Exercise
Medical Author:
Richard Weil, MEd, CDE
Richard Weil, MEd, CDERichard Weil, MEd, CDE, is an exercise physiologist and Certified Diabetes Educator, and is director of the New York Obesity Research Center Weight Loss Program at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center in Medical Editor:
Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD, Chief Medical Editor
Melissa Conrad Stöppler, MD, Chief Medical EditorMelissa Conrad Stöppler, MD, is a U.S. board-certified Anatomic Pathologist with subspecialty training in the fields of Experimental and Molecular Pathology. Dr. Stöppler's educational background includes a BA with Highest Distinction from the University of Virginia and an MD from the University of North Carolina. She completed residency training in Anatomic Pathology at Georgetown University followed by subspecialty fellowship training in molecular diagnostics and experimental pathology.
Exercise OverviewExercise isn't a new idea. Records of people exercising go back to 1100 B.C., when the Greeks competed in the javelin throw, distance running, archery, and boxing. Hippocrates (460 B.C.-377 B.C.), the father of medicine, wrote that "eating alone will not keep a man well; he must also take exercise." Milo of Croton, in 6 B.C., discovered the Principle of Progressive Overload, in which he carried a calf every day on his shoulders and as it grew into a bull and got heavier, he got stronger (just like adding heavier dumbbells). Skip ahead a thousand years to 1844, when the YMCA was founded and people started to do more formal exercise. Then, in 1896, the first modern Olympic games began, and by the early 1900s, gymnastics was mandatory for all American school children. In the late 1950s, things really picked up; Jack LaLanne had an exercise show on TV and the President's Council on Physical Fitness was created; the 1960s and '70s produced Jackie Sorensen and Jane Fonda exercise videos, Nautilus gyms, Ken Cooper coining the word "aerobics," and the running phenomenon started by George Sheehan, Jim Fixx, and others; and now today we have limitless types of exercise classes, technology built into every cardio machine, and all sorts of contraptions for building muscles. In this article, we'll take a more in-depth look at what exercise is all about. |
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Exercise
History of Running
The conventional thinking among most scholars is that early man (hunter-gatherers) ran in short sprints as a matter of survival—to catch prey and escape danger—but that running, and particularly endurance running, was merely a byproduct of the ability to walk and not a natural part of our evolution. The argument goes that (1) running is less efficient than walking (you burn more calories doing it), and (2) humans are poor sprinters compared to four-legged animals (who run much faster), and so it is concluded that we were never designed, or "born" to run. In evolutionary terms, scientists would say that we were not adapted for running.
But University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble and Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman suggest otherwise. In their research, published in the prestigious journal Nature, they claim that the "roots of running may be as ancient as the origin of the human g...
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