by A. J. Jacobs
Argument 2: In the end, medical advances will save us.
The old long bet. It’s another favorite of mine. My friend and former intern Kevin—who is just as bad an influence as Paul—put it this way: “I don’t smoke, but I would consider starting. Because it takes, what? Thirty years to get lung cancer. And by the time I get cancer, they’ll just give you a gene-coated nano-robot pill and it’ll fix it in five minutes.”
I think about this point often, because medicine is moving at mach speeds: By the time I’m morbidly obese, they’ll probably have a weight-control pill or pineapple-flavored shake to cure me. By the time my teeth have become rotten yellow nubs, you’ll be able to grow flawless new bicuspids from stem cells.
In 2010, a Harvard lab headed by Dr. Ronald DePinho actually reversed aging in mice. They did it with an enzyme called “telomerase,” which acts like little protective caps on the ends of chromosomes. The caps stop the chromosomes from wearing out, a major cause of aging. In ten years, who knows, they might have a human version. Health saints and health sinners might have equal life spans.
Argument 3: Gyms are germ-saturated disease vectors.
As a mild OCD sufferer, I’m a sucker for the microbial argument. Do I want to pick up a dumbbell that has been pawed by a thousand sweaty palms before me? The National Athletic Trainers’ Association addresses this topic in a delightfully nauseating paper. It says skin infections from gyms and sports are common, and account for half of the infectious diseases suffered by athletes. They list such unpleasantries as MRSA, athlete’s foot, jock itch, boils, impetigo, herpes simplex, and ringworm. As The New York Times warned in a headline, BE SURE EXERCISE IS ALL YOU GET AT THE GYM.
So these have been my excuses, the lard-assed devils on my shoulder. And they are somewhat compelling arguments.
But this year, I’m going to have to ignore this thinking. Or shoot the arguments down in my head. Which I can do. After all, Jim Fixx is just one data point, right? Exercise increases life span in general. And being in shape is pleasurable in its own right, so if I eat deep-fried Mars bars and wait around for medical advances, I’m depriving myself of feeling good. Exercise also increases efficiency in everyday life, so I’ll be able to plant more crops, think more clearly, and do more community service.
Plus, almost every reputable source recommends regular exercise. Exercise, exercise, exercise. I’ve read it a thousand times. It cuts down on heart disease and cancer. It soothes stress and improves concentration. It’s like Prozac and Lipitor and Adderall combined. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to do much for weight loss, partly because a good workout makes us hungry, and we end up bingeing.
But the other benefits? Well documented.
The big debate is over how much and what kind of exercise. And that turns out to be a heated debate indeed.
The Institute of Medicine—an arm of the National Academy of Sciences devoted to evidence-based medicine—recommends “60 minutes of daily moderate intensity physical activity (e.g., walking/jogging at 3 to 4 miles/hour) or shorter periods of more vigorous exertion (e.g., jogging for 30 minutes at 5.5 miles/hour).”
Dr. Oz in his book You: An Owner’s Manual lets us off easier: To stay young, he suggests twenty minutes of aerobic exercise three times a week, plus a bit of weight lifting. Too much more, he writes, and exercise starts to raise your age, because of the wear and tear on the body. Twenty minutes three times a week. For this, I love Dr. Oz.
There are studies in favor of long-distance running. And there are other studies that say distance running scars the heart.
There’s also a growing number of researchers who recommend interval training—lots of walking sprinkled with quick sprints. And still others who dismiss aerobic exercise altogether and say we should focus exclusively on weight training until we reach excruciating muscle failure. But I’ll get to that later.
For starters, I’m going to try the Institute of Medicine’s daily exercise regimen, blending aerobics and weights. And I’ll be confronting my demons and joining the 45 million Americans who belong to a gym.
Losing My Gym Virginity
I choose a gym called Crunch because it is two blocks away from my apartment. Laziness—not a healthy mind-set, I know.
It’s a basic, bare-bones gym. The only gimmick is that it’s known for its kooky classes, such as pole dancing. (Incidentally, the word “gymnasium” comes from the ancient Greek for “place to be naked,” so you could argue pole dancing is actually quite true to gym’s roots.)
I’m assigned a trainer named Tony Willging. He’s a big man with a shaved head and a tribal tattoo on his arm. He wears a tight black T-shirt that shows off his chest. I tell him I’m writing a book on being superhealthy, and I need to bulk up. I want pecs that would fill a set of B-cups. (Not the manliest way to put it, I suppose.)
“I can do that,” says Tony. “But that’s not necessarily the same thing as being in shape.”
He says healthiness isn’t about size. It’s overall body condition.
“The thing is,” I tell him, “I want before-and-after photos. Like the ones you see in ads for protein shakes.”
“Let me tell you something,” says Tony. “Those aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”
At this point, Tony lets me in on a fitness industry secret. Those glossy time-lapse photos are often snapped not months apart, not weeks apart, but . . . on the exact same day. Shave the chest, slather oil on the pecs, suck in the gut, and ta-da, you have a brand-new body. You don’t even need Photoshop. Or better yet, the ad company scours the local gyms till they find the most shredded guy around. They snap his photo. They pay him ten thousand dollars to get fat. And then snap his photo a month later. When they print the ad, they simply reverse the “before” and “after” pictures. Point is, it’s a lot easier to get out of shape than into it.
This is good information. It takes the pressure off. And if all else fails, I can shave my chest and bathe myself in sesame oil.
On paper, Tony should be the scary, drill-sergeant-like, get-all-up-in-your-grille type of trainer. He looks like he could punch in a windshield with little effort. In his former job, he was a parole officer for murderers and rapists. But Tony’s not scary. Quite the opposite. At least to those of us who aren’t murderers and rapists, he’s gentle and funny, and would rather talk about literary nonfiction than strangleholds.
“Are you up for warming up with a few minutes on the treadmill?” asks Tony, almost apologetically.
Ah, the treadmill. I’ve always loathed it. Originally, in the 1800s, treadmills were used by horses to crush grain (hence the “mill” in treadmill) and as a way to reform prisoners. They also provide us with an almost too-easy Sisyphean metaphor. So there’s plenty to hate about the treadmill.
But on I get, and start pattering away—it’s only going three miles an hour. And yet, within a hundred steps, I’m panting.
I spend the rest of my training session doing lunges, working with chest press machines, and pumping dumbbells. Thankfully, Tony thinks I’m beyond the lavender-colored dumbbells. But not much beyond. I got the ten-pounders. I keep looking at the tank-topped man to my left, who is hefting sixty-pounders as if they’re tubes of toothpaste.
“Don’t worry about him,” says Tony. “You’re doing great.”
I leave with a mix of embarrassment and pride. I sweated a bit, not too much. That wasn’t so bad, now, was it? And I love the way my arms feel as if they’re floating after lifting the weights.
When I get home, Julie hugs me and presents me with a first-day-at-the-gym gift: a PowerBar with a pink candle stuck in it.
“I’ve waited for this day for years,” she says.
For the last decade, Julie has made it her New Year’s wish that I join a gym. So for her, my inaugural workout has been one of the highlights of our marriage.
The next day, I had practically no soreness. This bodes well, I thought. What I didn’t know is that the soreness often kicks in not the next day, but two da
ys later. (It’s called “Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness,” and it occurs because of tiny rips in the muscle fibers, especially for those who are out of shape.) And man, did it kick in. I’m walking around like Lurch, straight-legged and angled forward. It takes me a full minute to sit down on the toilet—I have to ease myself onto the seat, clutching onto the sink. Oh, but I’m pleased with the pain. I must be accomplishing something, right?
Going Caveman
I’ve been hitting the gym a few times a week—and it’s been getting slightly less unpleasant—but I want to test other regimens, too. I need to be an exercise omnivore this year. So I’ve decided to sample the polar opposite of the indoor-gym workout. I’m going to try out the Caveman Workout, which is all about being natural and savage and out in the wilderness. For me, that wilderness is Central Park.
This Sunday, I will join five other men as we toss boulders and run barefoot through Manhattan’s own nature preserve.
The caveman movement—or the Paleo movement, as practitioners prefer it to be called—is still somewhat fringe, but it’s been gaining traction. The idea is simple. Our bodies evolved for millions of years to eat and exercise a certain way. Then, in relatively recent history, everything changed. Ten thousand years ago, humans started farming. A couple of hundred years ago, we began sitting at our desks all day. For total health, the proponents argue, we need to go back to the old ways—exercising in nature and eating like cavemen.
It’s an easy trend to mock. My friends have done so relentlessly: “Is part of the workout dragging women by their hair?” “What was the life expectancy of the caveman? Twenty-eight years? Good luck with that.” (Actually, the length of their life span is debatable.)
I’m skeptical of much of the caveman dogma—especially the parts about the meat-heavy diet. I’ll get to that later. But I don’t think the Paleos should be dismissed. They have some good ideas, too. It’s clear that our bodies were built for another time. So I want to give this workout a shot.
The man behind the caveman workout is a thirty-nine-year-old Frenchman named Erwan Le Corre, whose company is called MovNat, short for Mouvement Naturel.
He holds workshops around the world—from West Virginia to Thailand—and today he’s in New York. We meet at 108th Street and Central Park West at an entrance to the park.
Erwan bounds up wearing black shorts and a sporty zip-up sweater. He’s ridiculously good-looking, in a leading-man-in-a-1950s-MGM-movie way: A razor jaw, perfectly coiffed sandy brown hair, muscles that are well defined, though not steroidy.
“This is a great place,” he says, with a strong French accent, as he scans the scene. “Very natural. Very primal.” He runs up the hill to scout out the best patch of trees and rocks.
I wait on the corner with two other cavemen.
One is John Durant, a twenty-six-year-old Harvard grad with dark shoulder-length hair and blue camouflage shorts. The other is Vlad Averbukh, a twenty-nine-year-old with an accent from his native Uzbekistan. Vlad has short red hair, a short red beard, and when not running wild, drives a red Smart Car.
John and Vlad know each other well, having both appeared in a New York Times article on the caveman movement.
They chat amiably for a few minutes. Then Vlad starts pressing John on doctrinal differences. Vlad thinks that Paleos should be eating raw meat. His diet includes a lot of raw grass-fed beef and internal organs. John thinks fire was invented much earlier, and cooking your meat is just fine.
“What are your sources?” Vlad asks John.
John sighs. “I don’t want to have this debate now.”
Vlad seems annoyed, and walks off. I get the feeling Vlad is the fundamentalist caveman, and John is the reform caveman.
Erwan is ready. We leave our shirts in a pile near a rock. It’s a brisk day, and the sun apparently wants some privacy, because it refuses to come out from behind some clouds. I clasp myself in a self-hug, hoping to warm up.
“Why do we go bare-chested?” asks Erwan as he stands on a rock. “It’s better for us. It toughens us up physically, which toughens us up mentally. It helps us adapt.”
There are five of us total, including an African-American caveman named Rahsaan. Hanging on the sidelines are not one but two foreign TV shows taping segments on Erwan: a German show, and a French show, the latter of which, of course, was produced by a black-clad woman whose mouth was never without a lit cigarette.
We jog in place to keep warm.
Vlad leans into me and says, “I’m glad you’re here. Because otherwise I would be the least built of everyone.”
He glances at my chest again to make sure.
“Uh, thanks?” I say.
“I didn’t mean that as an insult. I am just stating facts.”
I once wrote an article on a movement called Radical Honesty, where practitioners remove the filter between the brain and the mouth. The article’s headline was I THINK YOU’RE FAT. It was an extremely unpleasant experience. I wonder if Vlad is a member of that group, too.
Erwan gives us a preworkout talk on the importance of exercising out in nature. He points to the rocks and hills and uneven ground. “This is better than a gym. It’s adaptive for our bodies and our brains. You never have this in a gym, because there you do one muscle, then another muscle.”
He mimes a biceps curl.
“It’s not only inefficient, it’s boring.”
Our first exercise will be running. We go in single file, crunching through the leaves, dodging broken bottles and jutting rocks.
We run as Erwan instructed. Or at least try. We’re supposed to run elegantly, like an animal. Keep the muscles relaxed, lean forward, and let gravity pull you ahead. Don’t stomp—take short steps and land lightly on your toes. Don’t pump your arms, just let them dangle naturally by your side.
It feels the exact opposite of natural to me, who is used to my old arm-pumping, foot-stomping running. But maybe it’ll become natural over time.
As we round a tree, I step on a glass splinter, barely suppressing a yelp. I don’t tell anyone, as I don’t want to be the whiner. When we come full circle, we stop to catch our breath.
“How much do you run every day?” Vlad asks Erwan.
“I don’t believe in spreadsheets or clocking my heart rate. I do what feels natural and primal. One day I might run five minutes. Another day I might run three hours without stopping.”
For our next exercise, we get more primal. We get down on all fours and clamber along a forty-foot fallen log. The idea is to move as if you’re a tiger stalking prey.
“It’s almost like swimming on the log,” says Erwan. “You keep all your muscles relaxed.”
Erwan hops on the log, his back flat, and prowls away.
We all follow. It’s tricky. My foot keeps slipping, and it’s a strain on my shoulders. I try to prowl like a tiger, but end up scurrying like a monkey.
We dismount, and Erwan gives us another pep talk. “In yoga, they say that the mind and body are in touch.” He does a mocking California-surfer-dude accent here—or at least a California surfer dude from Provence. “That’s fine. But that’s not enough. You need to have a mind-body-nature connection.”
At this point, the TV producers want a shot of John and Erwan interacting with nature by climbing a tree. So Vlad, Rahsaan, and I have some free time to hang around and chat.
“What’s your body fat?” Vlad asks. “My guess is it’s eighteen percent.”
I tell him I haven’t measured it in a bit.
“You have a lot of intravascular fat—fat in between the muscles. If you were a cow, I could make a lot of tallow out of you.”
“Uh-huh.”
I know I should be angry. So far Vlad has insulted my body twice in the span of a half hour. But there’s something disarming—maybe even charming—about his complete lack of social graces. He’s like my five-year-old.
The talk turns to diet, as it often does in caveman circles. Vlad extols the virtue of raw grass-fed beef.
; “I’ve found a great supplier of cow brains,” he says.
Rahsaan is interested. “Will you e-mail me the info?”
“Don’t you get sick from eating raw food?” asks the German TV producer.
“No, I haven’t yet. No worms. Also, in France, parasites are sometimes used in medicine. So it’s possible we have a symbiotic relationship with them.”
Over the summer, Vlad adds, he smushed a bunch of insects together and had them for a meal. “A lot of protein,” he said.
As you might imagine, Vlad has no patience for vegans. He’s dated a couple over the years. “I converted one to Paleo on the first date—but it didn’t work out.”
The lack of women in the Paleo movement is a recurring source of frustration. Vlad tells how he had a date over to his apartment, but she left because she thought the bathroom was too dirty.
For the first time, I feel a bit bad for Vlad. I want to tell him that it might be easier to date if he was a little more flexible with his no-hygiene-products rule. He won’t use deodorant or toothpaste. “I will floss my teeth because chimps have been known to floss their teeth.”
For the next exercise, someone suggests lifting a boulder, but we have trouble finding large rocks. Erwan thinks it would be better if all of us carried a log on our shoulders.
The French TV producer is talking quickly and with seeming concern to Erwan. I can’t understand what she’s saying, but I do hear the word dangereux.
Erwan shakes his head. “Ce n’est pas dangereux.”
Hmm. That doesn’t sound good. We get in line, and on the count of three, we heave a log onto our shoulders. It’s as thick as a telephone pole, and my knees buckle a bit before I regain my balance.
After we stagger forward about ten yards, Erwan shouts that it’s time to toss it back onto the ground. We all grunt, and the log thumps to the dirt.
Vlad approaches Erwan.