The Primal Blueprint (41 page)
Read The Primal Blueprint Online
Authors: Mark Sisson
Chapter Summary
1. Primal Blueprint Exercise Laws:
Mirroring the active lifestyle of Grok is not a complex endeavor requiring the extensive time, money, or specific equipment that Conventional Wisdom suggests. In particular, you can get extremely fit in as little as a few hours a week, provided you exercise strategically with a balance of extensive low-intensity movement, periodic high-intensity, short-duration strength-training sessions, and occasional all-out sprints.
Best results will come when your exercise routine is unstructured and intuitive, and workout choices are aligned with your energy and motivation levels. Always allow for sufficient recovery and pursue goals that are fun and inspiring. Weight-loss goals can succeed by combining Primal eating and frequent low-level exercise (fine-tuning your fat-burning system), with occasional brief, intense strength and sprint sessions (to stimulate an increase in lean muscle and metabolic rate). Novices and elite competitors alike can succeed with the
Primal Blueprint
exercise laws, by focusing on intermittent efforts instead of consistency and blending low-level work with brief, high-intensity efforts in between.
2. Primal Fitness:
Primal Fitness means you have a broad range of skills and attributes (strength, power, speed, endurance—with power-to-weight ratio as a critical benchmark) that allow you to do pretty much whatever you want with a substantial degree of competence and minimal risk of injury. In contrast, narrow, specialized fitness goals are popular today (e.g., for endurance athletes and bodybuilders). These goals often compromise functional fitness and general health. By exercising—and eating—
Primal Blueprint
style, you will develop the unmistakable physique of a well-balanced athlete and eliminate the drawbacks of narrowly focused, overly stressful exercise programs.
3. Organ Reserve:
Leading an active lifestyle and maintaining ample lean muscle mass correlates with optimal organ function and longevity, because your organs must keep up with the physical demands you place upon your body. In contrast, inactivity will accelerate the aging process to the extent that it becomes a greater risk factor than simply getting older.
4. Move Frequently at a Slow Pace:
Two to five hours per week of low-intensity aerobic exercise (heart rate zone of 55 to 75 percent of max heart rate), such as walking, hiking, easy cycling, cardio machines or (if you are fit) jogging offer excellent health benefits, including improved cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and immune function and fat metabolism. In contrast, Chronic Cardio workouts (75 percent of max heart rate and up) can place excessive stress on your system, deplete the body of energy (leading to increased appetite for quick-energy carbohydrates), inhibit fat metabolism, promote overuse injuries, and generally result in a burnout condition. Slowing down workout pace and moving around more in daily life will lead to improved fitness and health.
5. Lift Heavy Things:
Best results in strength training come from a sporadic routine of varied workouts that are brief and intense. These workouts will stimulate the release of adaptive hormones, such as testosterone and human growth hormone, helping improve body composition and delaying the aging process. Exercises should focus on real human movements (lunges, squats, plyometrics, push-ups, pull-ups, and other body weight resistance exercises) instead of isolations on narrow-range-of-motion gym machines. Session difficulty should be aligned with energy and motivation levels: push hard when you feel like it and take it easy or skip workouts when you are tired. With this approach, you will avoid the risk of injury, exhaustion, and burnout that comes from trying to follow a consistent schedule of long-duration workouts several times a week. Complete sessions should last under an hour, with 30 minutes sufficient for most. A mini-session of as little as seven minutes can be extremely beneficial.
6. Sprint Once in a While:
No workout is more Primal than an all-out sprint. Efforts like these fueled human evolution directly in the survival-of-the-fittest paradigm. Today we can enjoy excellent fitness, body composition, and health benefits from intense sprinting, modeling the “use it or lose it” principle. Sprint sessions should be conducted sporadically when energy and motivation levels are high. Intensity is the key—efforts should last between eight and 60 seconds, with complete rest between efforts to ensure maximum performance. Novices can do low-impact options, such as uphill sprints or stationary bicycle sprints.
7. Form and Feet:
Proper form in running and cycling is imperative. For running, the body should always face forward, the center of gravity should be stable, and wasted motion (i.e., side-to-side movement) should be eliminated. For cycling, ensure proper seat height and apply circular force while pedaling at a rapid, efficient cadence of 80 to 100 rpm. Make an effort to minimize bulky shoes that restrict natural foot motion and weaken stabilizing and propulsion muscles. Spend more time barefoot in daily life, and gradually integrate some “barefoot” time into your workouts. Utilize innovative footwear like Vibram FiveFingers or Nike Free to protect feet while simulating a barefoot experience.
The Primal Blueprint Lifestyle Laws
“If You Don’t Snooze, You Lose”
In This Chapter
I detail the five lifestyle laws of the
Primal Blueprint
: Law #6, Get Adequate Sleep; Law #7, Play; Law #8, Get Adequate Sunlight; Law #9, Avoid Stupid Mistakes; and Law #10, Use Your Brain. While Grok’s diet and exercise patterns were clearly major influences in shaping how his (and our) genes evolved, there were other environmental and behavioral forces that were no less important in perfecting the DNA recipe for a healthy, vibrant human being. It would be a mistake for us to underemphasize these other lifestyle habits, because they also play a significant role in whether or not we lose fat, build muscle, and stay focused, energetic, productive, and disease-free.
Law #6, Get Adequate Sleep, delivers obvious benefits but is widely compromised today. Good sleep involves understanding the physiology of sleep cycles, establishing consistent habits, taking advantage of the profound benefits of napping (when you need one), and applying effective time-prioritization skills. Law #7, Play, requires minimal analysis or specific instruction. Again, it’s an obvious but widely neglected lifestyle law that can deliver widespread benefits and make you quantifiably more productive when balanced effectively with work. Law #8, Get Adequate Sunlight, is an area where Conventional Wisdom has let us down, scaring us into avoiding the outdoors due to the misinterpreted risks of skin cancer. Obtaining optimal levels of vitamin D, synthesized from sun exposure on your skin, is critical to cellular health and cancer prevention.
Law #9, Avoid Stupid Mistakes, details how our obsessive desire to control or eliminate all sources of potential danger has made us lazy and inattentive. Cultivating the skills of hypervigilance and risk management is essential to avoid self-inflicted trauma and unnecessary suffering. Law #10, Use Your Brain, may seem counterintuitive to many of us who are hyperstimulated all day long. Actually, the unrelenting pace of modern life and intense pressure to achieve and consume strongly conflict with our genetic makeup and can lead to feelings of restlessness and discontent. Pursuing creative intellectual outlets unrelated to your core daily responsibilities and economic contribution will keep you refreshed and excited about life.
I am two with nature
.
—
Woody Allen
In the hierarchy of the most important ways to get Primal, sometimes sleep gets left in the dust in pursuit of more sexy and intellectually complex efforts such as tracking average daily carbohydrate gram intake or monitoring workout heart rate zones and interval sequences. Yet after all the macronutrients and workout reps are counted, virtually nothing is more critical to the success of your peak performance, weight loss, and longevity goals than getting adequate sleep. Admittedly, it’s one of the most difficult
Primal Blueprint
laws to observe in modern life.
For billions of years, the evolution of nearly all life forms on earth has been driven by the consistent rising and setting of the sun. This circadian rhythm (from Latin:
circa
, meaning “around”; and
dia
, meaning “day”) governs our sleeping and eating patterns as well as the precise timing of important hormone secretions, brain wave patterns, and cellular repair and regeneration based on a 24-hour cycle. When we interfere with our circadian rhythm (via excessive artificial light and digital stimulation after sunset, irregular bed and wake times, jet lag, graveyard shift work, etc.), we disrupt some of the very processes we depend upon to stay healthy, happy, productive, and focused.
Unlike Grok’s dietary and exercise habits—which you can mimic well today by food shopping carefully or finding a smooth neighborhood tree branch for pull-ups—obeying your human circadian rhythm to be active when the sun is up and sleep when it’s dark is a bit more of a hassle. Depending on where you live and the time of year, your efforts to follow a Primal sleep schedule could easily get pinched to the tune of two to eight hours a day. Can you say, “Ain’t gonna happen anytime soon?”
This is not to say you have to turn in at sunset in order to be healthy. For one thing, modernization has substantially lowered our activity level and the overall degree of difficulty of daily life. (I know commuting is tiring, but imagine
walking
home from the office every day!) Experts’ opinions vary on the amount of sleep you need, but the general consensus is that seven to eight hours per night is sufficient for most people, provided the sleep is of high quality (uninterrupted and not influenced by sleep medications, alcohol, or poor food choices)
and
that you observe a consistent pattern of bed and wake times.
During sleep, the recovery and rejuvenation of the muscles, organs, and all the systems of the body are accelerated. This is all guided by the sleep hormone melatonin, which is manufactured in the pineal gland near the center of the brain. As light diminishes,
the pineal starts to convert the feel-good hormone serotonin, which has kept your mood elevated all day (and which is why so many of us take SSRIs—to avoid depleting serotonin), to increasing amounts of melatonin, so that you can get that good night’s sleep. As light increases in the morning, melatonin production is then suppressed and serotonin begins to increase. You wake up happy and refreshed. It is a beautiful balance that allows you to sleep deeply yet helps improve and stabilize your mood during waking hours.
Resting the areas of the brain involved in emotional and social function helps you face the day refreshed. A study from Dr. Sophie Schwartz and colleagues presented at the 2008 Forum of European Neuroscience suggested that getting a good night’s sleep can help the brain “harden up weak memories which otherwise might fade in time.” Other hormones released during sleep, such as human growth hormone, help your body burn fat.
While these and many other perks of quality z-time are obvious to everyone, we are not walking our talk in modern life. A recent study cited by the Harvard School of Public Health found that an increasing percentage of Americans are seriously deficient in sleep (40 percent of Americans get less than five hours of sleep per night), and an incredible 75 percent of us suffer from some form of sleep difficulty each night. Chronic sleep deficit may lead to weight gain by affecting how your body processes and stores carbohydrates and by altering hormones that affect your appetite and metabolism. It can negatively affect your mood, concentration, and memory retention during the day, making you less productive and more irritable, impatient, and moody. Insufficient sleep can also lead to hypertension, elevated stress hormone levels, irregular heartbeat, compromised immune function, and drastically increased risk for obesity and heart disease.
When we look at the prevalence of late-night digital entertainment, insulin-producing dietary indulgences, central nervous system stimulants, and morning alarms knocking us off our waves (be they alpha, beta, delta, or perhaps a vivid dream about paddling out on the North Shore), we must again pause and ask, “What’s going on here?” I’m certainly not immune to the distractions. Even when I’m fatigued after a long week or returning from business travel, I can’t wait to hang out with my wife and kids, watch a DVD, surf the Internet for interesting blog fodder, catch up on some great books stacked at my bedside, and so on. Our natural (or actually I should say, “learned”) inclination to be constantly entertained is difficult to balance with our need for adequate restoration. It’s not until we are truly exhausted that sleep moves up the hierarchy of wants and needs. It shouldn’t have to be that way.
With a sincere dedication to health and balance, you can get away with some occasional departures from your routine with no ill effects. Just as with your dietary choices, if you can observe a consistent bedtime 80 percent of the time (there’s that 80% Rule again), the 20 percent of the time where you stay up late, wake up super early, or otherwise skimp on perfect rest will probably be handled by your body more easily. On the other hand, if you have a habit of disrespecting consistent sleep time habits, you create momentum in the wrong direction and will struggle to achieve basic health and fitness goals.
Get Primal with TiVo? You Bet!
While the admonition to avoid television at night and limit television in general is likely quite familiar to you, the reality is that television is a central component of modern life. (Try 28 hours a week average American viewing time!) This is a good opportunity to put in a plug for the DVR (digital video recorder, like TiVo). When we collapse onto the couch to spend some precious time vegging out in front of the TV, we often fail to discipline ourselves to stick to quality programming and a strictly observed bedtime. We are also forced to endure commercials (accounting for 30 percent of total air-time and with often annoying, in-your-face, repetitive messages) and programming options appealing to the lowest-common-denominator. (A TV Free America study revealed that 54 percent of local news programming is devoted to crime, disaster, and war, not to mention those ridiculous fear-eliciting lead-ins: “Could toxic school playground bark be lowering test scores? Story at 11.”)
The DVR empowers you with incredible freedom and control of your entertainment options, making for a far more enriching and time-efficient television experience. You can zip through commercials, store desired programming for later viewing at your leisure, and even automatically record your favorite shows around the clock. DVR service costs only about 12 extra bucks a month, and most cable and satellite operators will give you the expensive DVR machine for free on a subscription contract.
During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the four-hour prime-time broadcasts that extended to midnight each evening led to headline stories about widespread sleep deprivation across America. For my part, I breezed through the stored broadcasts a day later (psst: the prime-time shebang was delayed half a day anyway), picking and choosing my favorite action with my four-speed fast-forward remote, in about an hour and 20 minutes. I saved loads of time…and didn’t get completely sick of beach volleyball like some regular viewers!