 21 convention and the 21 convention is about the ideal man and shaping that ideal man and I know for my own journey what I Discovered through this was so much a whole new world of diet Exercise and fitness it changed my life and it actually it's the one thing that I've seen change so many attendees and even speakers lives so right now we actually have a PhD in exercise physiology and biomechanics also 21 convention speaker alumni all the way from the UK To the US to speak for you guys. We have mr. James steel I'm gonna go ahead and take a little sip of water first Just apologize My throat's been a bit sore this week. So hopefully my voice holds out for the whole of the talk and Okay, just to give you a bit of an overview of what the talk is going to be about and the purpose of the talk and for those of you Have seen it already. I've given this talk before this is the second time I've given it but I've got a bit more time to go in a bit more detail and try and conceptualize some of the ideas a Bit more make them a bit more contextual for you guys here so the title of the talk is a synthesis of modern exercise physiology and evolutionary theory and To start off with I'm just going to go through and kind of explain what my thinking was and What the purpose of the talk was about what brought me to actually want to discuss this topic in a bit more detail? Now I'm going to warn you guys. This is going to be a bit of a change of tact for What you've experienced for the most of the day. This is going to be quite an academic talk So expect a lot of references citations gonna make sure you're all taking notes And I'm gonna pass a quiz out at the end. So you'll look at your grades back by Sunday Okay, so let's get started if the clicker wants to work There we go. Right. Okay, so The talk's going to cover This idea of kind of evolutionary fitness or paleo fitness the whole kind of paleo idea has become very very popular Within the lay press and the academic sphere over the last few years I mean everyone here has probably heard of the paleo diet hands up if you heard of the paleo diet There we go. That's pretty much everyone. Okay So it's got a lot more momentum It's become a lot more popular and something that's kind of rolled up in the whole idea of a paleo diet has been this idea of paleo fitness as Well, so the idea that we should be exercising in an evolutionary evolutionarily congruent manner and this has been Becoming more and more popular in the lay press. We've got various books move now crossfit although I'm gonna have to sort of pretend that if the clicker works Okay, pretend I didn't say Crossfit because apparently they're actually suing the NSCA at the moment so pretend I wasn't talking about crossfit just in case this comes back to bite me in the ass So, but anyway, it's been very very popular in terms of the lay press and the academic sphere recently There's been a number of review papers covering the idea that we should be exercising like our evolutionarily evolutionary ancestors we should be exercising in a paleo evolutionary fitness type approach and there's some justification for this If the clicker wants to go There we go, right, and there's some justification for this So if you've read any of the literature or you familiarize yourselves with the works of guys like Lauren Cordain Rob Wolf you tend to see that the same few studies are trotted out over and over and over again to support the idea that hunter-gatherers evolutionary man was fit, robust, healthy, fast, strong Had good body composition, low body fat, good hip to waist ratio, so on and so forth And you get given this very romantic picture of what hunter-gatherers look like now What I wanted to do was actually go back into the literature and look at it with a bit more of a sober perspective A bit more skepticism and see whether or not the whole body of literature actually supported this view Because I didn't necessarily think that this was just all there was to see these are only a few studies So I wanted to go in and see whether or not the whole of the literature actually supported this viewpoint So as I said, I think this is a bit of a romantic view So let's just cover physical activity in general quickly so we all know that physical activity is Beneficial to our health and well-being our fitness and we know that physical activity It protects against all-cause mortality and morbidity in a dose-response type manner So the more we're physically active the more we see a reduction in our risk for all-cause mortality and different morbidities But recently studies have started to question whether or not the volume of activity I how much we're active actually provides the benefits that we think it does and we've started to find that actually the Intensity of effort involved in the activity So how hard the exercise actually is seems to provide a much more powerful benefit So if we're exercising in a more intense manner we tend to see significantly greater reductions in all-cause mortality and survival statistics and This ties up actually as well with studies that show that physical fitness parameters seem to be even stronger predictors of all-cause mortality Health and well-being so for example VO2 max is one of the strongest predictors of cardiac disease morbidity and mortality as well We tend to see that VO2 max is higher in the obese yet metabolically healthier healthy and lower in those who are normal weight But metabolically obese even strength and muscle mass a significant predictors of health and well-being and reduced all-cause mortality So it seems to be that actually what's more important is the intensity of the activity And this is what modern exercise physiology is starting to support So what I wanted to do was actually take some of these concepts and go back and look at the literature Regarding our evolutionary past and what our physical activity patterns were in that evolutionary past So in terms of evolutionary fitness recommendations in general, we're asking the question. What should we do now? Up until now authors have based The answers that question on two other questions. So they've even looked at the evolved traits determining our physical activity Limitations and capacities are asking what can we do? What do we evolve for what adaptations? Do we have that permits to involve ourselves in certain activities and what are the limitations to those activities or? What did we do in terms of what were the physical activity patterns and physical activity levels of extinct and extant hunter-gatherers and This is what most of the literature is based its ideas on So what I wanted to do was go through and actually try and answer those questions in order to provide a quest and answer to the question of What should we be doing in terms of exercise? What does the research actually support? So what this is going to do is provide a synthesis of the modern exercise physiology research with research into evolutionary Physical activity patterns in order to provide an answer of what we should be doing now I just want to provide a bit of a kind of limitation on this because I'm coming at it from the perspective that Physical fitness seems to be a very strong predictor of health and well-being So although yes, there may be other arguments for taking part in certain physical activities for other outcomes I'm going to focus the tool come What's the best way? What should we be doing to actually promote physical fitness because that seems to be one of the strongest predictors of all-cause Mortality and morbidity. I also want to make the point that obviously within our evolutionary past physical activity Was directed towards survival whereas today? We have the luxury that we don't have to be physically active Instead we have to directly engage in exercise in order to achieve these outcomes that we're interested in so I want to differentiate between Physical activity in terms of general and occupational physical activity as opposed to exercise Are you recommendations as to what we should be doing to actually achieve these outcomes? This is gonna slow me down Am I not pressing the button hard enough? There we go, right So the question is what exercise should we be doing? So the outline of the presentation is going to answer the questions of what can we do? What did we do? What should we do and then try and provide some conclusions and recommendations? So in terms of what can we do? I want to look at the activity repertoire that our bodies have actually evolved for What sort of activities can we do now? It doesn't necessarily answer whether we should do them though But some answer to that question will help lead us towards an answer of what should we do? I also want to look at what did we do? So I want to look back into the past at other primate species that extinct hunter-gatherers And at extant hunter-gatherer populations that are still around to see what their physical activity patterns and levels were actually like To try and provide some sort of answer And then finally what I want to do is actually synthesize that with the exercise physiology literature And what that currently suggests in terms of what's best in terms of exercise recommendations Okay, so To start off with them What activity repertoire have we actually evolved and adapted for now? There's a few things we need to keep in mind when we're talking about evolutionary adaptations And I'm going to take some concepts from Dan Liebman here with regards to evolutionary adaptations So what is an adaptation? So in terms of evolution and adaptations a useful feature that's been shaped by natural collection Selection that promotes survival and reproduction So it's important to differentiate between what we mean by physical fitness Which I've been referring to up until now and reproductive fitness So an evolutionary adaptation is something that promotes reproductive fitness But that doesn't necessarily mean that it promotes our physical fitness or our health and our well-being in today's society Physical reproductive fitness is more heavily influenced by a number of other factors. So we're differentiating between adaptations in terms of evolutionary fitness or reproductive fitness and Adaptations that might promote physical fitness Because not all ancestral adaptations are good for us But conversely not all modern adaptations are bad for us. So it's important to keep that in mind as well So what sort of things are we actually evolved for well bipedalism is clearly something that we've adapted for We're all bipedal everyone can stand up if they want to everyone can walk out of the room Heck most people can run if they want to so we've clearly evolved for bipedalism now in a talk I did a few years ago. I actually talked a bit about the emergence of bipedalism So what sort of stages we went through we started off as our boreal quadrupeds We went through a stage where we evolved into more Semi-terrestrial quadrupedalism when we look at great eight locomotive patterns Whereas today we're now habitual bipeds and that was accompanied by a number of different adaptations including changes in the lumber and pelvic structure and Changes in the hip and lumber and hip musculature as well And there are a number of other documented adaptations relating to our ability to be bipedal They include a neutral ligament to keep the head upright when we're moving bipedally We have changes in our morphology for our Achilles tendon providing more elastic energy to help with locomotion And there are a number and a host of other adaptations too many to go through in this in this presentation Now the reasons for us evolving bipedalism are many they involve changes in our environment increased ability to obtain food avoiding predation Increased our cost or reduced our energy savings for cost of transport but not necessarily for running So there were many pressures involved in determining bipedalism as an evolutionary adaptation And as I said a number of adaptive advantages to that so being bipedal meant that we were upright it increased our visual field It reduced our cost to transport which meant that we could walk further throughout the day It also increased our ability to firm and regulate standing upright meant there was more winds that could help reduce our body temperatures We also experienced much less solar radiation as well and obviously standing upright Freeze your hands for tool use as well. So there are a number of advantages for being bipedal. It's clear We have evolved to be pipede bipedal But that doesn't necessarily imply that being pipedal should dictate what types of exercise we should be doing Now our upper body physical capacity has significantly and dramatically altered as well We've obviously lost a lot of the specialization for our boreal type quadrupedalism and our boreal locomotion Now if we look at the capacity in terms of our upper body in early humans, we see that they were typically quite heavily muscled That may be down to the fact that Half dead leavers weren't available at that time So we needed greater physical capacity, but it's very difficult to determine whether or not we were more muscular because of the environment Or whether or not we adapted to be more muscular and you tend to see as well There is a general reduction in the musculature that's coincident with greater tool specialization So as we've gone through our evolutionary history, we've typically lost a lot of our physical capacity But as I said, it's difficult to determine whether that's an evolutionary adaptation Or actually just a reflection of our physical activity patterns A final thing to note in terms of what we've adapted for Our body is highly plastic It tends to respond to the demands that we place on it The capacity that we have broadly matches those demands The body doesn't want to waste anything So unless you place a specific demand on it, it doesn't want to invest resources in actually producing adaptations So in fact, our bodies being a plastic system was an evolutionary adaptation for energy savings in the first place So it's important to realize that we are an adaptive species in terms of our body's plasticity It will respond in a number of ways to the stimuli that it experiences But again, that's quite general It's very difficult to draw recommendations from that Okay, so let's move on then to what were the physical activity patterns in our evolutionary past We know kind of what we're adapted for Bipedal, we're not as muscular as we used to be We're not as specialized in terms of our upper body locomotion abilities We can use tools, we've adapted those types of specializations But it doesn't really tell us a lot in terms of drawing exercise recommendations from that Now, maybe if we look at the physical activity patterns in our evolutionary past We might be able to draw out some specific activities that we did involve ourselves in Or at least how active we were Now typically most studies have looked at the energy expenditure of physical activity And tried to draw recommendations from that So they broadly kind of said, well, extinct and extant hunter-gavroes, they were pretty active So we should be more active Well, that's great But that doesn't give you any specificity in terms of recommendations How should I be more active? Should I run? Should I lift weights? Should I bike? Should I swim? Should I row? It doesn't really provide a lot of information, it just tells you you should be more physically active