A top scientist is breaking down why we aren’t programmed to enjoy exercise

We’re not evolved to ‘exercise’, says a leading scientist. Here’s why that impacts your motivation. 

Exercise is now a normal part of human life – booking in a spin class and lifting weights in the gym is as normal as meeting a friend for cocktails, government campaigns encourage us to take up running, and there’s a whole multi-million-pound industry built on getting us fitter.

Yet, around one in three women don’t meet the recommended activity guidelines of 150 active minutes a week, according to the World Health Organisation. And, even for the most dedicated exercisers, working out feels like a slog sometimes. Why? 

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Well, as Patrick McGee, San Francisco correspondent at the Financial Times, said on the FT Weekend podcast, “We evolved to be as inactive as possible. Sure our bodies might be evolved to run, and in some was go hunting, but in the absence of a reason to run we did not evolve to just burn calories for kicks.”

He references the work by Dr Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist from Harvard, who points out that we are designed to conserve energy in case of food shortages. In his book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved To Do Is Healthy And Rewarding, Dr Lieberman expands on this idea, detailing how we aren’t evolved to move in structured ways simply for moving’s sake.

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That doesn’t mean the body enjoys being sedentary. Rather, the body expects to move for reasons like finding food or to avoid predators. Dr Lieberman breaks this down into moving out of necessity or moving for reward (like making social contacts). But we just aren’t evolved to want to burn energy simply for the hell of it.

In an interview for Harvard’s Book Store, Dr Lieberman expands on the meaning behind this book, saying: “People were [historically] very physically active, but they didn’t do what we did as ‘exercise’,” he says. In fact, Lieberman would go as far as to say that exercise is kind of odd – and I’d agree. It is weird that we take a break from our sedentary lives to start jumping around, and then go back to normal again. 

Of course, many people would say that contemporary exercise is exciting. From boxing in disco-esque rooms to the empowering feeling of getting stronger, we’ve found ways to love this style of moving. But, really, it is against everything the body was designed to do – hence why many people still struggle with exercise, or find dips in motivation. 

“To me, the apotheosis of exercise is the treadmill,” Dr Lieberman says during the interview. “Think about it: you pay money – either to buy one of these things or to go to a gym to use one – to work really, really hard, it’s noisy, it’s loud, it’s treacherous and it gets you nowhere. Try explaining that to your great, great, great grandparents.” In fact, he says, treadmills were invented as a way to punish prisoners in the Victorian era, “so if you hate treadmills, there’s a good reason: they have a long history of people hating them.”

In an ideal world, we’d run to get food or shelter, lift resources, and move to be social by dancing or walking with friends – and get enough activity through doing that to then conserve our energy by sitting and resting.

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The problem is that we now don’t need to do any activity to find food or create bonds. Avoiding movement is easy, so we developed the notion of exercise – a formal time frame of movement for health benefits, but without any evolutionary or survival purpose.

That’s why you probably find it a struggle. And why modern motivators, such as ‘just do it’ or ‘exercise is medicine’, fail to land with people who struggle to move more. 

So what can we take away from this? The answer isn’t just to stop going to the gym because we didn’t evolve to lift weights or get on a running machine. Instead, it’s about knowing that this lack of ‘motivation’ is normal. As Dr Lieberman says, “The little voice that tells you to take the escalator rather than the stairs is a deep and ancient instinct so we should be compassionate about that.”

But it’s also a reminder that we should focus on movement rather than traditional exercise – don’t force yourself to do a ‘workout’ if you hate it. Instead, try being in nature, making your sweat sessions social, or just moving your body around a little more. Or, if you want to get really primal about it, you could run to the supermarket. 

Images: Getty

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