The Exercise Problem

Apple announced their first new product in 10 years last week, the Vision Pro. It is essentially a large pair of goggles that you wear that displays window screens in front of your face that you can manipulate with your hands. The reactions to the new product were mixed. I wrote a thread on Twitter about how it can potentially be a good thing or bad thing depending on how people use. This is the first new product by Apple that is focused on a problem that does not need to be solved. It’s more like a toy than a revolutionary product like the iPhone.

Most likely, this product will be succesful because Apple makes great products and has a loyal customer base. But it just seems that Apple (and the broader tech world) isn’t interested in solving real problems anymore. Take the problem of exercise for example. No one has truly figured out a way to solve the exercise problem yet.

The exercise problem is this. We did not evolve to want to exercise, it was just a necessary part of life for survival.

We have created a society where we do not have to physically move our bodies very much in order to survive. We’ve built an incredibly convenient world. Physical stressors have disappeared. We do not need to hunt for our food, we drive to work and most office work and entertainment is sedentary. We can go through life working and living just sitting down day after day. We can even get really rich doing that. The incentives for moving around aren’t really there anymore.

But that isn’t the world we evolved from, nor have our bodies evolved to live in a sedentary world. We need to move around or else there will be consequences. But we haven’t figured out how to fit moving around in our modern world yet.

What is Exercise?

For nearly every day of their lives, hunter-gatherers, farmers and villagers engage in hours of physical work because they lack cars, machines and other labor saving devices. Their daily existence requires walking many miles and carrying things.

We have become so efficient and automated that farmers today have worse cardiovascular health than non-farmers. City people are healthier today. Which is probably the first time that’s ever occurred in history.

Researchers put trackers on the modern hunter-gatherer tribe called the Hadza. They found that the Hadza are physically moving at pace of what we call exercise at least 90 minutes a day. Everyday. Including moving around all the time doing things. This population also has a low level of cardiovascular disease, including hypertension and optimal levels for biomarkers of cardiovascular health. But these people were not exercising. They are just responding to the needs of their environment. Exercise is something else.

Exercise can be defined as a voluntary, planned, structured physical activity undertaken for the sake of health and fitness. It’s a modern phenomenon. We shouldn’t confuse exercise with physically moving around. We moved around for a variety of reasons. For example, play is an end to itself, it is not exercise. Every animal plays.

moving around is also part of transportation, fighting, building a nest and sex are too. No other animal is exercising. My dog isn’t going outside to run 5 miles and then come back home. He is out exploring or hunting and moving around is a byproduct of that goal. Humans are the only animal that exercises. And exercising at scale started late in the human story.

In Ancient Greece most physical training was done as a means to compete in sport. This meant long training sessions in the gym, located in the city centers, that took months to train and compete at Olympia. Or there was physical training for war. However, they warned that optimizing for sport did not make a great soldier. The few references in history we have to exercise are for ancient elites that had so many servants that they never had to physically move much at all.

How Many People Exercise?

It may seem like a lot of people regularly exercise in America. Television commercials and ads of people working out are everywhere. Gyms are quite common. But that isn’t the case.

Only about 20-30 percent of Americans exercise at even decent government approved intervals. Which is the lowest common denominator. Recent studies show you can exercise 13 hours a week at moderate intensity and still get healthier.

Of that 20-30 percent who actually work out, how many enjoy it? Only Half. The other half do not want to be there. They hate it. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. So now we’re down to 10% of Americans who enjoy exercise for the sake of exercise. Which basically means enjoying exercising can be considered a fetish.

This is a serious problem. It is not trivial. The survey also found that 54 percent of Americans mentally check out of their workouts because they’re so bored. Another 18 percent claim their body is simply on autopilot during their routines.

Who’s fault is it that 90% of people dislike exercising? Is it their fault? I don’t think so. There’s something wrong inherent with the concept of exercise we need to address in order to solve the problem of moving around. The Fitness influencer yelling at you to workout is a symptom of a deeper issue. We haven’t figured out the exercise problem yet at scale.

In This Newsletter

Let’s explore the mismatch between our need for moving around, exercise and modernity. There has to be a way to figure out how we can make something so integral to being a human being hated by less than 90%.

1) Who are the 10% who don’t hate exercising?

2) It’s very important for exercise to be fun or stimulating. Motivation isn’t enough.

3) What technological or social factors can we change to make people exercise more and have them enjoy it or at least tolerate it?

Who Loves Exercising?

It makes sense that most people hate exercise since it is a misalignment from our evolutionary environment. But some people really do enjoy it. Who are some of these 10% of exercise enjoyers? What is their motivation?

1) The Corporate Endurance Athlete

I’ve worked at a number of medium and big companies and there has been a consistent trend throughout: You won’t find many powerlifters in upper management. What you will find is people who love doing cardio and endurance sports like running or bicycling for many, many miles. There are some statistics that back it up.

I understand that reaching to the top means mimicking behaviors or fitting in. That’s part of it. Endurance sports are also convenient since you can do them at any time while having a busy schedule.

But mainly, It takes a lot of consistency to reach the top of a hierarchy. And consistency means doing the same thing day after day and not getting tired of it. It’s not surprise enjoying endurance exercising (running a lot of miles every day) selects for a certain type of person.

Not only does this person have a high tolerance for boredom, but it could be coupled with a high tolerance of pain. They do not mind using a treadmill or doing a triathlon. The history of the treadmill showcases its evolution from a form of punishment to a widely used exercise equipment. They were created in the 19th century. These early treadmills were primarily used for punishment in prisons and workhouses. In these institutions, prisoners and inmates were made to walk or run on the treadmill for hours as a form of hard labor. As for Triathlons…

2) The Bodybuilder

Many young males really enjoy going to the gym because it allows them to build their body to look a certain way. Unfortunately, that certain way only started a little over 100 years ago.

As a young man, I started going to the gym to build muscle to look better. It wasn’t for “health”. It was for show. Later on, I transitioned to Jiu-Jitsu and Muay Thai, and then to other forms of exercise. But if I stayed on the bodybuilding mindset I may have just gotten on various forms of steroids.

Is bodybuilding healthy? It’s certainly better than not moving at all and being sedentary. Absolutely. But skews your image of a lindy healthy body. How functionally strong athletes look like in the absence of steroids. Or just focusing on hypertrophy & muscles for show, not function.

3) The Anti-Aging Warrior

The other exercise lover is the man who fears death. He will force himself to love exercise for the sake of staying on this planet. Death is a tremendous motivator. Especially to a man who has a life he enjoys and is succesful. This type of man is his 50s, or 60s. Some examples include Peter Attia, Bryan Johnson. There is no emphasis on joy or fun. The exercise is deeply serious and must be done.

The focus on metrics almost resembles holy books. Exercise becomes almost religious at that point. And many people who take religious deeply, deeply serious are not playful and fun. You can see it on their faces. I don’t personally want to take this approach to exercising. Life is short. We should try to enjoy it.

I sometimes think about the island with the oldest people in the world and how they just look a little happier just living their lives in the environment instead of being on this mission to exercise to stay alive.

Exercise Needs to be Fun. Motivation Isn’t Enough

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.