When I walk into a village in a remote part of the world where people don't have chairs or a hunter-gatherer camp, people are always sitting. On the demonizing of sitting as 'the new smoking' There's all different kinds of physical activity, and it's all good in different ways.'

to get some benefits of physical activity. 'You don't have to do incredible strength training. 'The more we study physical activity, the more we realize that it doesn't really matter what you do,' Lieberman says. Even fidgeting can keep your muscles engaged. He says if 10,000 steps feels out of reach, it's OK to shoot for less - just so long as you're focused on movement. Lieberman notes that many people are moving less than they did before the pandemic. 'If you actually look at what our ancestors do, they walk about 5 miles a day, which turns out to be, for most people, about 10,000 steps,' Lieberman says. He writes about his findings, as well as the importance of exercise and the myths surrounding it in his new book, Exercised. Lieberman has spent a lot of time with indigenous hunter-gatherers in Africa and Latin America, cataloging how much time they spend walking, running, lifting, carrying and sitting. Why would anybody do something like that?'īook Reviews 'Exercised' Explains Why It Can Be Hard To Commit To Working Out - And Why We Should

'When I go to these villages, I'm the only person who gets up in the morning and goes for a run. 'Until recently, when energy was limited and people were physically active, doing physical activity that wasn't necessarily rewarding, just didn't happen,' Lieberman says. He says that the notion of 'getting exercise' - movement just for movement's sake - is a relatively new phenomenon in human history. It was an active lifestyle, but one thing it didn't include was any kind of formal exercise.ĭaniel Lieberman is a professor in the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard. to get some benefits of physical activity.'įor much of history, human beings needed to be physically active every day in order to hunt or gather food - or to avoid becoming food themselves.

That's good, says Exercised author Daniel Lieberman. With the pandemic, many people are turning to at-home workouts and walks in their neighborhoods.

Just move on