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Hansen, The Wanderer in the Forest, 1973

Nobody in the Pleistocene jogged for 42 minutes three days a week; lifted weights every Tuesday and Friday with a bullying (but otherwise nice) personal trainer, and played tennis at 11 A.M. Saturday mornings. Not hunters. We swung between extremes: sprinted when chased or when chasing (once in a while in an extremely exerting way), and walked about aimlessly the rest of the time. Marathon running is a modern abomination (particularly when done without emotional stimuli). This is another application of the barbell strategy: plenty of idleness, some high intensity. The data shows that long, very long walks combined with high intensity exercise outperforms just running. I am not talking about "brisk walks" of the type you read about in the Science section of the New York Times. I mean walking without making any effort, except of course to kill boredom. What's more, consider the negative correlation between caloric expenditures and intake: we hunted in response of hunger; we did not eat breakfast to hunt, which had to accentuate the energy deficits. If you deprive an organism of stressors, you affect its epigenetics and gene expression-- some genes are up-regulated (or down-regulated) by contact with the environment. A person who does not face stressors will not survive should he encounters them. Just consider what happens to someone's strength after he spends a year in bed, or someone growing up in a sterilized environment who, one day, takes the Tokyo subway where riders are squeezed like sardines. Why am I using evolutionary arguments? Not because of the optimality of evolution --but entirely for epistemological reasons, how we should deal with a complex system with opaque causal links and complicated interactions. Mother Nature is not perfect, but has been so far proven smarter than humans, certainly much smarter than biologists.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from "Why I Walk"

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