Your Body – Use It or Lose It !
It’s easy to forget that for most of our existence as a species we walked unclothed and barefoot across the vast open plains of Africa searching for food, water, safety and shelter. It might be obvious in our sedentary, centrally-heated and technologically sophisticated world but that’s our heritage and that’s how we evolved. We’ve spent the vast majority of our existence as highly-skilled hunter-gatherers with bodies that adapted to the advantages of walking upright for long distances with keen senses that were attuned to identifying food or threat. Our adaptation to a life of planting and sowing and herding is relatively recent.
The question today is how do you respect your ancient heritage as a fantastically efficient long-distance jogger that practised endurance hunting by chasing prey for hours at a time until it became too exhausted to escape our primitive spear points? If our bodies evolved to move every day – and evolutionary biologists estimate that we probably walked between fifteen and twenty-kilometers per day – how can we maintain our natural fitness and respect our physical needs when we sit for hours at a time in front of an electronic screen?
The answer, of course, is to move and make movement a regular part of your daily agenda.
You don’t need to go to extremes and become a marathon runner. You just need to stand up, stretch, breathe and walk. If you can move your body every twenty minutes, you’ll notice some amazing changes in your health. When you allocate time to enjoy a gentle walk every day, you’ll noticed improvements in your digestion, sleep, concentration, strength, endurance and resistance to stress. Partly because you’re respecting the evolutionary characteristics that shape your physical frame, but also because movement is the foundation for better breathing, improved perception and broad-spectrum improvements to your health. When you engage with your body and provide the opportunities for it to move, you send a clear message that it is expected to continue functioning with optimum efficiency. And that’s a message that lends itself to a longer, stronger, healthier and happier life.