It’s OK to Despise Exercise
You hate it. I hate it. So here are the keys to getting fit anyway.
If you can’t stand jogging, loathe spinning your wheels on a pseudo bike that goes nowhere, and don’t want to do another burpee as long as you live, you’re like me and you’re pretty normal. These things are nothing but work, work, work.
The whole idea behind exercise — a word invented to describe the ridiculous activities we take up to counter the paucity of modern human activity — is totally insane from an evolutionary perspective. We were not made to exercise. We evolved to do life’s natural work, like hunting, gathering and running from danger (then later tilling, planting and running from danger). Through nearly all of human history, mere existence was grueling, often terrifying, but the challenge of survival kept us physically fit and mentally sharp.
“Until recently, nobody exercised because people had to be physically active in order to survive,” Daniel Lieberman, PhD, a Harvard University evolutionary biologist and paleoanthropologist, told me earlier this year. “Exercise is physical activity for the sake of health and fitness.”
To be clear, you absolutely need physical activity, not just for a healthy body and long life but also to keep your head straight, oodles of studies have shown. The activity…
