Health gem

If you do one thing this week . . . exercise like a hunter gatherer

If you want to bump up your physical activity levels, you could learn a lot from our ancestors. As the 2010 paper Exercise Like a Hunter-Gatherer: A Prescription for Organic Physical Fitness in the American Journal of Medicine points out: “Natural selection shaped the human genome not to run marathons or exclusively lift extremely heavy weights but rather to survive and thrive as very active outdoor generalists in the wild.”

So how can you emulate those fit forebears? Everyday life as a hunter-gatherer involved “a great deal of requisite routine light to moderate activity such as walking and carrying”, and walking and running was generally done on soft, natural and sometimes uneven surfaces, state the authors.

“A variety of exercises should be performed regularly, including activities targeting strength building [weight training] and aerobic conditioning [cardio] and flexibility [stretching]”, and they suggest interval training [bursts of moderate to high intensity exercise with intervening periods of recovery] once or twice a week, but remember to follow it with easier days.