Exercise was important to paleolithic man, but he wasn’t doing high-intensity training every day or even every other day.  Hunter gatherers weren’t eating a lot (another swing and a miss for Epic Meal Time) so they had to conserve their energy.  Don’t get me wrong, occasionally, they’d be forced to fight for their lives against predators and probably lift some heavy shit.  They probably also traveled long distances at times, so thumbs up for walking while carrying stuff.   If you are going to again fall back onto the shoulders of evolutionary biology, you can’t justify training like the Crossfit Games Athletes (4-6 hours per day) and call it functional evolutionarily speaking.  This could be why studies are now popping up with data showingincreased risk of heart complications in people that have been distance running for most of their lives.  We’re only becoming smart about this now that we can collect data from people that have been running long distances for the past 50 years (“jogging” became a sport thanks to Bill Bowerman in the 1960s).  The same could be said for everybody that lives off of the high that you get from frequent high intensity exercise.  I’m guilty myself, having trained for an Ironman and doing Crossfit consistently for the past few years.  As a long-term mechanism of achieving fitness, training at such high intensity is not a healthy choice, a sentiment shared by Annie Thorisdottir, 2011 Crossfit Games Champ.   Art De Vany, in his great Essay on Evolutionary Fitness summed it nicely: “Think of a lion or jaguar. They are muscular and lean and spend long periods in languid rest and brief, highly intense periods in the hunt.  Paleolithic man needed rest, and so do you.”
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Exercise was important to paleolithic man, but he wasn’t doing high-intensity training every day or even every other day.  Hunter gatherers weren’t eating a lot (another swing and a miss for Epic Meal Time) so they had to conserve their energy.  Don’t get me wrong, occasionally, they’d be forced to fight for their lives against predators and probably lift some heavy shit.  They probably also traveled long distances at times, so thumbs up for walking while carrying stuff.  

If you are going to again fall back onto the shoulders of evolutionary biology, you can’t justify training like the Crossfit Games Athletes (4-6 hours per day) and call it functional evolutionarily speaking.  This could be why studies are now popping up with data showingincreased risk of heart complications in people that have been distance running for most of their lives.  We’re only becoming smart about this now that we can collect data from people that have been running long distances for the past 50 years (“jogging” became a sport thanks to Bill Bowerman in the 1960s).  The same could be said for everybody that lives off of the high that you get from frequent high intensity exercise.  I’m guilty myself, having trained for an Ironman and doing Crossfit consistently for the past few years.  As a long-term mechanism of achieving fitness, training at such high intensity is not a healthy choice, a sentiment shared by Annie Thorisdottir, 2011 Crossfit Games Champ.  

Art De Vany, in his great Essay on Evolutionary Fitness summed it nicely: “Think of a lion or jaguar. They are muscular and lean and spend long periods in languid rest and brief, highly intense periods in the hunt.  Paleolithic man needed rest, and so do you.”

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