched hunter-gatherer people about the way they exercise (not that hard, funnily enough, and mostly for food), conducted innumerable experiments in the lab, and kept up a running and weights routine over many years. And he concludes that, while hunter-gatherers exercise mainly out of necessity, in today’s extremely comfortable society we must learn to exercise for a different reason. That is, to stay healthy. Because we don’t have to exercise as the hunter-gatherers do (or did over millions of years), we need to find a different reason.

And there’s a lot of them. Exercise avoids, deters or otherwise almost eliminates many of the ailments and conditions that bedevil the western world but which were unknown in earlier societies. These range from cardiovascular diseases like heart attacks to lifestyle ones like diabetes and obesity.

As I read the book, I kept on thinking that the Badass slogan, Life’s more fun if you’re fit, could be one for our times.

Basing his thesis on sound science, Lieberman essentially prescribes weight-bearing aerobic activity plus a session or two a week of high-intensity interval training (HIIT), sensible diet and drinking, as little organ fat (around the belly, for example), twice-weekly weight training.

Along the way he explodes one myth after another:

• You don’t have to “slow down”, as I’m often told, as you get older. His studies show that over-80s benefit greatly from weights.

  
  

• Excessive exercise, whatever that is, won’t wreck your body. Indeed he says there will never be a public health crisis from exercising too much.

  
  

• HIIT training, as in boot camp-style sessions, is good but much better if combined with low-intensity aerobic-type training. A giant Swedish experiment showed that cross-country skiers – ordinary people, not professionals – had greatly reduced risk of cardiovascular disease while hard-core weight trainers actually increased theirs.

  
  

• Beware of mistaken diagnoses, like the multiple marathoner and Runners’ World editor who was told on the basis of a scan that he was, basically, at death’s door from hardening arteries. Exactly the same advice was given to my wife Margaret and that turned out to be mistaken too.  

And there’s more, much more. I can't wait for the next Daniel Lieberman book.

As best-selling author Bill Bryson wrote:

“Endlessly fascinating and full of surprises”. One of those surprises is how little we need to exercise to head off all these conditions that can spoil our lives.

About two and half hours a week – 25 minutes a day, is considered to be enough, according to American health authorities. I suspect that’s on the low side, but it’s certainly within everybody’s reach.

If you’re unfit, there’s nowhere to hide after reading Exercised.