Episode 49: Exercise
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 31 December 2020
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If exercise is healthy, why do so many people avoid doing it? If we're born to be active, why is it so hard to keep your New Year's resolutions about exercise? On this episode, learn about the powerful instincts that cause us to avoid exercise even though we know it's good for us.
Dan Lieberman, author of the new book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, tells the story of how we never evolved to do voluntary physical activity for the sake of health, and helps us think about exercise in a whole new way.
About our guest
Daniel Lieberman is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, a member of The Leakey Foundation's Scientific Executive Committee, and a pioneering researcher on the evolution of human physical activity. His research is on how and why the human body looks and functions the way it does. He has long been fascinated by the evolution of the human head but his main focus is currently on the evolution of human physical activity. He is especially interested in how evolutionary approaches to activities such as walking and running, as well as changes to our body's environments (such as wearing shoes and being physically inactive) can help better prevent and treat musculoskeletal diseases. To address these problems, he integrates experimental biomechanics and physiology in both the laboratory and the field with analyses of the human fossil record.
Links
- Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding - pre-order at bookshop.org
- Register for Dan Lieberman's January 5 Leakey Foundation lecture
The Leakey Foundation
Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and outreach.
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Support this show and the science we talk about. Donate today and your gift will be matched. leakeyfoundation.org/donate
Lunch Break Science
Lunch Break Science is The Leakey Foundation's web series featuring short talks and interviews with Leakey Foundation grantees. Episodes stream live on the first and third Thursdays of every month. leakeyfoundation.org/live.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. |
| 0:11.3 | I'm Meredith Johnson. |
| 0:15.4 | The new year is finally here. |
| 0:18.5 | And along with the reported three quarters of all adults in America, |
| 0:22.4 | I'm planning to make some changes in 2021. I'm making one of the most popular and basic New Year's |
| 0:29.0 | resolutions to improve my health and get more exercise. I'll admit this is not the first year I've |
| 0:36.9 | promised myself to walk 10,000 steps a day or do yoga or lift weights three times a week. |
| 0:43.0 | I make myself the same promise pretty much every year. |
| 0:46.4 | And every year I feel bad about myself when it doesn't happen. |
| 0:49.7 | But not this time. |
| 0:51.2 | No more feeling bad. |
| 0:53.4 | Because what if I told you that the reason it can be so |
| 0:56.6 | hard to make exercise part of your life is because we never evolved to want to exercise. In fact, |
| 1:03.8 | the opposite is true. My guest on the show today is Dan Lieberman. He's a professor of human |
| 1:10.6 | evolutionary biology at Harvard University |
| 1:13.0 | and a member of the Leakey Foundation's Scientific Executive Committee. |
| 1:17.5 | He's an expert on the evolution of human physical activity, |
| 1:21.1 | and he's the author of a new book called Exercised, |
| 1:24.7 | Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy is healthy and rewarding. The book is a natural |
| 1:30.4 | history of human movement, and the central idea of the book is that even though we have powerful |
| 1:36.2 | instincts that cause us to want to avoid exercise, we need it to be healthy, and we can use |
| 1:42.3 | insights from anthropology and evolutionary research to change |
... |
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