I wrote this article to my Lithuanian community, and before I post more about health or other things, I wanted to translate it into English.
Recently, I listened to an interview with Tom Myers (Why Everyone Needs To Prioritize Functional Training) in which he called this world we have created a zoo.
Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc5LSzrXles
His idea is simple: take an animal out of the environment for which its biology evolved and place it into an artificially created, safe and comfortable space – its behaviour will change. A bear living in a zoo no longer lives the way a bear in the forest does, even if it receives enough calories, medical care and safe shelter. Myers says that we ourselves built a zoo and moved into it. Although it is probably the most comfortable cage an animal has ever built for itself, while admiring the features of the cage, we forget what kind of animal it was designed for.
Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman examines this paradox in a very similar way: as technology and machines increasingly replace human physical labour, movement has changed from a necessity into something we have to consciously choose. In the past, there was no point for a hunter to run five kilometres in the morning “for health” if, on that same day, he would still have to walk many kilometres looking for food, hunting, carrying, climbing or running. Energy was a valuable resource, so conserving it was not a character flaw – it could have been evolutionarily useful. This is exactly why Lieberman opposes the simple explanation that people today are simply “lazy”: our tendency to avoid unnecessary physical effort has a biological logic. Only now has a completely new situation appeared – for the first time, we can live successfully enough while barely moving at all, so physical activity, which used to be necessary, now has to be consciously chosen as a separate activity.
Today, evolutionarily logical energy conservation meets technologies that allow it to be stretched almost to absolute immobility. There arises a necessity to understand what a strange situation our biology has found itself in: an old organism is living in a wonderful new world. Most people wake up in the morning, sit down to have breakfast, then get into a car or bus, sit at a desk at work, sit again during lunch, later get back into the car, and in the evening sit in front of the television, computer or phone. Most people even rest, entertain themselves and socialise while sitting.
Of course, the human body does not object to this lifestyle and simply adapts. If, for eight or ten hours a day, the body needs to maintain a fairly similar seated position, it learns to maintain it. If the arms are in front of the body for most of the working day, the head is oriented towards a screen, and the hip and knee joints remain within a similar range of angles for many hours, the organism receives no message that it necessarily needs to maintain equal readiness for hundreds of other movements.
Thanks to neuroplasticity, the nervous system learns from what we constantly do. And that saying “use it or lose it” reminds us that the body constantly invests in what we demand from it.
So the body understands: I no longer need flexibility, movement or mobility. The eyes do not need to constantly change distance, observe the environment, or adapt to changes in lighting as the time of day changes. This becomes one of many reasons why people now complain about scoliosis, a misaligned pelvis, limbs of different lengths, myopia, and so on. Geneticists and doctors will probably be able to talk about how such things will affect the bodies of future generations.
Then it becomes important to ask what kind of mechanical environment we create for our body every day and what kind of person our daily life gradually shapes out of it?
And here we have another little problem. Having realised that we move too little, we created yet another specialised environment. The gym. For an hour a day, we go to a place where we perform planned movements in order to compensate for a world in which there is no longer any need to move. Sport itself, of course, is not the problem. On the contrary – systematic physical activity has enormous health benefits.
However, Myers raises another question: what are we trying to achieve when we train? If appearance becomes the greatest priority, the body can once again be viewed as an object whose purpose is to look good in the mirror, rather than as an organism that should carry us through life as well as possible.
This seems quite important when a heavy weight lifter comes into your massage room who can lift a barbell weighing several hundred kilograms but is unable to lift his own small child. (His muscles were trained for one kind of movement, but not the natural environment that life required) Of course, Myers does not criticise strength or beautifully developed muscles. He himself says that appearance goals are temporary, while function remains important as we age; his personal goal is not to defeat ageing, but to live as well as possible for as long as he is alive.
A person can have an impressively developed chest, strong heads of the quadriceps muscle and beautiful abdominal muscles, but this in itself does not answer the question of how he moves. Can he easily bend down towards the ground? Raise his arm through the full range intended for it? Can he react quickly when the body unexpectedly loses balance? None of these abilities require rejecting strength training – on the contrary, strength is an important part of function. The only question is whether we are training the person or the image of individual muscles.
Professor Lyudmila Vasilyeva emphasises that the body tries at any cost to perform the task. If movement is restricted in one place, another area may move more. If one muscle does not perform its function, another may have to work for both. If a certain position is repeated for years, the body looks for the most economical way to maintain it. And we often evaluate only the final result.
According to Myers, the problem is not that we are lazy or “use” the body badly. The problem is that we created a very efficient environment that removed many reasons for us to move, and biology gladly accepted this offer. Therefore, today movement has to be chosen consciously, because a human being is still a moving creature.
Myers encourages us to pay attention to how often we change position, how many different movements our body gets, whether we use our whole environment, or whether we only travel between the chair, the car, and the bed. Do our eyes look at one distance all day? Do we ever find ourselves on the ground? Do we have an opportunity to carry, push, pull, reach, rotate, balance, walk on an uneven surface? We do not have to do everything correctly or do a lot, but it is important to give the body opportunities to move.