Free The Animal » Aerobics & Cardio Myth

Born to Run?

Richard Nikoley — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:27:38 +0000

I received an email the other day from a reader Cynthia Kuni who has some different ideas about running. She makes good arguments that I think deserve consideration. I'll save my comments for after.

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I've enjoyed your blog since I discovered it at the beginning of this year. I really like your approach and appreciate the amount of time it must take you to put together your posts. When I realized that you also share our (hubby's & mine) political philosophy of individual liberty, I became an even bigger fan.

I hope you will do me the honor of reading this letter. I do appreciate your time. It's rather long, and I apologize for that. I have put off writing it for over a month, but I cannot stop thinking about it. The dogma about which I am writing to oppose keeps popping up. This letter is my first foray into proposing an alternative viewpoint.

If you think I have a valid point, you might have a way to spread the idea since you are a "player" in this nascent paleo / lowcarb / Taubes movement (will refer to as LC hereafter), with a voice and an audience. Maybe you would reprint my letter, or part of it. If you think I'm wrong, I will thank you for your time and move on.

I had been trying to eat Paleo for a couple of years when I discovered Jimmy Moore and low carb in January. That was when I began to realize how addicted I was to carbs, even though I was getting them from massive amounts of fruit (especially dates & bananas). I also believed in Cordain's "lean meats" recommendation and, along with the high fruit intake, I was starving for the right macronutrients and gaining weight on the wrong ones. I immediately set forth to change my diet and it's been an incredible 3+ months! I'm sold.

As I have been reading (and listening) to everything I can get my hands on about low carb living, something keeps popping up that is bothering me. I don't have a blog or a podcast, so I really don't have a public voice, but I keep thinking I need to say something to someone or I'll go nuts. I decided to try you first because I relate to you and perhaps am less intimidated because you feel like a friend. It's not that you have offended me in any way, it's more that I see you as a person with influence who might be sympathetic.

It's about... running. (Endurance running, not sprints.) Specifically, it's about the anti-running sentiment that seems to exist so prevalently in the LC community. At the same time that I was discovering this wonderful new way of eating, I seemed to be surrounded by voices denigrating something I loved to do. But their logic just didn't hold up.

Please believe me, that I am not asking anyone to become a runner. Really, I'm not. I only want certain facts to be considered by those major LC figureheads before they go out bashing running as a sport/hobby. I also am not claiming that running will make people thin, a goal which brings a lot of people to the many LC blogs and podcasts. Thirdly, I am not denying the benefits of strength work, which is a vital part of my fitness routine.

What I do want to share with you are the reasons I believe running is a healthy and natural activity for humans and is part of our paleolithic heritage. Anyone who rails against bread being the "staff of life" on the basis of evolution, but refuses to examine the evidence I am about to share, has cherry-picked their philosophy just as much as the runners who have embraced "evolutionary running" but still cling to their high carb diets.

In 2004, two scientists published a paper in Nature describing their findings regarding humans as runners, based on the fossil record. (http://www.nature.com/nature/links/041118/041118-1.html) Dennis Bramble and Daniel Lieberman enumerated a list of characteristics that separate the genus Homo from our primate ancestors, and that are specifically adaptive for endurance running.

Bramble and Lieberman showed that we humans have our current shape and physiology not because we walked upright, but because we ran. Not sprinted to escape (absurd - just try to out-run a tiger), not sprinted out of bushes to capture prey (such a survival skill would actually make us look less like we do and more like the big cats, with huge haunches) -- but ran, at easy paces for long distances.

I am no match for the authors who have presented popular, layman's summaries about the Bramble / Lieberman paper, so I will list their articles below. But here are just a few of the traits that distinguish us from our primate predecessors, traits which we would not have if "Grok" had not been a distance runner:

We dissipate heat by sweating and lack of fur. We have long legs & ligaments, most notably the Achilles tendon (a liability for merely-walking animals). Along with other stabilizing adaptations, we have large gluteals to stabilize a running gait (check out the tiny butts of primates at your zoo). Mere bipedalism does not require the stabilization traits abundant in humans. We have numerous "anti-bobble-head" adaptations, such as our unique inner ear structure and, in sharp contrast with Australopithecus, a shallow groove in the skull for a nuchal ligament (only present in running animals). We, unlike all running mammals, can take breaths that are not in sync with our steps. Other running mammals must breathe in a one-step-one-breath pattern. This incredible adaptation is what enables us to continue running when we reach the over-heating point, and together with our furless, sweating bodies, make us "the best air-cooled engine that evolution has ever put on the market." (Bramble, interview in Born to Run, Christopher McDougall)

Until Bramble and Lieberman published their research in Nature, the image of human-as-runner seemed as ridiculous as the current anti-running LC bloggers portray it to be. Our lack of speed prevents us from being competitive as predators and doesn't exactly protect us from becoming prey. So why would natural selection favor adaptations for running? Because, we did not sprint out with spears and surprise the antelope. Nor did we outrun it like a cheetah. We out-endured it. It is called Persistence Hunting, and it is still practiced today by a very few hunter-gatherer tribes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting).

I am condensing dozens of pages of reading here (see below for some full text sources). I just want to provide enough information to explain why I feel the LC world is missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.

I don't have a blog or a podcast and no one knows who I am, so I don't really have a voice. But if I had one, my message to the LC community regarding runners would be, "Lay off." Or if you must criticize, go with the truly viable paleo argument - that we can and should run on low carbs. If people don't want to run, fine - don't run. But if you are going to bash it, you'd better have a better argument than "it's not paleo."

I have never told another person they "should" run, nor will I ever do so. I only say, we humans are built for distance running. To the LC icons (trying not to name names here) who are vocally anti-running: let me enjoy my marathons in peace, stop trying to discourage people who love running, and get your facts straight.

The other arguments against running that pop up in the LC world usually have to do with negative medical consequences. I'm sorry, but no one has ever conducted a valid, long term study of the effects of running on health, because no one has EVER had a big enough population of runners eating a species-appropriate diet to make a valid sample, free from the influence of a toxic diet.

One LC blogger begrudgingly said that diet might have something to do with health problems among runners… Might? MIGHT?!?! The enormous and horrendous health problems of our nation can be linked directly to the crappy USDA food pyramid diet, and runners are the worst carboholics! In Advanced Marathoning, by Pete Pfitzinger (one of the most popular distance training books), there is a section entitled "Hope You Like Carbs." An entire industry exists to provide runners with little packets of sugar-gels they can suck down every 20 minutes. It's insane to study these people as a model of runners' health! You might as well study heroine addicts to determine the health effects of wearing denim. I suppose they could study the tribes that still practice Persistence Hunting, but instead they insist on sticking sugar burners on treadmills.

Well, I'm getting worked up enough to resort to typing in caps, so I had better wrap this up. Thank you, Richard, for hearing me out and for your time. I truly appreciate it. The references below represent quick links to summaries of the Bramble & Lieberman research. Additionally, I would particularly recommend chapter 28 of the book, Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall (Knopf, 2009), which goes more into the history behind B&L's research and the reasons why we would have benefitted from this evolutionary shift to running. Like Taubes' GCBC book, the concepts I am discussing have the truth of ages, but are only recently published.

http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/biomechanics/112078/born-to-run
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/may/tramps-like-us
http://dailyuw.com/2004/11/18/humans-were-born-to-run-study-finds/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/11/1117_041117_running_humans.html

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So there you have it. I personally don't run. I walk a lot (60-90 minutes per day, on average) and I sprint now and then. I used to run way back when, in college, and for a few years after that. The only time I really enjoyed it is when, somehow, that "runner's high" would kick in where one feels to be able to go forever. That usually happened when I was living in the Pacific northwest and it would be raining or misting out. I liked running in the rain but always hated running in the heat.

But that's me. The last time I really ran any significant distance was a few years back when my wife & I signed up for a 23 mile power walk. At times during the walk I couldn't help but to just start running, so I'd do so for a couple of miles, then return to walking until irresistibly drawn to running again. It was quite enjoyable.

It is interesting about those bottled of glucose syrup. It was during that power walk where I saw them for the first time -- folks with their little belts & pouches carrying bottled of syrup, and of course, the organizers had the little packets of what I assume is the same thing at every station along the route, along with fruit and sugar drinks. She's right: it was a total carb extravaganza and at the finish line, it was basically fruit, bagels, beer & soda pop.

I think Cynthia is definitely talking about something other than what we commonly refer to as "chronic cardio." Here's a video that explains some of our evolutionary adaptations in the context of the Persistence Hunt. Highly recommended. Seven minutes well worth it. Getting out and running a few times per week on a proper diet, keeping it real so as to avoid injury, is probably fine if that's what you like. And I doubt those persistence hunters were out there day in, day out, running their asses off.

Update: Long time reader, commenter and fantastic blogger in his own right, Methuselah, points out in comments that he recently covered the same topic. Go take a read.

Does “Cardio” Cause Heart Disease? Dr: Harris: “Yes”

Richard Nikoley — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:28:19 +0000

Well here's another post that's merely to point you to someone else's good work, but I just can't pass it up. One of the great recent additions to the paleo blogosphere is Dr. Kurt Harris, also a reader and commenter here.

Here he really does his homework and puts a number of studies together -- backed by his specific expertise in radiology -- to demonstrate that, as he says:

Running a marathon is looking about as smart as boxing or playing football.

But here's the bottom line, comparing 102 experienced, long-term marathoners with 102 age-matched sedentary folk.

Would you believe 12% of asymptomatic marathon runners had evidence of myocardial damage on LGE?

Would you believe that among the sedentary controls only 4% had abnormal LGE?

Go have a read at the whole post, which is quite comprehensive.

By the way, I -- as everyone else back in the 80s -- thought running was just a super healthy thing to do. From about '82 into the late 80s I'd run from time-to-time, and at times, might do upwards of 15-20 miles in a week. Did some 10Ks, and did 10 milers a few times.

But other than running in the cold rain, which I did love doing, I always pretty much hated it. But, see, in a world that runs on guilt, shame, self-denial and sacrifice, this was proof positive that it just must be good for you, just like, y'know, taxes, regulations, fines, levies, restrictions and all manner of stuff you hate for yourself but see as good for everyone else. We seem to be susceptible to erecting all manner of "necessary evils" to tolerate and embrace "for our own good," depraved as we all are. So, running is like confession and penance.

Does it make sense that something most of us naturally hate to do would be particularly healthful? Wouldn't the Paleo Principle suggest that it's more likely harmful? If most people hate trudging along, then it can't possibly be something we evolved doing regularly or to great extent (brief running and sprinting, absolutely), which means that we've not particularly adapted to it, making it somewhat of a crapshoot to engage in the behavior.

It certainly was for the three unfortunate runners who all collapsed and died in the space of six minutes during the recent Detroit Marathon.

Overtraining

Richard Nikoley — Mon, 29 Nov 1999 22:00:00 +0000

One thing I should always mention about my results like I posted yesterday is that in addition to the real food and intermittent fasting, my workouts consist of only two 30-minute sessions per week, both of which I always do hungry, i.e., at least 12 hours since last food intake, and sometimes as much as 24-30 hours (I'm still in fat-loss mode). And regardless of how long it was that I hadn't eaten, I don't eat immediately after the workout either, for at least two hours.

If that seems totally crazy to you, does that sense come from actual experience, first-hand knowledge, or are you doing what so many do, which is to just run with the crowd? As I've come to learn being around the gym, trainers, and cardioholics: the fitness industry is dominated by a herd mentality. It's very faddish, and if you watch closely you'll begin to notice all sorts of contradictory diet, exercise, nutritional and supplement advice.

But stop to consider this: do mammals typically hunt in a fed or a hungry (fasted) state? If the latter, doesn't it seem logical, and also, doesn't it make sense that evolved physiology would be highly adapted to such behavior? Remember, we didn't evolve with refrigerators, so food storage was rather difficult.

And I do no cardio. I walk every weekday morning (low level aerobic), and now and then I do all out sprints, 3-6 at 30-40 seconds with a couple of minutes rest in-between.

I've been going trough all my past EvFit posts over the last year and a half and am re-categorizing for better granularity. But I came across something I wanted to highlight. Remember Mark Sisson? Who is he?

I excelled at cross-country and distance track events in high school and at Williams College, where I was a pre-med candidate and received my degree in Biology.

In fact, the running was going so well after college that I decided to forgo medical school for a few years (it’s at 31 years now) and concentrate on a running career. I trained seriously as a marathoner for another five years, racking up well over 100 miles each week in training. The effort culminated in a top 5 finish in the 1980 US National Marathon Championships and a qualifying spot for the 1980 US Olympic Trials. Unfortunately, by then the inhuman amount of training and weekly racing was taking its toll and I found myself constantly sick or injured. (Note to self: too much exercise is not a good thing). In fact, in my last year of competition, as a world class, extremely “fit” athlete, I experienced eight upper respiratory infections! Clearly I was ruining my immune system and my joints doing too much exercise. That’s when I started exploring nutrition and supplementation as a way to enhance my performance and to support my damaged body and bolster my immune system.

The running injuries - osteoarthritis and tendonitis - precluded ever racing at a high level again, but that was just about the time that the new sport of Triathlon was starting to emerge, and I was immediately hooked. While I couldn’t run much anymore, I could certainly cycle and swim to my heart’s content…and I did. I spent a few more years racing triathlons, including finishing 4th place at the Hawaii Ironman, the biggest in the world at the time.

I finally retired from competition in 1988 and decided I would do whatever I could to help others avoid making the kinds of health mistakes that I had made. I figured I could use my pre-medical background, my degree in biology and an intense desire to unlock the health secrets that I knew were out there - answers to questions about health, wellness, anti-aging, safe weight-loss, nutrition and supplementation - to find the natural ways of achieving good health.

I wrote several books, including Maximum Results, The Fat Control System, The Anti-aging Report and The Lean Lifestyle Program (over 400,000 copies distributed). I edited the Optimum Health national health newsletter (circ. 90,000) from 1994 through 1996.

Now, take a look at him at 54.

If anyone ought to know about the ill effects of chronic cardio, Mark should. See this post, and this one.

And rejoice! You don't need to do slow, boring "cardio" to get awesome results.

And why wouldn’t anyone want to hear that real exercise doesn’t mean endless hours on that torturously boring treadmill? News like this is like sunlight bursting in, choirs of children singing, shackles collapsing open and crashing to the ground. Hordes of celebratory folk parade through the gym, penny whistles and fiddles playing, ale mugs in hand, goats and cows in the merry mix. Get off that treadmill and join us, for the love!

The Cardio and Aerobic Myth

Richard Nikoley — Mon, 29 Nov 1999 22:00:00 +0000

Now that I'm a regular at the gym, coming up on a year, I am quite comfortable concluding that the "cardio craze" is complete bunk. It's of virtually no value whatsoever, and the downsides far outweigh any advantages. I'd love it if my gym -- which is a 5-minute walk, so I'm not about to switch -- would dump all but a few of the cardio machines that take up enormous space, and use the space for crossfit training.

How did I come to this conclusion? Well, Art's essay on Evolutionary Fitness (PDF) clued me in and made me aware, so it was in my field of view and I've observed.

The adaptive and variable energy demands of our ancestral existence are gone. We live a low energy ﬂux and metabolically unvaried existence in bodies designed for another lifeway. We are hunter/gatherers in pin-stripe suits, living a sedentary life and it is killing us in ways our ancestors never experienced. Virtually all the degenerative diseases–atherosclerosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, declining muscle mass–of modern civilization are unheard of among hunter-gatherers and were not part of our ancestral experience. Most modern ﬁtness prescriptions are static and agricultural. These programs model the body as a machine, not as an adaptive organism. Consequently, they prescribe a regime in which the body is under-fed and over-trained. They are not based on adaptation, but on steady state analysis. These models assume the body is a linear process that maintains a steady state. In fact, all bodily processes are highly non-linear and these non-linearities must be exploited in any effective ﬁtness program. The key to exploiting the highly non-linear and dynamic adaptive metabolic processes of the human body is to achieve the right mixture of intensity and variety of activities.

Here is an example of the Zen-like twists that adaptive, non-linear systems like human metabolism follow that confound mechanistic thinking. The body uses fat in the aerobic (ST and lower IT) zone. So, linear thinking suggests that to burn fat you should operate in that zone. It would not surprise someone trained to understand the adaptive capabilities of the human body that if you burn more fat the body will ﬁnd a way to produce more. And this is just what happens when you energy ﬂows over the aerobic pathway—your body releases hormone messengers that signal higher fat production.

You do burn a higher proportion of calories as fat in the aerobic zone, but that is no reason to stay there. You burn more calories and more fat in total when you train at high intensity. And you do not open the metabolic pathways that cause your body to make more fat. Energy that ﬂows over the anaerobic pathway signals your body to make more muscle and to burn fat.

You incur an oxygen depth that raises metabolism for days after a high intensity session. Above all, you bring adaptations that burn fat. As the body remodels in response to the adaptive challenge presented by a brief, high-intensity session, it preferentially burns fat. In addition, you put on lean muscle mass that burns energy continuously. From 60 to 70 per cent of the energy you burn is at your basal metabolic rate. If you gain lean muscle mass you raise your basal metabolic rate and, thus, burn more energy 24 hours a day.

(I know I've mentioned and linked to this essay before, but presuming your interest, if you haven't taken the time to to read it, you should -- and I'm reading it for the third time.)

Anyway, long story short, I've seen amazing things in the gym. I see these same people, toiling away on the treadmill, day after day, week after week, month after month and they look like zombies to me. Far from the picture of health, they look highly stressed, swollen from body-wide inflammation, pale -- awful. And they make no noticeable gains. On the other hand, a number of people have come up to me and complimented me on the gains I've made and they've noticed. I work out, high intensity, for a total of one hour per week -- some do that every day on the treadmill or elliptical.

All that, to get to this: here's a couple of posts my Mark Sisson, a former long-distance runner, covering the cardio-aerobic myth.

Dear Mark: Chronic Cardio

More Chronic Cardio Talk

As Art says he feels like saying when he sees joggers on the street: "slow down and live longer."

Aerobics: Stop Killing Yourself

Richard Nikoley — Mon, 29 Nov 1999 22:00:00 +0000

As I've been saying, my own experience bears this out, and in different ways. Competitive runner and personal trainer finds out the hard way. Take a look.