What concerns me about brief, intense workouts is do they truly reflect
Paleo lifestyle. Assuming a hunting expedition took three or more hours
every few days, that's not quite the same as half an hour of iron.

What's more, a pack of Paleo people would have grown up very differently
from most of us. As kids, life must have been a lot of play - akin to kids
who do a lot of sports in our times. Sports mimic life in the raw far more
that limited movements in gyms, almost all sagital plane with some coronal
plane and usually no tranverse plane of movement. Such kids far more fully
innervate neural network to motor unit capabilities; one of the items of
AJ's creed was that one set to failure accesses most all motor units, a
speculative idea in 1970 completely disproven by neuroscience of the 1980s.
Ideal training mimicking life in nature must include:

Twisting
Reaching
Stepping
Squatting
Pushing
Pulling

Strapped into a damned machine isolating certain muscles robs accessing most
of the more than 600 muscles we're composed of.

Multiplanar training including all of the dimensions of movement above comes
far closer to how we evolved before the Fall - the industrial revolution.

The works of Weston Price and Pottinger note incredibly fast degenerative
disease conditions effecting teeth and mouth formation in one or two
generations eating industrial processed foods and livestock. It may be that
our condition actually stimulates de-evolution. Don't know, merely
speculating.

I prefer erring on the conservative side. Given that the overall context of
contemporary Western life imposes darn few demands, it seems to me that we
can easily under train - even rationalize undertraining with inappropriate
application of a Paleo model that doesn't consider the full context of
ancient life.

By today's standards, I'd guess the far more demanding paleo lifestyle
resulted in levels of conditioning we'd associate with athleticism. That's
an area I've yet to see HIT folks discuss, rather finding it in the works of
Scott Abel, Vern Gambetta, and other coaching and exercise physiology
experts. Aside from that, there are hints in NASA work - astronauts are now
mandated to train for 2 hours daily, six days per week in space. While
extreme for planet side humans, perhaps our adaptive needs should be
reconciled not in terms of how much exceptional activity paleos undertook
but rather total contextual demands of their lives, and how they grew up.

I'd appreciate learning of any references on this subject.

best

-----Original Message-----
From: Paleolithic Eating Support List [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Jim Swayze
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 7:54 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Art DeVany's book: "The New Evolution Diet"

> I liked your sensible advice "Don't copy the other people in the  
> gym". It
> reminds me of the most valued comment I have ever received at my  
> gym: when I
> was in my early 50s a fellow asked me "How come you don't do any of  
> the
> standard exercises, yet you have the best body in the gym?"
>
> Keith


At 43 years old, I get the same comments.  How is it you're spending  
*at most* half an hour per week and yet you are in the best shape of  
anyone here?  How is it you can run a half marathon or bike 40 miles  
with zero training?

The answer is of course that it's a combination of eating a species- 
appropriate diet combined with intense, brief, infrequent workouts.   
It always saddens me when I think of the hours of wasted time people  
spend in the gym or out on the road.

Jim Swayze