Making Exercise Necessary and Rewarding [Podcast Series]
[:55] Dr. Bantham introduces her guest, Dr. Dan Lieberman
Dr. Lieberman is Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
He is also the author of Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding.
[1:19] Journey from a reluctant exerciser to author and researcher
“And then I realized that there was a lot to learn about, not just the evolution of physical activity, but also about how and why it's relevant to health and disease. Because, you know, I was teaching my classes and students were just bored out of their mind when I would talk about Australopithecus this and Australopithecus that, but when you start to talk about heart disease and diabetes and other chronic illnesses and cancer and shin splints, and snoring and whatever, right, they get super interested. So I ended up writing a book called The Story of the Human Body, which is really about mismatched diseases, and here I am.”
[4:41] Motivation for the book
“The reason the book is called Exercised is that I think the more I've studied exercise, the more I've studied the evolution of human physical activity, the more I realized that people are really confused about physical activity and about exercise. And there are a lot of myths and misunderstandings about it.”
“And it's just very obvious to me, that what we're doing isn't working very well. I mean, the fact that 80% of Americans don't meet basic levels of minimal recommendations, which are 150 minutes a week, that's of moderate to vigorous physical activity, that's 21 minutes a day. The fact that 80% of Americans don't do that means that we're not doing a very good job, right?”
[8:20] Debunking myths about exercise
“I mean, just equating that with smoking is, to me, part of the problem. And I understand why it's, good-intentioned people wrote that, with all the right intentions, but it just makes people skeptical of the science. Because exercise is not a magic bullet. And a chair is not a cigarette. And so we need to kind of tell people the truth, which is that sitting is kind of normal, but if you sit too much, it's a problem.”
[11:38] Physical activity and living healthier for longer
“Natural selection doesn’t care about you if you're a 75 year old hunter gatherer who can't forage and hunt, right? You need to be healthy in order to have a selective benefit to be that old. And so what we were selected for is not so much lifespan, but actually for health span, how long we could live in order to be vigorous and active and healthy. And lifespan follows from health span.”
[16:11] Book cover
“Because, to me, the treadmill is the apotheosis of exercise, which is how strange and weird it is right? You know, to pay money to either buy or go to a gym to go on a machine that makes you work really hard and gets you nowhere, right, is to me the perfect example of how weird we've made exercise.”
[17:34] Making exercise necessary and rewarding
“And, and for the most part, the efforts that people have gone to get people to be more physically active, just aren't working very well. I mean, sometimes it does, but on average, it just doesn't seem to work very well. And so, we evolved to be physically active for two reasons and two reasons only, right? One is when it's necessary. And the other is when it's socially rewarding in some way or other, right, when it's fun. “And so I think that the trick is to make it both, right, recognizing that it is an abnormal behavior, that doing discretionary, voluntary physical activity for the sake of health and fitness, although it's good, isn't normal, it's, and we shouldn't make people feel bad for that. And so let's find ways to make it necessary and rewarding.”
“And I think what we need to do as a field is to get away from the usual prescriptive, medicalized, commodified way of getting people to exercise. And try some much more anthropologically normal, social ways to get people to be physically active.”
[20:28] Requiring students to exercise
“And we know, and I'm sure you know this from your work, that the habits you develop in college are really, really important as lifelong habits. This is the time when people sort of settle into the kind of way they're going to be as an adult. And so I don't see any problem whatsoever with requiring college students to exercise. We did it for hundreds of years.”
[21:48] Exercise and education
“So what we do is we make it necessary and rewarding going to school. And I don't see why we should treat exercise any different from education. It's the same. It's exactly the same model.”
[23:00] Exercise and academic performance
“I mean, the data are clear. People who are more physically active do better cognitively. They do better at memorization. They do better at performance on tests. I mean, this is not like a hypothesis. It's actually, like a fact.”
[23:29] Moving outdoors
“But, you know, I like being outside. And so that's for me the number one problem. So I've, for example, I've done some outdoor kind of like CrossFit workouts, and those are way more fun than doing something in a gym. So have an outdoor, turn a parking lot into a kind of a more, maybe, I don't know, I mean, but so that's for me, that's part of the issue is just the indoor nature of them or just I find off putting.”
[24:58] Trainers making exercise fun
“And they, you know the trainer there did a fantastic job making that workout really fun. It was very social, it was like, because it was a company, and they were trying to build, you know, camaraderie among people. And they were doing all kinds of really charming things that also involved exercise.”
[26:34] Requiring employees to exercise
“I've never heard of any other company that actually requires all its employees to exercise. I think it's the only one. If there are others, I'd be curious to find out. But so far, it's the only one I know about.”
[27:10] Physical activity as a right
“And so, I hope that this is a wake up call that we need to not only promote physical activity more, but also we need to promote it differently. Expecting people to get physical activity by paying for it is, I think, immoral. And it's unacceptable. I mean, if healthcare is a right, which I think it is, and education is a right, which I think we now all agree on. Why isn't the opportunity to be physically active a right?”
