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ART DE VANY is 62, but physical fitness tests three years ago showed he had
the body of a 32-year-old. Although De Vany is sceptical of such assessments, he
knows he鈥檚 in good shape. His former career as a professional baseball player
may have something to do with it, but he attributes his physical prowess to an
exercise regime inspired by the lifestyle of our Palaeolithic ancestors.

De Vany鈥檚 advice to the modern exercise freak is to cut duration and
frequency, and increase intensity. 鈥淥ur muscle fibre composition reveals that we
are adapted to extreme intensity of effort,鈥� says De Vany, a professor of
economics at the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the
University of California, Irvine. His approach to fitness combines Darwinian
thinking with his interest in chaos theory and complex systems.

This new science, which De Vany calls evolutionary fitness, is part of
growing efforts to understand how the human body has been shaped by evolution,
and to use this knowledge to improve our health and fitness. Proponents believe
the key lies in the lifestyle of our hunter-gatherer ancestors because, they
say, the vast majority of the human genome is still adapted to an ancient rhythm
of life which swung between intense periods of activity and long stretches of
inertia.

Across the Palaeolithic鈥攚hich covers the period between 2.6 million and
10 000 years ago鈥攑rey animals were large, fleet of foot, or both. For men,
this would have meant lots of walking or jogging to find herds, dramatic
sprints, jumps and turns, perhaps violent struggles, and long walks home
carrying kill. Women may not have had such intense exercise, but they would have
spent many hours walking to sources of water or food, digging up tubers, and
carrying children. If modern hunter-gatherers are anything to go by, men may
have hunted for up to four days a week and travelled 15 kilometres or more on
each trip. Women may have gathered food every two or three days. There would
also have been plenty of other regular physical activities for both sexes such
as skinning animals and tool making, and probably dancing.

Our ancestors must have evolved cardiovascular, metabolic and
thermoregulatory systems capable of sustaining high-level aerobic exertion under
the hot African sun, according to Loren Cordain of the Human Performance
Laboratory at Colorado State University. And given that the Palaeolithic ended
only an evolutionary blink of an eye ago, we ignore its legacy at our peril.
Cordain and his colleagues point out that in today鈥檚 developed societies,
inactivity is associated with diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and heart
disease. Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies rarely experience these modern
killers, they say.

This is where De Vany鈥檚 exercise ideas come in. 鈥淭he primary objectives for
any exercise and diet programme must be to counter hyperinsulinaemia
(chronically elevated insulin) and hypoexertion (wasting of the body鈥檚 lean mass
through inactivity),鈥� he writes in his forthcoming book about evolutionary
exercise. Exercise and diet are linked. For example, says De Vany, our appetite
control mechanisms work best when our activity mimics that of our ancestors. But
he feels that most modern exercise regimes are not hitting the mark.

De Vany views the body as non-linear and dynamic and says exercise should mix
order and chaos鈥攕tructure and novelty. Too much endurance training is
harmful. 鈥淐hronic aerobic exercise overtrains the heart, reducing the chaotic
variation in heart rate which is essential to health,鈥� he says. Likewise, most
weight training is governed too much by routine and is too time-consuming. He
gives his own workout a chaotic character with ascending weights and descending
repetitions. To these brief but intense gym workouts he adds a wide variety of
other activities that vary randomly in intensity and duration. These include
Rollerblading, bicycling, walking, sprinting, tennis, basketball, power walking,
hitting softballs and trekking with a grandson on his shoulders.

He also argues that most people do not train the right muscles for that
ultimately attractive鈥攁nd adaptive鈥攓uality of symmetry. 鈥淪ymmetry is
a reliable evolutionary clue to health,鈥� he says. 鈥淭umours and pathologies
produce gross asymmetries, and our love of symmetry reflects the reproductive
success of our ancestors, who were sensitive to these clues.鈥� He strives for the
X-look鈥攁 symmetrical balance of mass in the shoulder girdle, upper chest
and back, the calves and lower quads, two of the four large muscles at the front
of the thighs (see 鈥淗ow to get X appeal鈥�). This also makes men look taller, he
adds, 鈥渁nother reliable evolutionary clue that women use to find good
驳别苍别蝉鈥�.

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle indicates that women should exercise only a
little less intensely than men, says De Vany. 鈥淲omen are opportunistic hunters
who go after small game when they come across it. They also climb trees to
capture honey and snare birds. And have you ever seen how much work it is to dig
out a deep tuber?鈥� Women benefit enormously from strength work, he says. It
increases their bone density and they get and stay leaner by building muscle
mass. 鈥淭oday鈥檚 women are so weak [compared with their female ancestors].鈥�

Of course, people vary. De Vany acknowledges that our ancestors were adapted
to a variety of terrains and climates. Cordain points out that genetic
differences between populations lead to different physical strengths. East
Africans, for example, seem to be better endurance runners, West Africans better
sprinters.

But human genetic similarity greatly outweighs the variations. And because
our genes have changed so very little since Palaeolithic times, if you want to
be a lean, mean, survival machine why not try exercising like a caveman?

EVOLUTIONARY exercise virgins should begin with three sessions a week. Upper
and lower body workouts should last no more than 40 minutes each and focus on
the large muscles. A third workout aims to improve all-round fitness, including
symmetry and grace. 鈥淔or most people, a move from mechanistic training to
adaptive training would consist primarily of cutting back on the number of sets
and how often they work out,鈥� says Art De Vany. 鈥淭his is combined with a little
pushing up of the pace and intensity of the workouts, and cutting way back on
how long they are, and on the rest between sets. I spend very little time in the
gym, usually from 1 to 2 hours a week.鈥�

• Intensity:
• intermittent acute exercise
• Brevity:
• don鈥檛 exercise acutely for too long
• Variety:
• mix various acute and less stressful exercises
• Randomness:
• arbitrarily mix intensity, frequency, duration, volume and spacing
• Play:
• enjoy what you do