Just don’t do it: 10 exercise myths

We all believe we should exercise more. So why is it so hard to keep it up? Daniel E Lieberman, Harvard professor of evolutionary biology, explodes the most common and unhelpful workout myths by Daniel E Lieberman in The Guardian 

Yesterday at an outdoor coffee shop, I met my old friend James in person for the first time since the pandemic began. Over the past year on Zoom, he looked just fine, but in 3D there was no hiding how much weight he’d gained. As we sat down with our cappuccinos, I didn’t say a thing, but the first words out of his mouth were: “Yes, yes, I’m now 20lb too heavy and in pathetic shape. I need to diet and exercise, but I don’t want to talk about it!”

If you feel like James, you are in good company. With the end of the Covid-19 pandemic now plausibly in sight, 70% of Britons say they hope to eat a healthier diet, lose weight and exercise more. But how? Every year, millions of people vow to be more physically active, but the vast majority of these resolutions fail. We all know what happens. After a week or two of sticking to a new exercise regime we gradually slip back into old habits and then feel bad about ourselves.

Clearly, we need a new approach because the most common ways we promote exercise – medicalising and commercialising it – aren’t widely effective. The proof is in the pudding: most adults in high-income countries, such as the UK and US, don’t get the minimum of 150 minutes per week of physical activity recommended by most health professionals. Everyone knows exercise is healthy, but prescribing and selling it rarely works.

I think we can do better by looking beyond the weird world in which we live to consider how our ancestors as well as people in other cultures manage to be physically active. This kind of evolutionary anthropological perspective reveals 10 unhelpful myths about exercise. Rejecting them won’t transform you suddenly into an Olympic athlete, but they might help you turn over a new leaf without feeling bad about yourself.

Myth 1: It’s normal to exercise

Whenever you move to do anything, you’re engaging in physical activity. In contrast, exercise is voluntary physical activity undertaken for the sake of fitness. You may think exercise is normal, but it’s a very modern behaviour. Instead, for millions of years, humans were physically active for only two reasons: when it was necessary or rewarding. Necessary physical activities included getting food and doing other things to survive. Rewarding activities included playing, dancing or training to have fun or to develop skills. But no one in the stone age ever went for a five-mile jog to stave off decrepitude, or lifted weights whose sole purpose was to be lifted.

Myth 2: Avoiding exertion means you are lazy

Whenever I see an escalator next to a stairway, a little voice in my brain says, “Take the escalator.” Am I lazy? Although escalators didn’t exist in bygone days, that instinct is totally normal because physical activity costs calories that until recently were always in short supply (and still are for many people). When food is limited, every calorie spent on physical activity is a calorie not spent on other critical functions, such as maintaining our bodies, storing energy and reproducing. Because natural selection ultimately cares only about how many offspring we have, our hunter-gatherer ancestors evolved to avoid needless exertion – exercise – unless it was rewarding. So don’t feel bad about the natural instincts that are still with us. Instead, accept that they are normal and hard to overcome.

‘For most of us, telling us to “Just do it” doesn’t work’: exercise needs to feel rewarding as well as necessary. Photograph: Dan Saelinger/trunkarchive.com

Myth 3: Sitting is the new smoking

You’ve probably heard scary statistics that we sit too much and it’s killing us. Yes, too much physical inactivity is unhealthy, but let’s not demonise a behaviour as normal as sitting. People in every culture sit a lot. Even hunter-gatherers who lack furniture sit about 10 hours a day, as much as most westerners. But there are more and less healthy ways to sit. Studies show that people who sit actively by getting up every 10 or 15 minutes wake up their metabolisms and enjoy better long-term health than those who sit inertly for hours on end. In addition, leisure-time sitting is more strongly associated with negative health outcomes than work-time sitting. So if you work all day in a chair, get up regularly, fidget and try not to spend the rest of the day in a chair, too.

Myth 4: Our ancestors were hard-working, strong and fast

A common myth is that people uncontaminated by civilisation are incredible natural-born athletes who are super-strong, super-fast and able to run marathons easily. Not true. Most hunter-gatherers are reasonably fit, but they are only moderately strong and not especially fast. Their lives aren’t easy, but on average they spend only about two to three hours a day doing moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. It is neither normal nor necessary to be ultra-fit and ultra-strong.

Myth 5: You can’t lose weight walking

Until recently just about every weight-loss programme involved exercise. Recently, however, we keep hearing that we can’t lose weight from exercise because most workouts don’t burn that many calories and just make us hungry so we eat more. The truth is that you can lose more weight much faster through diet rather than exercise, especially moderate exercise such as 150 minutes a week of brisk walking. However, longer durations and higher intensities of exercise have been shown to promote gradual weight loss. Regular exercise also helps prevent weight gain or regain after diet. Every diet benefits from including exercise.

Myth 6: Running will wear out your knees

Many people are scared of running because they’re afraid it will ruin their knees. These worries aren’t totally unfounded since knees are indeed the most common location of runners’ injuries. But knees and other joints aren’t like a car’s shock absorbers that wear out with overuse. Instead, running, walking and other activities have been shown to keep knees healthy, and numerous high-quality studies show that runners are, if anything, less likely to develop knee osteoarthritis. The strategy to avoiding knee pain is to learn to run properly and train sensibly (which means not increasing your mileage by too much too quickly).

Myth 7: It’s normal to be less active as we age

After many decades of hard work, don’t you deserve to kick up your heels and take it easy in your golden years? Not so. Despite rumours that our ancestors’ life was nasty, brutish and short, hunter-gatherers who survive childhood typically live about seven decades, and they continue to work moderately as they age. The truth is we evolved to be grandparents in order to be active in order to provide food for our children and grandchildren. In turn, staying physically active as we age stimulates myriad repair and maintenance processes that keep our bodies humming. Numerous studies find that exercise is healthier the older we get.

Myth 8: There is an optimal dose/type of exercise

One consequence of medicalising exercise is that we prescribe it. But how much and what type? Many medical professionals follow the World Health Organisation’s recommendation of at least 150 minutes a week of moderate or 75 minutes a week of vigorous exercise for adults. In truth, this is an arbitrary prescription because how much to exercise depends on dozens of factors, such as your fitness, age, injury history and health concerns. Remember this: no matter how unfit you are, even a little exercise is better than none. Just an hour a week (eight minutes a day) can yield substantial dividends. If you can do more, that’s great, but very high doses yield no additional benefits. It’s also healthy to vary the kinds of exercise you do, and do regular strength training as you age.

Myth 9: ‘Just do it’ works

Let’s face it, most people don’t like exercise and have to overcome natural tendencies to avoid it. For most of us, telling us to “just do it” doesn’t work any better than telling a smoker or a substance abuser to “just say no!” To promote exercise, we typically prescribe it and sell it, but let’s remember that we evolved to be physically active for only two reasons: it was necessary or rewarding. So let’s find ways to do both: make it necessary and rewarding. Of the many ways to accomplish this, I think the best is to make exercise social. If you agree to meet friends to exercise regularly you’ll be obliged to show up, you’ll have fun and you’ll keep each other going.

Myth 10: Exercise is a magic bullet

Finally, let’s not oversell exercise as medicine. Although we never evolved to exercise, we did evolve to be physically active just as we evolved to drink water, breathe air and have friends. Thus, it’s the absence of physical activity that makes us more vulnerable to many illnesses, both physical and mental. In the modern, western world we no longer have to be physically active, so we invented exercise, but it is not a magic bullet that guarantees good health. Fortunately, just a little exercise can slow the rate at which you age and substantially reduce your chances of getting a wide range of diseases, especially as you age. It can also be fun – something we’ve all been missing during this dreadful pandemic.

Britain’s bosses fat and lazy? For once, Liam Fox has a point

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Liam Fox ranks among the chief fantasists behind Brexit, deplores gay marriage as “social engineering”, and thinks nothing of claiming 3p from taxpayers for a car journey of less than 100m. But even a snake-oil salesman sometimes speaks the truth and in criticising British business as “too lazy and too fat on our successes”, he has a point.

I know, I know. Why defend a Tory headbanger who otherwise thirsts for cuts to the NHS budget and the slashing of taxes upon the rich? Why entertain lectures from someone whose only attempt at job creation was the boondoggle he shamelessly awarded his former best man?

Yet when the international trade secretary says, “If you want to share in the prosperity of our country, you have a duty to contribute to the prosperity of our country”, I fail to muster up the outrage. I share neither Fox’s views on the causes nor his suggestions on the solution. But he is on to something.

For the past six years, the Tory party has barely paused from laying into British workers. From Iain Duncan Smith to George Osborne, senior ministers wrote off a sizeable chunk of this country as “skivers”. The screws were twisted so hard that jobseekers who decline zero-hours contracts are now penalised with benefit sanctions.

And the Tories did all this with the simpering connivance of Nick Clegg’s LibDems. If you think that era ended with David Cameron, remember that Theresa May’s cabinet boasts luminaries who wrote a report stating: “Too many people in Britain … prefer a lie-in to hard work. Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world.”

Ever since 2010, the Tories have tried to pin the blame for economic sluggishness on the shirking Brits. At the same time, their ministers have boasted, with all the regularity of a cuckoo clock, about how the number of British people in work is now at a record high. As a matter of logic, both things cannot be true. The British cannot be both workshy and working more than ever before. The Tories have been fibbing – and at last one of their number has come out and said as much.

The real problem in Britain isn’t its workers: it’s the bosses. By this, I’m not getting at the poor old line managers. I mean those right at the top of big business who have got away with paying themselves too much and investing too little in their workers, their businesses and their society.

Consider pay. While the average British worker is barely better off than in 2008, wages for those at the top of British business have just kept soaring. Researchers at the High Pay Centre recently went through the accounts of the FTSE 100 largest companies. They found that chief executives raked in an average of £5.5m in 2015, up 10% from the year before.

Bung in the lavish pension arrangements and generous bonuses and the average chief executive now earns the same as 129 of their employees. There is no justification for such a wide disparity: no one is as productive as 129 other people. We have gone beyond “Because I’m Worth It” to “Because I Said So” (and my mates on the remuneration committee backed me up). Even when shareholders revolt, as happened at BP over the £14m handed out to its chief executive despite huge losses, they are roundly ignored.

The TUC has just crunched the numbers on how much investment the private sector makes in this country. Of the 29 leading industrialised countries, the UK comes in at 27. Businesses in Estonia, the Czech Republic, Poland: all invest more in plants, equipment and the rest. The only countries that do worse are Greece and Iceland.

We have the same calamitous showing in spending on research and development. A few years ago, the Sheffield University physicist Prof Richard Jones went through the figures. He wrote: “In 1979 the UK was one of the most research-intensive economies in the world. Now, among advanced industrial economies, it is one of the least.” All of our competitors – the US, Japan, France and Germany – have maintained or increased their spending on research. South Korea and China are breathing down our necks. But the British capitalist class prefers the safe bets, the quick bucks – and the mega handouts to the senior executives and the shareholders.

Vice chairman of Stronger In campaign calls off Liam Fox after saying is Britain ‘fat and lazy’
Friday afternoons on the golf course? Fox may have watched one too many episodes of Terry and June. But what’s clear is that Britain’s bosses pay themselves far more than is justified either by comparison with their workers or on their performance. They have spent years relying on taxpayers to top up poverty pay and on the regulators to allow pensions holidays – just so they could hand out more money to shareholders.

They take what academic Kevin Farnsworth estimates at £93bn a year in corporate welfare – cash handouts and subsidies. But they react with horror to the notion of decent wages or chipping in for apprenticeships, rather than treating them as the normal overheads of doing business in a developed country. If that’s not fat and lazy, I don’t know what is.

Of course there are good and non-greedy bosses. But I have spent six years hearing the view that the British are lazy spongers with barely a demurral from most of the media or the political classes. It is high time to push the pendulum back a little.

Fox sees the answer to all this as more slash and burn: of taxes, of red tape, of public spending. That is delusional. Britain has spent 40 years making the burden on business easier, and the results have been to create a capitalist class so sluggish and short-term that it now threatens the continuation of capitalism.

Better, by far, to have a more honest capitalism: in which the responsibilities of business – on taxes, on pay and on investment – are laid out alongside their rights.

Audi Drivers

Audi Drivers
Girish Menon
 1/08/2013

Your speed limit is @ seventy
To protect each road user
But I'll drive my Audi @ one sixty
Coz I am not a loser

The judge banned me for three years
And fined me five one five
Fine, I said, will you take cash
It's time for my next drive

None of your laws will stop me
I've got more cash than you think
I can buy your cops and judges
With my tax haven market riches

Your income tax is @ 45 percent
To protect every lazy Briton
But I will pay @ zero percent
Coz I am not a cretin

The taxman may audit my books
To get cash for the treasury
His mates help me cook the books
And I won't share my luxury

None of your laws will stop me
I've got more cash than you think
I can buy your rulers and judges
With my tax haven market riches

I'm an everythingist – craving new experiences, but unwilling to put the work in

Everythingism is the deadly combination of perfectionism plus narcissism plus utter laziness – which explains why I haven't read Crime and Punishment

• 
• • Sophie Heawood
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 11 June 2013 18.30 BST

Crime and Punishment: details available on Wikipedia. Photograph: CBW/Alamy

When I was pregnant, someone told me that she read Dostoevsky novels to her baby, both in the womb and after he was born. Apparently, at about two months old, he would respond with delight every time he heard the character names he had heard so many times in utero.

Massively annoyed by this insufferable woman and her competitive wankery, I resolved to go home and do exactly the same thing. Only I had never read any Dostoevsky, and wasn't sure that I could be arsed, in my seventh month of gestation, to begin a literary journey into desperate horse-flogging Russians and Siberian internment camps. So I went straight to the Wikipedia page for Crime and Punishment and skipped to the list of character names instead.

"Raskolnikov! Svidrigailov! Dunechka!" I barked at my foetus for no discernible reason, the laptop balanced precariously on my bump, while my internal smugometer wavered somewhere between pride and existential despair. A little like the characters in the books. Perhaps.

It was some time after this that I took a long, soft look at my slapdash, half-arsed approach to life, and realised that I am an everythingist. This is a word I have invented to describe the sort of person who is greedy for the benefit of all new experiences, but unwilling to put the work in to fully commit to any of them. An everythingist leaves no experiential stone unturned, which means doing absolutely everything by halves. It is the deadly combination of perfectionism plus narcissism plus utter laziness. It will get you nowhere in the end. Halfway there at best. Every time an everythingist's mother opens her mouth, the words "oh just bloody well get on with it" come out.

Here's how to tell if you, too, are an everythingist. Do you clutch your phone in your hand at all times, like a beacon against the cold, a magic talisman with its promise of otherness, betterness, of more attractive people desirous of your company elsewhere? Does it ensure you are unable to quite go with a plan or be in the moment because of all the other plans and moments where you might be, cheating on yourself with your other selves? Does your phone give you FOMO (AKA fear of missing out) for the party you're not at, even when you're at it? Did the news that Prism could be spying on all of our data give you a giddy rush when you thought that one of the lockdown powergeeks might be looking in and realising that you – you! – are the chosen one? Do you tend to fall asleep in your clothes, just in case the revolution should begin outside your bedroom window in the night?

Do you, like me, think that fairytale endings will magically happen to your life – ie, you will fall in deep rewarding love and raise daughters with Rapunzel hair in a beautiful Welsh farmhouse one day, writing novels on a typewriter, milking your nanny goats at dawn? Of course, this all will have to happen magically as you absolutely refuse to give up nightclubs and the closest you have come to milking your nanny goats at dawn was all a case of mistaken identity and that restraining order for going within a 40-metre ring of the late-night Turkish greengrocers is a gross infringement on your civil liberties, which you will sort out as soon as you find the bit of paper they wrote it on.

The everythingist can't be tied down by a job and so they work freelance (ie are self-unemployed). They don't want to be restricted by narrow labels like straight or gay because they believe their sexuality to be a fluid concept (i.e. they keep getting dumped). They are breathlessly addicted to their youth, despite being 12 years older than their parents were when they had them; can't read a book to the end because they've already started two more; and they need to know, at all times, that they could, in theory, if they wanted to, at any point, run away to Rio de Janeiro.

The everythingist works from home, revelling in their freedom to go for a walk in the sunshine while other sad jobsworthy losers are stuck at their desks with not so much as a freelancer's liedown to look forward to. The everythingist has been planning this walk in the sunshine for 17 days now, having been quite distracted by all the freelancer's liedowns that it is their right and freedom to enjoy. In their lunch hour. I mean, why not? It's not as if there's any lunch.

If you are not an everythingist, and you're one of those people who gets stuff done and gets over it – I realise now that you have the greatest freedom of all. The freedom to finish things, and not have all your half-read books, half-written books and half-experienced experiences clanking around your neck like shells. I can only apologise for how I used to giggle at you for being boring and keeping lists and being on time while I dashed over half an hour late to meet you, hopes and dreams blinding my eyes so that I couldn't read a bus timetable. I'm so sorry now. For everything.

Europe is haunted by the myth of the lazy mob

It suits the wealthy to turn the debate about poverty into a morality tale, but the reality is that inequality is structural

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 29 January 2013

'Markets are frequently rigged in favour of the rich.' Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

"A spectre is haunting Europe." Thus began the famous opening passages of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Today, once again, Europe is haunted by a spectre. But, unlike back in 1848 when Marx and Engels wrote those passages, it is not communism, but laziness.

Gone are the days when the upper classes were terrified of the angry mob wanting to smash their skulls and confiscate their properties. Now their biggest enemy is the army of lazy bums, whose lifestyle of indolence and hedonism, financed by crippling taxes on the rich, is sucking the lifeblood out of the economy.

In Britain, the coalition government constantly slags off those welfare slobs in the working class suburbs, sleeping off their hard night's slog with Sky Sports and online casino. It is their shameless demand for "something for nothing", pandered to by the previous Labour government, we are told, that has created the huge deficits that the country is struggling to get rid of.

In the eurozone, many believe that its fiscal crisis can be ultimately traced back to those lazy Mediterranean types in Greece and Spain, who had lived off hard-working Germans and Dutch, spending their time sipping espresso and playing card games. Unless those people start working hard, it is said, the eurozone's problems cannot be fixed.

The problem with this story is that it is, well, just a story.

First of all, it is important to reiterate that the fiscal deficits in the European countries, including Britain, are largely due to the fall in tax revenues following the finance-induced recession, rather than to the rise in welfare spending. So, attacking the poor and eviscerating the welfare state is not going to cure the underlying cause of the deficits.

Moreover, on the whole, poorer people typically work harder. They usually work in jobs with longer hours and tougher working conditions. Except for a tiny minority, they are poor despite the welfare state, not because of it.

The point comes into a sharper relief, if we compare nations. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, people in Greece, that famous nation of skivers, worked on average 2,032 hours in 2011 – only a shade less than the supposedly workaholic South Koreans (2,090 hours). In the same year, the Germans worked only 70% as long (1,413 hours), while the Netherlands was officially the "laziest" nation in the world, with only 1,379 hours of work per year. These numbers tell us that, whatever else is wrong with Greece, it is not the laziness of their people.

Now, if the laziness story has such flimsy bases in reality, why is it so widely believed? It is because, in the past three decades of dominance by free-market ideology, many of us have come to believe in the myth of the individual fully in charge of his/her destiny.

Starting from Disney animations we watch as young children telling us that "if you believed in yourself, you can achieve anything", we are bombarded with the message that individuals, and they alone, are responsible for what they get in their lives. This is what I call the L'Oreal principle – if some people are paid tens of millions of pounds a year, it must be because they're "worth it"; if others are poor, it must be because they are either not good enough or not trying hard enough.

Now, it is politically difficult to criticise the poor for their incompetence, so the attack is focused on the mythical lazy slob, who has no moral leg to stand on. But then the end result is the dismantling of a whole set of policies and institutions that help all poor people in the name of punishing the lazy.

The beauty of this worldview – for those who disproportionately benefit from the current system – is that, by reducing everything down to individuals, it draws people's attention away from the structural causes of poverty and inequality.

It is well known that poor childhood nutrition, lack of learning stimulus at deprived homes, and sub-par schools restrict capability developments of poor children, diminishing their future prospects. When they grow up, they have to contend with all sorts of prejudices that constantly discourage and deflate them, especially if they have the wrong gender or the wrong skin colour.

With these sandbags on their legs, the poor find it difficult to win the race even in the fairest market. Markets are frequently rigged in favour of the rich, as we have seen from a series of recent scandals surrounding deliberate mis-selling of financial products, lies told to the regulators, to the rigging of the Libor rate.

More importantly, money gives the super-rich the power even to rewrite the basic rules of the game by – let's not mince our words – buying up politicians and political offices (think of all those former banker-turned-US treasury secretaries). Many deregulations of the financial and the labour market, as well as tax cuts for the rich, in the last three decades are results of such money politics.

By turning the debate into a morality tale of laziness, the rich and powerful can divert people's attention away from all of these structural problems that create more poverty and inequality than is necessary.

All of this is not to say that individual talents and efforts should not be rewarded. Attempts to completely suppress them can create societies that are ostensibly equal but fundamentally unfair, as in the former socialist countries.

However, it is vital to recognise that poverty and inequality also have structural causes and start a real debate on how to change those things. Ridding the debate of the pernicious and baseless myth of the lazy mob is an important first step in that direction.