Exercise is a big part of life in today’s society. Millions of people voluntarily exercise in some form every day, whether it be to maintain a healthy body weight, to prevent illness, or to live longer. Industrialised societies, however, often ignore, or are unaware of, the evolutionary and anthropological aspects behind exercise. Much of what we are told about physical activity today is inaccurate and exaggerated, such as the common belief that we should all have an innate desire to exercise.
One of the most common misconceptions about exercise has to do with the so-called ‘athletic savage’, and claims that people who lead a primitive lifestyle are much more athletic than other modern-day citizens. These ‘athletic savages’ often seem to be able to run for kilometres on end, climb mountains, and perform other superhuman feats with no difficulty whatsoever. When analysing how and why this belief first came about, we can take the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains in northern Mexico as a useful reference point, and the Tarahumara tribe who live there and are famous for travelling long distances on foot. In the book Born to Run, Christopher McDougal describes the Tarahumara as a healthy population, and says that they are the best runners in the world, who are capable of covering incredible distances barefoot. McDougal also writes that the Tarahumara run simply for the fun of it, but this is not actually the case: the members of this tribe run for very specific reasons, such as religious practices or for purely practical purposes, such as when they have to hunt for food.
The Tarahumara, and all other indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples, spend many hours engaged in physical work, because they have no machines or tools to do the job for them. So, physical activity is a simple necessity rather than a healthy lifestyle choice. When they are not busy foraging for food or cultivating the land, the men and women of these tribes spend most of their time resting, and doing what we now consider to be quite unhealthy, namely sitting or lying down.
The Tarahumara experience the same exhausting effects of their physical activity as marathon runners, but theirs is not the result of a competitive spirit. They are completely unfamiliar with the concept of carrying out physical activity for anything other than practical purposes, and this dispels the belief that we are born to exercise.
