The EXERCISE Scandal Revealed | Genesis Movement

The EXERCISE scandal is revealed. There really is no rational argument on the other side of this…I'm going to show you how the right movement will impact your health and life. We're going to look at movement lessons from history and reveal the hidden truth about how much we need to move for health and longevity.

I discuss:

• Human research is always better than rat science, know the difference.
• Our genetic template for the ideal exercise and nutrition plan.
• The latest neuroscience into brain health as it relates to movement.

In this training, I'm going to debunk the myth in exercise physiology. You know, the myth, that if you work out for an hour or two a day; that you're golden. Let me ask you something, would you eat one meal a day and skip the rest of the meals? What would happen if you did? 

You would be deficient in nutrients. You would get sick. Now do that for 20, 40, 60 years of your life. See where I am going. You can’t only do exercise for an hour and then sit or stand in a static immobile sedentary position all day; that is killing us. Again, like everything else in science, we all disagree. 

So I'm going to give you my perspective of human movement, not rat and animal-based, but human movement and how it really relates to you. Not the rat. Not the animal.  You. There is a difference guys. But first, we have to discover the origin of human movement.  

Anthropologists rely on a variety of fossil, archaeological, genetic, and linguistic clues to reconstruct how people populated the world. Sir Arthur Keith was a Scottish anatomist and anthropologist. He was a leading figure in the study of human fossils, and later became President of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Keith was put in charge of the treasury of artifacts that were kept safe in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.

It was exposure to these fossils that enabled a shift in his interest from anatomy to the machinery of human evolution, and the world will be ever grateful. While Sir Keith was one of the first anthropologists to discover the earliest Homo sapiens to our more modern scientific techniques, we have advanced our understanding of human movement patterns by looking at fossils of skulls, artifacts, DNA, culture, and language.

How did our ancestors’ physique look? How often did they move? How much energy did they spend? The answer to this became apparent with the differences after the agricultural revolution.

Science demonstrated that a small tribe in the Middle East about 10,000 years BC discarded their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and began domesticating animals and cultivating plants in a manner similar to farming. The Middle Eastern tribe became revolutionaries as science labeled them the first peoples to plant the first seeds of agriculture. 

In so doing, they began following a lifestyle different than all prior humans. What started as a rebel way of life in the Middle East was ultimately adopted around the globe and eventually drove the hunter-gatherer lifestyle into extinction.

Save for a few isolated tribes in Amazon rainforests and on the An-Daman Islands in the Bay of Ben-gal, un-modernized hunter-gatherer societies barely exist. Ironically, as the last of the hunter-gatherer cultures became endangered, modern science is coming to understand the importance of this lifestyle to the health of all humans.

Researchers determined what it must have been like to survive in the wild. It would require massive energy expenditure on a daily basis for requisite activities such as hunting games and foraging for water, social interaction, dealing with predatorial stress, and gathering food. To survive in the wild back then would have been very stressful. Again, how accurate these dates are matters not.   

Were not concerned here how long human civilization has lived. What we need to take home from this data is that this way of life represents the pattern of physical activity regimen for which our genome remains adapted. Accordingly, humans are highly capable of performing the great diversity of physical activity required for hunting and gathering food in the wild. 

Again, the reason we need to tap into our Inner Aboriginee and live like a wild human in a civilized world. The profound and progressively wider discordance between current-day physical activity and indigenous Homo sapiens activity results in atrophy, disability, and disease. Accordingly, the original model of hunter-gatherer’s daily physical regimen could serve as an ideal genetic template for the ideal exercise and nutrition program for humans today.

So, let me continue our discussion while I make my case that following data derived from humans is always better than the most expensive science extrapolated from rats.  After all, rat science is evidence-based science, it is neither the most accurate evidence, nor is it based on real evidence for humans.

Again, that is the purpose for this program and the bulk of the reason experts have conflicting opinions and use rat and animal science to defend their theories; keep in mind, it ain’t even human; hardly any of it at least. At any rate, I went to get back to what we know from human studies, the origin. 

Science went from digging ancient human fossils and analysis of skull size to predict the size of the human brain to DNA analysis to provide clues to the modern Homo sapien. We have concluded that a more accurate description of how humans were designed to move is better achieved with human data as opposed to the science of rats and attempting to extrapolate that data to humans.

In other words, you and I are much smarter about listening to television and experts recommending nutrition and physical exercise based on rat science. It is far from accurate, and the reason why so many doctors and scientists disagree. It is much better to recommend nutrition and exercise patterns for humans, based on human data.

So far, I have presented some evidence to back up this point, but how do we know about how movement shaped the human brain? What is the relationship between movement and the human brain?

In modern neuroscience, we find an answer to that question. Dealing with the difficult issues about the brain is no trivial task. At some point in your life, most of us have asked this question. Why do humans and other species have a brain? Did you know that not all species on planet Earth have brains?

Dr. Dan Wolpert recently spoke at Ted and gave an answer to this question. He talked about our unique ability to perceive the world, and our capacity to think. Most people believe perception and thought are the reason we have a brain. Dr. Wolpert strongly disagrees; he says it is obvious why humans possess a brain, “We have a brain for one reason and one reason only; that is to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain.”

If we contemplate this for a moment, we realize that movement is everywhere and essential for life. The impulse of life goes through movement and contractions of muscles. Humans’ ability to speak, write, use gestures, and even use sign language are mediated through our contractions of muscle; through movement.

Even our sensory modalities, memory, and cognitive processes either drive or suppress future movements. There is no evolutionary or adaptive advantage in laying down old memories of childhood or perceiving the color of a butterfly if it does not affect the way you are going to move later in life. If you are skeptical of this argument, Dr. Wolpert is a British medical doctor, neuroscientist, and engineer, with outstanding contributions in computational biology.

He would have this to say: “Now for those who do not believe this argument, we have trees and grass on our planet without the brain, but the clinching evidence is this animal here — the humble sea squirt.” The sea squirt is an immature, undeveloped, basic form of an animal. It has a nervous system and swims around in the ocean in its juvenile life. The sea squirt has a fascinating story to tell.

It begins its life as an egg and develops into a tadpole-like creature, complete with a spinal cord down to the tail. The sea squirt has a brain that helps it wiggle its tail to locomote through the water. The interesting thing is, its mobility does not last long. Once it finds a suitable home, it attaches itself and never moves again. After it implants itself to its home, slowly digesting its brain and nervous system for food. In other words, the lesson of the sea squirt teaches something marvelous to science, because once you do not need to move, you do not need a brain.