I am against jogging for all the reasons that have come to the forefront
in research. I do run, as Rudi suggested, over natural terrain, mixing
sprints, walks, and running at different paces. It is the flat liners
(joggers on treadmills and on city streets) who experience the repetitive
injury stress, excess intake of polluted air, and deplete their body's
ability to deal with chronic stress.
Trail running, not jogging, is what the Aztecs and Tarahumara did or do so
well. When you run on natural terrain, you are doing power law training
because the surface of the earth is a fractal with a power law
distribution of elevation changes. The same would be said of the length
of intervals between intense and slow activities, much like the length of
a set in a tennis match (also power law distributed).
I am convinced that the human mind is adapted to a power law landscape of
terrain and events and this is its natural environment. To "linearize"
the mind and the heart rate dynamics in flat land jogging is certainly not
effective and playful training; and it is close to drudgery and evidence
suggests that it trains the chaos out of the heart beat or diminishes
heart rate variability enough to heighten the danger of fibrillation. You
should also know that small ischemic events (low blood flow) to parts of
the heart caused by extended running at a near constant pace produce scar
tissue. This scar tissue then breaks the wave front of muscle contraction
as it passes through the heart and becomes a source of oscillations and
potential fibrillation.
Many have asked about the book. I am now back on it, having made an
excursion researching the relationship between exercise, diet, and gene
expression. Since hunter-gatherers like myself do not "do busy" I will
finish it at an unspecified time, likely to be by the end of this summer.
Last, I am just a few months away from 50 years of working out and
developing my theories of fitness. It has been a long and productive
journey, one I am very glad to have made in this way. I am convinced that
maintaining lean body mass has been a big part of staying healthy and lean.
Sacropenia (penurious muscle mass) is a major, and somewhat inadequately
noted, source of insulin resistance.
Would those of you who use this list make sure not to format your mail as
html. The mail server doesn't do html. Go to the preferences of your
emailer and set it to compose or at least respond to the evolutionary
fitness list server in ascii or text.
Arthur De Vany
Professor
Economics and Mathematical Behavioral Sciences
University of California
Irvine, CA 92697-5100
949-824-5269
[log in to unmask]
http://aris.ss.uci.edu/econ/personnel/devany/devany.html
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