I detail the rationale behind and the benefits of the three Primal Blueprint exercise laws: Law #3, Move Frequently; Law #4, Lift Heavy Things; and Law #5, Sprint Once in a While. Following these laws will enable you to approximate Grok’s active lifestyle and develop a broad and highly functional state of fitness. Primal Blueprint Fitness develops a versatile and diverse set of abilities that allow you to enjoy an active, high-energy lifestyle and to tackle varied athletic challenges safely and competently. The Primal Blueprint exercise laws will also help delay the aging process by preserving lean muscle mass, which correlates with enhanced organ function, a concept known as organ reserve.
I contrast the benefits of Primal Blueprint Fitness with the many drawbacks and health risks associated with conventional wisdom’s fitness recommendations and with the narrow, specialized athletic goals that many people pursue but that are minimally functional and often compromise general health. (Endurance athletes and bodybuilders often fall in this category.) A chronic pattern of slightly-too-difficult workouts promotes carbohydrate dependency, compromises weight-loss efforts, hampers immune and endocrine function, and even elevates disease risks.
Moving more during daily life is a critical, but it’s an often-overlooked element of a total fitness routine. Even fit folks can suffer from the “active couch potato syndrome,” where excessive periods of inactivity (commute, work, digital leisure time) can overwhelm the benefits of regular workouts. Furthermore, there are assorted flexibility/mobility practices like Pilates, tai chi, and yoga, as well as properly conducted stretching exercises, that enhance health, reduce injury risk, and complement focused fitness and athletic goals.
Lifting heavy things entails conducting brief, intense sessions (lasting just 10 to 30 minutes) that build explosive strength, promote the release of anti-aging hormones, and avoid the catabolic effects of prolonged sessions that leave you exhausted and depleted. And few things are more primal than Law #5—run for your life once in a while! Brief, intense sprints (on foot, or other maximum efforts that are low or no impact, such as on the bike or in the pool) trigger optimal hormone balance, lean muscle development, accelerated fat metabolism, and incredible fitness breakthroughs.
I discuss the best strategic approach for conducting workouts for each of the three Primal Blueprint laws, including pointers on form for running and cycling. I also describe the benefits of going barefoot. Specific workout suggestions for strength training and sprinting are provided in the Bonus Material at the end of this book and online at MarksDailyApple.com, including a free downloadable ebook called Primal Blueprint Fitness.
Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.
—Lord Edward Stanley Three-time United Kingdom Prime Minister (1799-1869)
The movements that dictated how our genes evolved were simple: squat, crawl, walk, run, jump, climb, hang, carry, throw, push, pull, a bunch of other actions we probably don’t even have names for, and most of all just moving, plain and simple. This primal “training program” helped Grok survive the rigors of a hostile environment, explore new territories, track and hunt, find and exploit new types of food, build shelters, and basically become exceptionally fit, even ripped, by today’s standards.
Becoming super fit is as simple as blending lots of low-level movement (cardiovascular activity through both structured aerobic workouts and walking around more in daily life, along with complementary flexibility/mobility practices) with intermittent bouts of higher-intensity efforts. There is little need for the incredible complexity of today’s fitness scene—the expensive gym equipment, obsessively detailed and regimented training programs, and fancy contraptions such as cyclometers, GPS units, calorie-burning meters, and body sensors. These gadgets, while possessing a high cool factor, can also lead you astray from the benefits of having a simple, varied, and intuitive approach to exercise.
Unfortunately, commuting, work, digital entertainment, and modern comforts promote prolonged periods of inactivity, hindering our opportunities to obtain even the bare minimum requirements for daily movement. While making a concerted effort to lodge a respectable number of cardio workout hours each week is laudable, it’s not enough to counteract the massive sedentary forces we face. So the directive to “move frequently” involves a multi-tiered approach: conduct your regular cardio workouts, making sure you remain at or below your aerobic maximum heart rate (more on this later); avoid prolonged stillness at all costs by taking brief walks, trying out a standup desk, and adding movement habits like taking stairs instead of elevators, habitually parking at the far end of parking lots, and doing errands on foot; and add complementary movement practices such as Pilates, yoga, tai chi and expert-guided mobility exercises to help you move functionally and safely. (Again, more on this later.)
Pursue challenges that turn you on instead of worrying about what the magazines say is the ‘best’ workout, or the marketing hype that glorifies extreme events.
Beyond the challenges of sedentary modern life, conventional wisdom has brainwashed us to believe that a lean, fit body comes from either lucky genes or following a regimented, overly stressful exercise routine. It’s no wonder that many well-meaning fitness enthusiasts have become either exhausted or totally turned off to getting fit. Millions more stick with flawed approaches that leave them disappointed and discouraged when they fall far short of their ultimate peak performance potential and ideal body composition.
You can get extremely healthy and fit on a few hours a week of basic walking/moving around and comfortable cardio workouts, one abbreviated strength workout a week lasting 10 minutes, another longer strength session of up to 30 minutes, one sprint session every 7 to 10 days (lasting perhaps 15 or 20 minutes, but with only a few minutes of hard effort in total), and regular efforts to integrate flexibility/mobility exercises (perhaps while relaxing in front of the TV at home). That adds up to only a few hours dedicated to exercise out of the 168 at our disposal each week.
Amazingly, you don’t have to endure the fatigue and exhaustion that so many have suffered when following conventional wisdom’s recommendation to adopt a consistent and unnecessarily complex exercise program. You don’t even have to be consistent; in fact, it’s better if you are inconsistent with your workout routine. Heck, the old saying “All you need is a pair of shoes” doesn’t even apply—you don’t even need shoes! (See the “Happy Feet” section later in the chapter.)
Functional fitness, stress/rest balance, anti-aging benefits
If you are currently racking up a dozen or more hours of chronic cardio each week, or hitting the gym most every day for prolonged strength training sessions where you cycle through repeated stations or exercises until you reach failure with high reps and light weights, I encourage you to reframe your perspective from “more is better” to “brief and intense is better.” If you find yourself bouncing off the walls with extra energy because your new primal schedule is too easy, make your hard workouts even harder—not longer or more frequent. Remember, the goal is to trigger optimal gene expression, not fill in all the blanks of your logbook and teeter on the edge of injury and burnout.
Reframe your perspective from “more is better” to “brief and intense is better.”
For those interested in the effects of primal exercise on weight loss, I must first remind you of my critical assertion that 80 percent of your body composition success is determined by how you eat. Reprogramming your genes through dietary modification is the best way to become fat-adapted so you can derive most of your energy from stored (or ingested) fat, instead of the disastrous dynamic in modern life where the population is dependent upon regular feedings of high-carbohydrate meals for energy. When you moderate insulin production and upregulate your fat-burning genes, you will trend toward your ideal body composition over time. The details of your exercise program—what we commonly believe to be the most significant factor in weight-loss success or failure—are actually much less influential than you might think. Reducing excess body fat is predominantly about hormone optimization through a low-insulin-production diet.
“The Myth About Exercise” TIME Magazine cover story details why the oversimplified “calories in, calories out” equation for weight loss is flawed.
Science is now validating the idea that calories burned during exercise minimally contributes to your fat-loss goals; rather, exercise stimulates a commensurate increase in appetite, so you eat more calories when you burn more calories.
When you exercise the Primal Blueprint way, you will indeed fine-tune your fat-burning system, but only if you are also eating right. Your low-level movement—while it doesn’t burn a ton of calories—will greatly enhance your ability to metabolize fat both during exercise and at rest. Meanwhile, brief, intense strength and sprint sessions elevate body temperature and stimulate an increase in fat metabolism, not only during the workout but also for many hours afterward. Eating primally moderates insulin production, boosts fat metabolism, and normalizes appetite. Put everything together and you reprogram your genes to become a fat-burning beast around the clock—the only reliable method for reaching and maintaining your ideal body composition. The primal approach stands in sharp contrast to conventional wisdom’s “calories in, calories out” model where you hope the 600 calories burned during your 50-minute step aerobics class will somehow lead to weight loss. Recall that Kelly Korg ingested nearly double that on her quick visit to Jamba Juice!
With a balanced approach patterned after Grok and designed to promote optimal gene expression, you will develop a broad range of skills and attributes (strength, power, speed, endurance) that allow you to do pretty much whatever you want (or, in Grok’s case, survive the various challenges of primal life) with a substantial degree of competence and minimal risk of injury or burnout.
By breaking free from the cycle of using carbs to fuel stressful, prolonged, sugar-burning chronic cardio workouts, you can easily get into the generally accepted favorable body fat percentage range of 10 to 18 percent for men and 14 to 24 percent for women. This is true no matter who you are or how plump your family tree is. The Primal Blueprint Fitness strategy will not just lower body fat levels but tone your entire body and also give you some noticeable definition in your arms, legs, and core. When you expand your horizons beyond “jogging at a strenuous pace for five songs,” your body will begin to show the effects all over, most notably by correcting the common trouble spots of excess butt, hip, thigh, and abdominal fat.
For the competitor, you can expect to branch out beyond your bread-and-butter skills to become a more complete athlete. Those who rely on bulk to hoist mucho plates or post up under the basket will become leaner and improve their power-to-weight ratio (how strong you are in relation to your body weight). This translates into more pull-ups, a higher vertical leap, and more quickness on your first step. Those who tend to be slight of frame and lacking in raw power will add a bit more muscle and improve pure strength and explosiveness, expanding their repertoire not only to outlast the competition but also to out-power them. And all of us who move frequently will elevate our health and fitness status out of the narrow competency of being able to perform magnificent athletic feats and into the realm of being truly healthy, functional, and poised for longevity.
Power-to-weight ratio is a critical Primal Blueprint Fitness benchmark because it has a strong functional component. A skinny dude like the late Bruce Lee was by reasonable definition more powerful than Hulk Hogan because of having a superior power-to-weight ratio. Decathletes like American Brian Clay (5’11”, 185 pounds; 180cm, 84 kg), 2008 Olympic decathlon gold medalist (and primal/paleo eating enthusiast!), or the remarkable current Olympic champion and world record holder Ashton Eaton (6’1”, 185 pounds; 185 cm, 84 kg), are great examples of balanced all-around performers. The demands on the decathlete to sprint, hurdle, high jump, pole vault, and throw the shot, discus, and javelin at levels respectable to individual event specialists blow away the vein-popping magazine cover models, who might look really impressive but would be seriously outmatched in any sort of athletic contest.
Natursports / Shutterstock.com
NBA Most Valuable Player Stephen Curry displays a wonder of never-before-seen athletic skills on the basketball court. Enjoy the show!
Beyond the reputation that decathletes enjoy for being the greatest all-around athletes in the Olympic realm, basketball stars like Stephen Curry and LeBron James blend an incredible array of skills—speed, endurance, strength, agility, and explosiveness—to perform seemingly superhuman feats. (Ever try a 360-degree slam dunk, even on a low basket? It ain’t easy! I miss occasionally...) The popular CrossFit movement envisages the ultimate athlete as a combination gymnast, power lifter, and sprinter. The ideal exercise practices, and the body that you aspire to build, come down to personal preference within the broad guidelines of the Primal Blueprint. Do the exercises that turn you on the most—in your mind, your heart, and your genes!
P.S. Speaking of the NBA, primal/paleo-style eating is really catching on. Numerous players are now embracing primal habits, including LeBron James, who dropped excess body fat and toned up with a summer-long strict ketogenic eating pattern in 2014. The Los Angeles Lakers have implemented a program overseen by Dr. Cate Shanahan to get players eating primal-aligned meals on road trips. Tim DiFrancesco, Head Strength & Conditioning Coach, inspires Lakers players to train, eat, and even sleep per primal guidelines.
I know you would probably like me to provide a specific, day-by-day workout plan to reach your Primal Blueprint Fitness goals, but the fact is, it is better to make sure your workout decisions align with your energy and motivation levels than to follow a strict schedule. Your most urgent priority is to simply move around more each day—no pressure, no stopwatch, no formality needed. Just avoid prolonged periods of inactivity.
Supplement basic movement with structured cardio sessions, but make absolutely sure that during these workouts you maintain a comfortable heart rate at or below your aerobic maximum of “180 minus age” in beats per minute. (See the sidebar “The Maffetone ‘180 - Age’ Formula” later in this chapter.) Exceeding aerobic maximum heart rate and drifting into chronic exercise patterns is an extremely common mistake among everyone from novices to elite athletes. We’ll spend ample time discussing this important matter to make sure you are comfortable slowing down and building aerobic fitness without compromising your health.
Instead of following a strict schedule, align your workout decisions with your energy and motivation levels.
Perform complementary movement exercises that build flexibility, balance, range of motion, and coordination to support functional movement and prevent injury. Put your muscles under load with strength training sessions once or twice a week, but keep them brief and intense. Sprint once in a while when you are super motivated and energized. Don’t forget to include play as part of your fitness regimen too.
A whimsical, intuitive, unstructured approach to fitness might feel uncomfortable if you are accustomed to flawed conventional wisdom that values consistency, gadgetry, and judging your fitness progress by the obsessive tracking of quantifiable data such as miles covered, calories burned, weights and reps, time in target heart rate zone, or placement in the race. If you have a techie bent and enjoy tracking your fitness output, that’s great. Just remember that your mind and body will thrive with an intuitive approach and likely struggle with a regimented approach.
Grok and his hunter-gatherer pals knew nothing of the superficial silliness that frames the fitness industry today. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors’ motivation to exercise was completely pure: to meet basic needs of food and shelter, to satisfy the innate human desire for adventure, competition, and play, and to explore the boundaries of the human spirit, regardless of what measured results came of it. I urge you to determine the success of your fitness program by how much fun you are having and how much personal growth you experience from striving for your goals. Pursue challenges that turn you on instead of worrying about what the magazines say is the best workout or about the marketing hype that glorifies extreme events, such as the marathon or ironman triathlon as ultimate athletic accomplishments. In my opinion, both are far too difficult for almost all of the entrants and their real life daily responsibilities.
Keep in mind that the benefits of a sensible exercise program extend far beyond competitive success and looking good. The more lean muscle you maintain throughout life, the better your organs will function, up to an obvious point of diminishing returns; for example, a bodybuilder has heaps of excess muscle that serve little or no functional purpose and require a lot of caloric energy to sustain. Optimal organ function correlates with maximum longevity and excellent health.
Organs, like muscles, adhere to the natural law “use it or lose it.” When you hit the deck for 50 pushups, the conscious decision to engage these muscles in a work effort calls your heart, lungs, liver, and other organs into action. Blood chemistry changes as you burn glycogen and fat, process oxygen, and produce metabolic byproducts (e.g., lactic acid) at an accelerated rate. You are asking your organs to keep up with your active lifestyle, in the process strengthening them to better withstand the demands of daily life and the natural aging process.
In contrast, when your activity diminishes, as in the classic paradigm of aging, muscles and organs can atrophy. Their function decreases because they are given no reason to remain at 100-percent efficiency. An unfit person has lower bone density, less lung capacity (the quantity of air you can exchange on each breath), and less stroke volume (the amount of blood your heart pumps with each beat) than a fit person. Today, the aging process should really be called the “process of physical decline largely due to inactivity and lifestyle habits that result in mismanaged genes.”
My ability to perform an extreme and narrow fitness feat like run a 2:18 marathon is gone, but my more balanced fitness regimen today promotes organ reserve and longevity.
Because all of your organs and body systems work synergistically, you are vulnerable to your weakest link. For example, an unfit accident victim or a surgery patient who loses excessive blood and has a heart operating at only 45 percent of potential capacity will often fare differently than a fit person with superior heart function suffering the same trauma. Bones break more easily among the unfit. Pneumonia is a common cause of death among the elderly due to the inability of their weakened lungs to help clear the germ-laden mucus effectively through coughing. When you keep your muscles fit throughout life, your organs come along for the ride. Yes, chronological aging will eventually cause your muscles and organs to wear out after 120 years or so, but this seems like a more appealing process than the distorted one that prevails today. Use it or lose it!
Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.
—Thomas Jefferson
In a modern world with tremendous momentum toward sedentary living (how’s that for an oxymoron that’s actually true?), honoring Law #3 requires the three-pronged approach of moving more in daily life, conducting cardio workouts at aerobic heart rates, and performing complementary flexibility/mobility exercises. Devoted fitness enthusiasts tend to fixate on the accumulation of impressive and prolonged structured workouts, but the truth is that short-duration activity sessions really do add up and make a significant contribution to your aerobic conditioning and overall health. Grok and company didn’t worry about issues like coordination, range of motion, and flexibility because their regular everyday movements would have supported these areas of functionality. Today, most of us are woefully deficient in frequent, varied movement and spend excessive time sitting still. When we do get moving, it’s often a narrow activity like running or moving through a sequence of weight machines. This makes flexibility/exercises a critical element of law #3.
If you can manage truly active days, a single long hike on the weekend, and a few shorter walks or cardio machine sessions during the week, and you complement those with a fairly small amount of time devoted to complementary movement practices, you will dramatically reduce your risk of heart disease (in comparison to being sedentary), support efficient metabolism, better control your weight, and, in conjunction with the strength and sprint workouts, achieve the broad athletic competency that characterizes Primal Blueprint Fitness.
As you broaden your perspective about fitness, your top priority is to find more ways to move. No matter how deskbound your job is, you can make some inroads in this area. How about taking phone calls or conducting in-person meetings on the move? How about climbing a couple flights of stairs to deliver a message to your coworker in person instead of phoning? If you take your kids to the playground, don’t just park yourself on a bench, get up and walk around the perimeter or, better yet, get out there and play with them (and fulfill Primal Law #7 at the same time!). Walk your dog every day—he lives for it! When you watch a TV show, get up and do some air squats during the commercials. (Does anyone watch commercials anymore?) It doesn’t really matter what you do, as long as you are moving frequently and in a varied manner to stimulate different muscle groups.
One reason we might not move more during the day is that the modern workplace culture equates being productive with being glued to a task, grinding away for hours at a time without a break. Plenty of science validates that cognitive function is improved when you take frequent breaks from tasks requiring stationary concentration. This is why casino card dealers work under high-pressure circumstances for 40 minutes followed by 20-minute breaks, repeated throughout their 8-hour shift. The harder you work—and I mean delivering either physical or mental effort—the more important it is to break from peak cognitive focus for some gentle movement. If you are a physical laborer, your breaks might be to stretch and move your body in different ways, including compensatory movements if you do a repetitive task.
The specifics of expert recommendations vary on this subject, but it’s safe to say that for every 2 to 3 hours of peak cognitive focus, you need 15 to 20 minutes of devoted break time. Ideally these breaks will involve deliberate movement or even light exercise (such as the kind I will present shortly in the complementary movement section), as well as sunlight or fresh air. If you work at a desk job, I also strongly encourage you to integrate a standup experience into your workday. You don’t need to invest in an expensive rig (although those are great if you can afford them). If you just elevate your computer keyboard and monitor on some boxes, you are in business. You may not be able to go for long periods at first, so feel free to lower back down to sitting position and just strive for variation of any form during your work day. Nutritious Movement™ expert Katy Bowman and I present a comprehensive multimedia educational program on the topic of standup desks and creating variation in your workplace called Don’t Just Sit There that you can find at PrimalBlueprint.com.
I truly believe that simply introducing more general movement throughout the day in 5-, 10-, or 15-minute increments is one of the greatest changes you can make for your overall health and fitness. Walking is the most obvious choice, but you can also count stretching, calisthenics, a yoga sun salute or tai chi sequence, ascending and descending stairs, pedaling a lonely stationary bike for a few minutes, throwing down some breakdancing skills in the lunch room, and whatever else you fancy to get your body out of stagnant, inactive patterns and into activity and variation patterns. Making a commitment to moving more will improve musculoskeletal health, increase fat burning, help regulate appetite hormones, improve attention and mood, and fight fatigue. This is a crucial even for those of you who consider yourself already active but who nevertheless spend many hours a day sitting still. Plain and simple, being sedentary for long periods wreaks havoc on your body, even if you start your day with a five-mile run or end it with 50 laps in the pool. Sure, Grok probably spent considerable time lounging around conserving energy, but he certainly never spent eight hours in a chair, hunched over his keyboard with terrible posture.
My Focal standing desk with special pogo-stick-style Mogo seat allows me to alternate from standing (notice the cool pebble mat for a nature texture on my feet) to getting a little support from the seat. The decades-long tightness in my hip flexors was significantly alleviated after only a few weeks of using this set-up.
You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She’s 97 today and we don’t know where the hell she is.
—Ellen DeGeneres
While frequent everyday movement should be a priority throughout your day, it is also important to log some time doing deliberate cardiovascular workouts at a comfortable pace. For those heavily indoctrinated into the conventional wisdom that medium-to-difficult-intensity cardio is the path to health, fitness, and weight control, consider again the premise of the Primal Blueprint. It’s clear that our ancestors were lean, strong, and extremely active, and they were most certainly capable of running long distances at a respectable pace similar to today’s gung-ho endurance athletes. However, our ancestors did this very rarely, because the risks of failure were so severe. Imagine Grok chasing some game animal all-out for a few hours in the hot desert sun and—oops—not succeeding in killing it. He’s squandered valuable energy reserves (increasing glucose metabolism by a factor of 10) yet has no food to replace that energy. He has suddenly become some other animal’s potential prey because he is physically exhausted. Instead, it’s more likely that Grok relied on superior tracking ability (using his highly evolved brain) and walking or slow jogging (using his superior fat-burning system), rather than literally chasing down his prey.
I’m particularly concerned about the vast numbers of fitness enthusiasts in the gyms and on the roads who generally take their pace to slightly uncomfortable in order to get that sensation of “getting a workout” and experiencing that invigorating pulse of stress hormones—the endorphin high—upon completion.
It’s important to acknowledge the addictive nature of the so-called runners high or endorphin rush that happens when you trigger the fight or flight response from prolonged vigorous workouts. When you push your body beyond a comfortable aerobic endurance effort, you stimulate the release of assorted feel-good hormones and neurotransmitters like cortisol, dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, and norepinephrine—the cocktail recipe for the endorphin rush. This is a genetically hard-wired mechanism to support survival by dulling sensations of fatigue and pain when you are immersed in what’s perceived to be a life-or-death effort.
When these powerful chemicals linger in your bloodstream after that vigorous long-distance run, hike, or bike ride, you experience a state of bliss akin to the effects of prescription painkillers. Remember, the term endorphin literally means endogenous (internally manufactured) morphine. Slowing down to promote aerobic fitness and protect health requires you use some significant restraint and let go of the instant gratification provided by the endorphin rush.
A key factor in promoting optimum health according to the Primal Blueprint is to make sure that you conduct the vast majority of your cardiovascular workouts at or below your maximum aerobic heart rate. Your maximum aerobic heart rate is the point where you reap maximum aerobic benefits (i.e., maximum fat burning) with a minimum amount of anaerobic stimulation. Don’t confuse aerobic maximum with your absolute maximum heart rate, which is the fastest your heart can pump when delivering a brief, all-out effort; aerobic maximum is considerably lower than absolute maximum. If you increase your effort beyond aerobic maximum heart rate, you start burning an increasing percentage of glucose instead of fat, and you stimulate more stress hormone production due to the difficulty of the effort.
Your maximum aerobic heart rate can be calculated using Dr. Phil Maffetone’s simple formula of “180 minus age” to identify the upper limit, in beats per minute, to achieve an aerobic workout. For example, a 44-year-old exerciser would conduct aerobic workouts at a heart rate of 136 or below. Aerobic (meaning literally, “with oxygen”) exercise is comfortable and energizing, and it improves your ability to burn fat both during exercise and at rest. During properly paced aerobic workouts, your heart and other energy systems work a little harder to handle the extra fuel and oxygen delivery demands, but not so much that you are physiologically overstressed. The specific biochemical signals created by this low-level aerobic activity produce numerous health and fitness benefits as follows:
Improved Fat Metabolism: You train your body to efficiently utilize free fatty acids for fuel, a benefit that is realized 24 hours a day, with a higher metabolic rate and a preference for fat over glucose (provided you eat primally). Low-level aerobic exercise also helps balance blood glucose levels and regulate appetite.
Improved Cardiovascular Function: You increase your capillary network (blood vessels that supply the muscle cells with fuel and oxygen), improve the functionality of your muscle mitochondria and also manufacture additional mitochondria (the “energy powerhouses” of the cell), increase the stroke volume of your heart (more blood pumped with each beat), and also improve oxygen delivery by your lungs.
Improved Musculoskeletal System: You strengthen your bones, joints, and connective tissue so you can absorb increasing stress loads without breaking down. This is critical to your ability to perform and recover from your high-intensity primal strength and sprint sessions.
Stronger Immune System: You enhance the function of your immune system by stimulating beneficial hormone secretions and by building a more efficient circulatory system.
Increased Energy: You finish workouts feeling energized and refreshed, rather than slightly fatigued and depleted (as you typically do when you follow a chronic cardio schedule of moderate-to-difficult-intensity workouts conducted too frequently).
Those with competitive endurance goals might not be satisfied to putter along exclusively at a slow pace and believe they can take down the competition with that approach. And it’s true that intense workouts that approximate the challenge of your competitive goals deliver outstanding fitness benefits. However, whether you are a casual fitness enthusiast or an elite athlete, you must establish a strong base of low-level aerobic conditioning before you can actually benefit from stressful, higher-intensity workouts. The tertiary benefits of low-level work (better balance, strong postural muscles, increased mitochondrial development and capillary profusion, and strengthening of bones, tendons, and ligaments to prevent injury) might not be as readily apparent as the direct competitive application of beating your personal record at a time trial, but one cannot happen without the other.
This concept of “base first, then intensity” has been proven successful by the training regimens of the world’s greatest endurance athletes of the last 50 years, beginning with the pioneering work of New Zealand running coach Arthur Lydiard. Lydiard’s prize students, including 1960 and 1964 Olympic track gold medalist Peter Snell (today one of the world’s leading exercise physiologists), showed that long-duration, low-intensity training, coupled with intense interval training and adequate rest (rest was another far-out concept for the ’60s), could lead directly to Olympic gold medals and world records at races as short as 800 meters (which last less than two minutes).
When I completed my career as an elite marathoner and triathlete and transitioned into a career as a personal trainer, my training regimen shifted dramatically. I was still out there moving for several hours a day, but I went from busting my brains out with super-fit training partners to moseying along with a succession of clients on my daily calendar. Unlike many of today’s fitness trainers who stand there and count reps, I got outside with my unfit to moderately fit clients and did their workouts with them. Bike rides that I previously hammered at 20-plus mph for hours were now conducted at 13 mph. The long, hard trail runs of my marathon days were replaced with easy jogs where my heart rate barely exceeded 100 beats per minute (only 50 percent of my max). With a young family and a career filling my days, I rarely had time to do my own specific workouts. I made the most of what free time I had by conducting short, extremely intense interval sessions once or twice a week—on cardio equipment like my beloved VersaClimber or running a few quick repeats around the track. Usually these sessions lasted around 20 minutes until my next client came strolling in.
When I jumped into the occasional long- or ultra-distance endurance race, the results were shocking to me. My “by chance” regimen of very, very slow workouts coupled with occasional very short, intense workouts was effective beyond my wildest dreams. I was able to place among the top competitors in the world in my age group and very close to the standards set by top professionals of that era. Indeed, the Primal Blueprint parameters literally took shape in my mind as I blew by my rivals (who were putting in big chronic cardio miles, just like I used to) despite what most experts and prevailing conventional wisdom would have deemed ridiculously inadequate preparation.
If you try out this aerobic base building and almost certainly have to slow down significantly to stay in your aerobic heart rate zone, try not to become frustrated at your leisurely pace or to feel that you’re not really benefitting from the workouts because the effort feels much easier than what you are used to doing. It’s important to understand that the efficiency of your aerobic system—your ability to burn fat during sustained exercise—is by far the most important predictor of performance.
Building a strong aerobic base gives you a higher platform from which to launch all competitive efforts that extend beyond your aerobic maximum and into the higher heart rate zones. For example, if you can run 9-minute miles comfortably at aerobic heart rates, you may be able to drop to a 7:30 per-mile pace in a competitive effort. What’s more, when you are delivering a maximum competitive effort anywhere from a few minutes up to the all-day ultraendurance events, most of your energy production comes from your aerobic system because it is completely engaged, in addition to the anaerobic energy production that happens when your heart rate elevates. Dr. Maffetone asserts that a competitive effort of two hours is 99 percent aerobic, and only 1 percent anaerobic—a concept that is confirmed in exercise physiology texts.
When you have the patience and discipline to keep your workouts aerobic for months and months, you will experience a gradual and steady improvement in your aerobic function—you’ll go faster (running, pedaling, rowing, or whatever) at the same maximum aerobic heart rate.
Emphasizing aerobically paced exercise not only makes you go faster, it’s healthier. Your body burns fat much more cleanly than it burns glucose. Glucose is the quickest and easiest fuel to burn, but it burns dirty—producing more free radicals and causing oxidative damage in your body. When you burn fat—by exercising at a slower pace and eating the right foods—you utilize oxygen and mitochondria to minimize oxidative damage.
Becoming aerobically efficient is like having a powerful, clean-burning solar power plant for your energy needs. Being aerobically deficient and carbohydrate dependent is like operating with a dilapidated coal power plant, spewing smoke and generating inflammation and free radicals.
A high-carb diet and a high-stress exercise program results in “dirty” energy production: carbohydrate dependency, oxidative damage, inflammation, and accelerated aging.
Eating primally and exercising aerobically makes you fat-adapted: clean-burning energy thanks to enhanced mitochondrial function.
Doing cardio workouts at 180 minus age or below often requires a significant adjustment in mindset to reject the “no pain, no gain” mentality toward workouts. You should feel very comfortable at this heart rate and embrace a rhythm of workouts that are not strenuous or stressful. At 180 minus age heart rate, you can easily converse without getting short of breath, and you finish feeling refreshed and energized instead of slightly fatigued and hungry, as you might after more strenuous workouts.
Because it’s so easy to exceed maximum aerobic heart rate without feeling any strain, it’s absolutely essential to use a wireless heart rate monitor. This dude is jeopardizing a promising modeling career with his chronic cardio ways generating oxidative damage, and eventually wrinkles...
Because the 180 minus age level is so comfortable, it’s critical to monitor your heart rate during workouts with a wireless chest strap and watch. You simply cannot trust perceived exertion to keep you aerobic, because you don’t really feel any significant strain even as you drift 5, 10, or 15 beats above your aerobic maximum. Many people find when they first start conducting cardiovascular workouts at or below their aerobic max that they have to go considerably more slowly than they had been. Rest assured that this is normal. If you discipline yourself to slow down accordingly, you will progress steadily over time. Your progress can be tracked by conducting the Maximum Aerobic Function (MAF) test frequently—I’ll detail this shortly.
THE MAFFETONE “180 - AGE” FORMULA
Quantifying maximum aerobic heart rate (defined as the point where maximum aerobic benefits occur with a minimal amount of anaerobic stimulation) is not an exact science, and there is a range of opinion on the matter from leading exercise physiologists, coaches, and elite athletes. Some believe that max aerobic heart rate correlates with a laboratory-defined state called ventilatory threshold (VT), a point where increased effort would cause a non-linear spike in ventilation, glucose metabolism, lactate accumulation, fight or flight hormone release, and the recruitment of oxidative fast-twitch (type IIa) muscle fibers. VT studies suggest this occurs in well-trained athletes at around 77 percent of maximum heart rate, and around 75 percent of max in lesser-trained athletes.
After extensive research on the matter, the Primal Blueprint position is to strongly support Dr. Phil Maffetone’s “180 minus age = maximum aerobic heart rate” formula. The Maffetone formula has been field tested by thousands of athletes over decades, can be calculated without laboratory testing and without needing an accurate maximum heart rate value, and is on the conservative side in comparison to the VT calculations Training with a conservative number still supports excellent aerobic development and lessens the risk of the disastrous chronic cardio patterns that occur when one routinely exceeds aerobic maximum.
Keep in mind that as you improve your fitness, your speed at maximum aerobic heart rate will improve, but there is never a justification to increase your maximum aerobic heart rate beyond your 180 minus age calculation. What this means is that while a fitter athlete performs at a higher level than a novice at the same heart rate, the relative difficulty of the workout is similar with all exercisers. It feels comfortable!
The Maffetone formula offers some adjustment factors to the calculation based on your current state of health and fitness. Take 180 minus your age as your baseline number, and then adjust it accordingly if appropriate:
1. Subtract 10: Recovering from illness, surgery, or disease, or taking regular medication.
2. Subtract 5: Recent injury or regression in training, get more than two colds annually, allergies, asthma, inconsistent training, or recently returning to training.
3. No Adjustment: Training consistently (4x/week) for two years, free from aforementioned problems.
4. Add 5: Successful training for two years or more, success in competition.
Regarding the low end of the aerobic zone, it’s really nothing with which to concern yourself. Even a leisurely walk is delivering a training effect that will make a significant positive contribution to your overall aerobic conditioning.
The best thing about heart rate training is that it individualizes your experience to ensure you get an optimal workout. This critical “individual” element—one that can make or break your entire exercise program—has long been ignored by group class instructors and social groups working out together. Generally speaking, asking a class or group of workout partners to keep pace together is a recipe for failure for all but the fittest members of the group. As a final note, occasionally exceeding 180 minus age when you feel great and want to really go for it is just fine—as long as you adhere to a pattern of mostly aerobically paced workouts and you get adequate rest and recovery after occasional challenging workouts or races.
In contrast to the comprehensive benefits of frequent, comfortably paced exercise, getting more serious about working out can really mess you up if you have a flawed approach. Conducting cardiovascular workouts that are too hard (above maximum aerobic heart rate), last too long, and are done too frequently with insufficient recovery between them adds up to a disastrous pattern I call “chronic cardio.” I’d estimate that the vast majority of folks you see working out on cardio machines, jogging through the neighborhood, or keeping pace in the group class are exceeding 180 minus age (often by a wide margin) for the duration of nearly every session.
While a workout that exceeds 180 minus age by 5, 10, or 15 beats might not feel at all difficult at the time, a sustained pattern of chronic cardio—even when you are just a few beats over your aerobic maximum—can lead to numerous problems with metabolism, physiological stress management, immune function, and general health. A routine of chronic cardio requires large amounts of dietary carbohydrates each day to support it. While the risks of excess fat storage and hyperinsulinemia (overproduction of insulin) are moderated somewhat by a heavy exercise schedule, they are still significant because you are teaching your body to prefer glucose for fuel, not only during workouts but around the clock. (More on this topic shortly.) Chronic exercise patterns are also believed to promote increased laziness throughout the day, both consciously (“Hey I did my workout, I think I’ll just drive the half-mile to the mailbox.”) and subconsciously, where you tend to be less active and burn fewer calories as a reaction to the stress of chronic cardio.
The real kicker is that for all your hard work, chronic cardio is unlikely to actually help you lose weight. Fat burns well in the presence of oxygen (i.e., when you are in your aerobic zone), but as exercise intensity increases, your body’s preferred fuel choice shifts from primarily fat at lower intensities—at heart rates up to 180 minus age—to an ever-increasing percentage of glucose, which is quicker and easier to burn when oxygen is lacking due to your quickening pace. Workouts have a powerful effect on your metabolic function at rest, so burning sugar during workouts teaches your body to prefer burning sugar at rest. Furthermore, when you frequently deplete your energy reserves with a pattern of chronic workouts, your brain learns to overeat, especially quick-energy carbs, as a genetically programmed survival adaptation against the life-or-death risks of starvation or depletion of physical energy. If you are looking to reduce body fat primarily through vigorous cardiovascular exercise (as conventional wisdom recommends), you are quite likely to fail unless you slow down your pace and alter your diet to limit your carb intake.
Group energy, pumping music, and vigorous effort can yield an endorphin buzz and a sense of accomplishment, but a chronic cardio pattern can destroy your health. Just you wait, she’ll get wrinkles like the dude on page 335
Chronic cardio—a program I followed for nearly 20 years as a marathoner and later as an ironman triathlete—is bad for your health, period.
Besides the weight-loss issues, chronic cardio increases the production of the prominent fight or flight hormone cortisol. Cortisol is great in short bursts to elevate your physical and cognitive function per your hard-wired fight or flight response. When you engage in chronic cardio, you call upon the fight or flight response too frequently and for workouts that are too long in duration. When cortisol is chronically elevated, you break down hard-earned muscle tissue, suppress immune function, suppress key anabolic hormones such as testosterone and human growth hormone, promote sugar cravings and fat storage as previously mentioned, and ultimately head down the road to fatigue, illness, injury, and burnout.
Over the long run, chronic cardio increases systemic inflammation in the body, leading to elevated disease risk, increased oxidative damage, and accelerated aging. Realize that inflammation is the body’s response to a stressor; again, great in the short term and destructive in the long term. It’s ironic that many people in their forties and fifties start engaging in chronic-style marathon or triathlon training in hopes of improving health and delaying the aging process when, quite often, it has the exact opposite effect.
CHRONIC CARDIO DRAWBACKS—POCKET REFERENCE
Strike this pose in yoga class—okay. Strike this pose after routine training session—not okay.
A consistent schedule of frequent, sustained, medium-to-difficult-intensity (above your 180 minus age aerobic maximum) workouts can overstress the body and lead to these negative consequences:
Hormone Imbalance: Chronic cardio causes a prolonged elevation of cortisol and other stress hormones and a corresponding suppression of testosterone and growth hormone. This compromises optimal fat burning and muscle development, and suppresses immune function and sex drive. When cortisol and other fight or flight hormones are stimulated too frequently, the end result is burnout. Yes, you get the “runners high” when cortisol, dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine and the other powerful endorphin rush chemicals are flowing through your bloodstream, but chasing this high too often will lead to burnout.
Injuries: Recurring muscle fatigue, repetitive impact, restrictive footwear, and inflammation from excessive catabolic hormones released in response to chronic cardio traumatizes joints and connective tissue.
Metabolism: Burning more sugar (while exercising above a heart rate of 180 minus age) leads to eating more sugar leads to producing more insulin leads to storing more fat.
Stress: Excessive and prolonged stimulation of the fight or flight response increases systemic inflammation and oxidative damage, compromises immune function, increases disease risk, and accelerates aging.
One Trick Pony: Chronic cardio compromises development of power, speed, strength, and lean mass, and leads to muscle imbalances and inflexibility. Total fitness is sacrificed in favor of narrow, minimally functional aerobic endurance.
I am fully aware of the many loud and passionate voices extolling the psychological and lifestyle virtues of devoted endurance training, and I agree that pushing and challenging your body with inspiring competitive goals supports mental, emotional, and also physical health (albeit with the significant caveats already discussed). An exercise physiologist friend of mine countered my “case against cardio” position recently by reminding me that Hawaii Ironman finishers are vastly healthier than the average population. While true, let us not forget, in the words of Jay Leno, the “average” we are dealing with: “Today there are more overweight people in America than average-weight people. So overweight people are now average. Which means you’ve met your New Year’s resolution.”
Furthermore, I’ll assert that an old has-been like myself (goals: eat primally, with no processed carbs; nail a couple brief, intense strength workouts each week, in the gym or outdoors; conduct one all-out sprint workout per week; and hang with the young guns for a two-hour Ultimate Frisbee match on weekends) possesses superior health and total body fitness to one-dimensional, routinely overstressed physical specimens that strut in their Speedos down the main drag of Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, every October during Ironman week. Seriously, they really do strut around shirtless and in Speedos. There is even a very popular annual “Underpants Run” before the Ironman that started as a parody of the unchecked Speedo scene in Kailua-Kona.
Back in the day I was good for one thing: endurance. Ask me to do a few deadlifts or dig a hole (to install a ladder to wash basement windows perhaps?) and I was headed for delayed onset muscle soreness. Today, even with a few decades of aging (check that hair color—still blond, right? Right?), I’m fitter by every possible measure except the finish line clock at an endurance race.
If you start to feel good during a marathon, don’t worry, that will pass.
—Don Kardong
U.S. Olympic marathoner and author
Yes, today’s ironmen can dispose of me in short order in a long-distance swimming, cycling, or running race (it would’ve been a different story back in the day, but I digress...), but their endurance superiority comes at great cost. Collectively, they tend to suffer from recurring fatigue and adrenal burnout, frequent overuse injuries, frequent minor illnesses from suppressed immune function (I get a cold maybe once every five years; a fair number of ironman triathletes get five every year), and, last but certainly not least, high overall life stress scores—something often touted as the number one heart attack risk factor.
Having spent many years immersed in the type A community of driven fitness enthusiasts and competitive endurance athletes, I am aware that many heads will nod in agreement with my message—and then turn around and plug along with their familiar exhausting training regimens. If serious exercise is a centerpiece of your life, I don’t wish to deprive you of your passion. That’s right, go ahead and hammer that 3-hour group ride or that 10-mile trail run with the big boys and girls, but only do these things once in a while. This will produce far superior fitness benefits and eliminate the risk factors of repeating highly stressful workouts too frequently.
The various sedentary elements of modern life, especially folding into a sitting position for hours on end, cause an assortment of both minor and serious health problems: musculoskeletal weaknesses and imbalances, hormone dysregulation (especially relating to fat metabolism—sitting promotes insulin resistance), diminished cognitive function, chronic pain and obesity, and even distortion in the shapes of cells and tissues that have been squooshed and immobile too frequently. These problems can be partially—even largely—addressed by increasing everyday movement in assorted ways. However, because our sedentary tendencies are so severe, and because when we do exercise it is often in narrowly-focused, chronic patterns, we can greatly benefit from exercises specifically designed to improve balance, flexibility, coordination, and range of motion in problem areas like the neck, upper and lower back, hip flexors, hamstrings, and calves.
Dr. Kelly Starrett, former elite athlete turned physical therapist, Cross-Fit superstar, and author of the best-seller Becoming a Supple Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance, is a fervent advocate of mobility exercises to improve functional health. Mobility exercises are similar to stretching, but instead of involving only muscles, they also target the tendons, ligaments, and fascia that support the entire musculoskeletal system. One of my favorite mobility exercises is to do a handful of mini-lunges—great for counteracting the shortening of the hip flexors caused by sitting for long periods.
A big difference between mobility work and traditional stretching is that mobility stretches are generally held for two minutes (or even longer—Dr. Starrett likes to put his CrossFit athletes through a 10-minute squat test!). Holding positions for a while help identify areas of weakness or imbalance. If you find yourself shaking or aching in the lower back or the calves when trying to hold a deep squat, you can work diligently to make those problem areas more mobile and durable.
As always, performing a static stretch on a cold muscle is not recommended, so brief cardiovascular warmups are advised before getting into any serious mobility work. You can also tack mobility work onto the end of a cardio or strength workout when you are nice and warm and loose. Dr. Starrett has an extensive series of mobility WODs (workouts of the day) posted on YouTube that you can check out.
Practices like yoga and Pilates also develop mobility and flexibility, with the added benefit of strengthening a variety of muscles, notably the core. Core strength is essential to maintaining proper posture, which in turn helps circulation and breathing, relieves back and neck pain, supports your joints, and protects against muscle injuries. Yoga and Pilates also have meditative elements; participants focus on breathing and promoting calmness, which can contribute to emotional and mental wellbeing and counteract the stress that pervades modern life. Tai chi and qigong similarly focus on breathing and slow, deliberate movement involving the whole body and can confer both physical and mental benefits as well.
The more you sit—or on the other end of the spectrum, the more you perform repetitive movement exercise like running—the more important it is that you add complementary movement practices into your routine. Mobility work helps develop proper alignment and strengthens small stabilization muscles and connective tissues. For endurance athletes, attention to complementary movement practices helps preserve good technique even as you fatigue from sustained effort. You may have run plenty of miles in preparation for a marathon race, but if your hip flexors blow out at mile 20 (thanks to your sedentary patterns outside of workouts and insufficient mobility workouts), all that conditioning can go to waste because of your inability to exhibit efficient technique down the home stretch.
Preserving form under fatigue is a critical performance marker that is often overlooked in the quest to accumulate as much volume as possible in your desired sport. Experts like Dr. Starrett also recommend adding self-myofascial release (deep tissue massage) using foam rollers, lacrosse balls, or other tools to help relax muscles, improve range of motion, and reduce post-workout soreness. Spending a few minutes “rolling out” at the end of a busy day or after a tough workout helps stimulate the calming, relaxing parasympathetic nervous system. Yes, even when you get in there deep and get that good hurt going! Self-myofascial release is a great way to speed recovery and help you unwind to facilitate a good night’s sleep.
I recommend performing some basic stretching and mobility exercises daily. For example, when you take that 15-minute break and walk away from your computer, walk a bit to warm up and then choose a couple exercises that counterbalance the muscles that have been contracting and shortening while sitting at your desk. For example, in the Don’t Just Sit There book and video series, Katy Bowman demonstrates exercises like “wall angels” and “pelvic slides” to regain mobility in the muscles and joints especially traumatized by prolonged sitting.
Formal practices like yoga and Pilates are a wonderful to obtain expert guidance and comprehensive, long-duration sessions that are difficult to do on your own. Keep in mind that it’s possible to overdo it even with yoga or Pilates and drift into a chronic pattern. Hitting that sunrise power yoga class five days a week can be an invigorating and addicting way to start your days, but it can qualify as chronic cardio due to the difficulty of the sessions and insufficient recovery between them. Resolve to move more in ways that are fun and invigorating for you. Don’t worry if you only have five minutes to spare—every little bit counts when it comes to battling against our high-tech, increasingly inactive lifestyles.
Due to the sedentary elements of modern life, we can surely benefit from sensible stretching practices that help us transition from an inactive state to activity (e.g., a workout in the morning or after a long sedentary period), prepare us for and protect against injury before intense activity, and finally to help the body return gracefully to a rested state after a vigorous workout. That said, a flawed approach to stretching can compromise performance and recovery, and actually increase injury risk. Here are some recommendations for effective stretching:
Dynamic Stretches: Stretching while moving your muscles through an intended range of motion, such as the series of running warmup/technique drills pictured on page 358.
Functional, Full-body Stretches: Examples include the Grok Hang and the Grok Squat detailed in the coming sidebar. Here, simply elongating or compressing your body through natural range of motion, such as lowering to the ground for a squat or hanging from a bar, provides a safe and effective stretch.
Post-workout Static Stretches: The best time for static stretches isolating certain muscle groups is after a vigorous workout when you are warm and loose, and may need to work through some tightness that developed as a consequence of your effort.
What you want to particularly guard against is doing static stretches to cold muscles, especially where you apply extra force. A classic example is the hurdlers stretch where your rest a straightened leg on an elevated surface and apply downward pressure to stretch the hamstring. Recent research suggests that such static stretches may cause a neuromuscular inhibitory response in your muscle such that it gets weaker (by up to 30 percent) for up to 30 minutes after the stretch.
Dynamic stretches like the sprint warmup sequence pictured on page 358 generally involve simulating the desired movements of your upcoming workout with an exaggerated range of motion. Moving through a specific range of motion helps protect against that undesirable neuromuscular inhibitory response caused by applying too much stretch for too long to a muscle. You still have to be sensible about controlling the resistance with your dynamic stretch, but you can easily feel that point where you experience resistance at the limit of your flexibility when you are doing a quad pull or a mini-lunge, for example. With any stretch, even a simple hang or squat, avoid introducing any pain or sharp, localized discomfort. Skip or adapt any prescribed stretch that doesn’t feel right. Be sure you are balanced before commencing a stretch, and ease into and out of all stretching positions.
If you are engaged in a chronic training pattern and overworking tired muscles, the ensuing soreness and tightness might make you feel like stretching frequently. I have a better idea: chill out and let your muscles recover! Muscle tissue repair is best accomplished through extra rest and sleep, gentle movement, and good nutrition (especially avoiding inflammatory foods like grains, sugars, and refined vegetable oils). If you are exercising primally, your muscles should feel supple and strong nearly all of the time. Sure, you’ll occasionally get sore and stiff after challenging workouts; this is nature’s way of telling you to get some rest.
IF YOU DON’T KNOW SQUAT, TRY HANGING WITH GROK
My two favorite stretches are timeless, all-purpose classics: the Grok Hang and the Grok Squat. The Grok Hang offers a safe, full-body stretch that leaves you feeling exhilarated every time. It’s also an effective strengthening exercise—as primal as they come. It’s as simple as grabbing hold of a bar or tree branch (with overhand grip) and hanging for as long as you can support yourself.
The Grok Squat involves squatting down to the ground, lowering your torso between your bent knees, taking care to keep your spine straight and elongated, until your butt is nearly touching the ground and arms are extended in front of you. This natural movement provides a safe, gentle, efficient post-workout stretch for your feet, calves, Achilles, hamstrings, quadriceps, buttocks, lower and upper back, and shoulders. For thousands of years, people have squatted as a natural “sitting” position in the absence of chairs (to say nothing of Barcaloungers!). For Grok—and millions of people today in the less developed world—squatting is the default position for resting, socializing, eating meals, and even eliminating.
Try a Grok Squat for 20 seconds, and notice what a comprehensive effect you get from such a basic movement. If it’s first thing in the morning or you’re a little stiff from some intense activity or other stressor (e.g., traveling), simply lowering into the position provides a good stretch. When I’m feeling warm and loose, I’ll gently rock back and forth and/or extend my arms out farther to obtain a deeper stretch I recommended maintaining a straight back as you lower into position, but I allow myself a little spinal curvature at the bottom (to get a specific stretch on my lower back muscles) because I am experienced doing so As a general rule, all of your stretches should be performed with a straight and elongated spine. One caution: if you haven’t done this for a while, are overweight, or have joint issues, you can begin to ease into this stretch (and keep yourself from going too low or falling over) by holding on to a post or another stationary object.
While the Hang and the Squat are both technically static, and I’ve cautioned against the dangers of static stretching, these stretches are safer because they are regulated by your own bodyweight.
The popular conventional wisdom concept of following a strength-training routine that calls for prolonged strenuous workouts several days a week is deeply flawed. Your body thrives on intuitive, spontaneous, and fluctuating workout habits—not ego-driven regimentation organized around an arbitrary time period of seven days that has no special relevance to your fitness progress. When your muscles are challenged beyond what they are used to, the signals generated by the effort prompt genes to make those muscles stronger; it is the challenge that is important, not the strict adherence to a regimented program. Workouts should be high-intensity and brief in duration to elicit the most desirable hormonal response. Just as with chronic cardio, when you conduct strength training sessions that last too long and are done too frequently with insufficient rest, you drift into a chronic exercise pattern that is destructive to health. Furthermore, a chronic workout pattern promotes mediocrity, because your workouts are too long and too frequent to develop the raw power and explosiveness that the “lift heavy things” law is all about.
Lifting “heavy things” has broad meaning here. Besides actual weights, machines, and resistance equipment, you can challenge your bodyweight against gravity.
Regarding the particulars of how to balance upper- and lower-body efforts, “push and pull” workout groupings, light weight with high reps or heavy weight with low reps: it doesn’t matter that much! The idea is to challenge your body on a regular basis with brief, intense workouts involving full-body, functional movements. The specifics of your workout are based on personal preference. You can do just fine using a park bench and monkey bars, frequenting a fancy gym with a high-priced personal trainer, or getting busy in your garage with a few basic weights, elastic tubing, or creative “primal” implements such as kettlebells, slosh tubes, and sandbags. Check out MarksDailyApple.com for hundreds of interesting and challenging resistance workout ideas.
Challenge your body on a regular basis with brief, intense workouts involving full-body, functional exercises. The specifics of your workout are based on personal preference.
Personally, I’m a devoted gym rat, but my faithful appearance at the local gym a few days a week has a heavy social element. Some days I’ll be in there for an hour and 15 minutes, shooting the breeze, preening, and trash-talking with my pals, interspersed with some embarrassingly low-effort exercises where I barely sweat. Other days, when I’m feeling fired up, I’ll push it hard for 25 minutes of maximum effort sets with short rest. After these workouts, I have trouble slipping my sweatshirt on and sticking my key in the ignition to drive home, but I am exhilarated, and recovery is quick. These hard days are few and far between, but they make a big difference. Overall, once you get the Primal Blueprint eating strategy dialed in, you see that it does not require that much time to maintain excellent all-around functional muscle strength and a lean, toned physique. It’s simply a matter of establishing a reasonable baseline commitment of regular workouts, with the occasional super effort that stimulates a fitness breakthrough.
A high-intensity, short-duration workout will stimulate the release of adaptive hormones—particularly testosterone and human growth hormone—that get you lean, energetic, and youthful. Work hard and complete your session in less than 30 minutes, even (or especially) if you are an experienced lifter. That’s right—go against the conventional wisdom of long, drawn-out workouts of the same old sets with the same weight and repetitions. Even a 10-minute session can produce excellent fitness benefits.
Always align the difficulty of your sessions with your energy level, and don’t push yourself beyond what you are motivated and inspired to do. On the other hand, if you feel energized and ready to ramp it up a notch, go for it!
I suggest you shoot each week for one comprehensive 30-minute session and another abbreviated session lasting 10 to 15 minutes. If you are a “more is better” person, I’ll argue in favor of increasing the intensity of these sessions rather than adding additional workouts. Feel free to experiment with the types of exercises that are most fun for you and with a routine that fits most conveniently and comfortably into your daily lifestyle. If you like altering your routine per the popular buzzword “muscle confusion,” that’s fine. If you are a creature of habit and prefer to do the same workout over and over, that’s fine too—as long as it adheres to the “brief, intense, full-body functional movements” description.
The Bonus Material at the end of this book offers descriptions and photographs of what I call the Primal Essential Movements—four simple, safe, bodyweight resistance exercises (pushups, pull-ups, squats, and planks) that can get you super fit in less than an hour a week. Realize that this concept of sporadic, intuitive exercise means you have permission to take—and will, in fact, greatly benefit from—vacation time for your muscles. The more extreme your goals and training regimen are, the more discipline required to balance your overall stress levels on both a micro (daily or weekly) and macro (annual) scale. As I discovered for myself (the hard way), trusting the body’s need for balancing rest and intermittent stress can lead to results that are superior—in terms of weight loss or peak competitive performance—compared to the die-hard trainaholics who never miss a workout and never get sufficient rest.
To make sure you are adhering to the Primal Blueprint philosophy, I suggest paying close attention to your energy level and even your emotional state in the hours after a strength workout. After even my toughest sessions, I feel alert, energized, and positive—basically a natural buzz—for hours afterward. My muscles, while certainly not eager to repeat the workout in the immediate future, feel pleasantly relaxed, loose, and warm. In contrast, if your muscles feel stiff and sore after strength sessions, or you feel like taking a nap, raiding the fridge, or snapping at your loved ones, back off on the duration and possibly even the difficulty of the workout. If you routinely experience next-day muscle soreness after your workouts, you are probably going too hard. Once in a while you will feel a little stiff, but you don’t have to exhaust yourself to that extent to get and stay strong and explosive.
Your strength sessions should generally start with a brief three- to five-minute warmup using light weights or calisthenics specific to the muscle groups you’ll be working that day. A few sets of easy pushups and some jumping jacks might be sufficient. For the main set, emphasize exercises that engage a variety of muscles with sweeping, real-life movements (squats, pull-ups, pushups, etc.) instead of a series of isolated body part exercises. (This includes those ever-popular, narrow-range-of-motion ab machines!) Remember that you are striving to achieve a good power-to-weight ratio and balanced, functional, total-body strength. Follow an intuitive and fluctuating approach focused on maintaining a proper balance of stress and rest.
This approach is a simpler and safer alternative to popular routines designed to pack on more muscle than your body is naturally suited for or to produce disproportionate muscles (“Develop huge guns in six weeks!”) in the interest of vanity over functionality. For example, I like to run on an inclined treadmill for a few minutes in stocking feet, without letting my heels touch the ground. This offers a real-life functional test for my calves and works the small muscles, tendons, ligaments, and connective tissue in my lower extremities that are otherwise artificially protected and unchallenged in high-tech running shoes. I gradually incline the treadmill to reach from two to five degrees and then steadily increase the speed, making sure my heels don’t bear weight or provide propulsion.
Keep in mind that I just made this exercise up one day, and you may or may not like it. However, I think it offers an important counter to the time spent working out and walking around in overly cushioned and arch-supported running shoes. Contrast the broad benefits of this exercise with something like donkey calf-raises. This narrow-range-of-motion exercise (sit with a weighted bar across your knees and lift your toes off the ground repeatedly) has minimal functional benefit; besides, I’ll stack my calves up against any bodybuilder’s!
Because Primal Blueprint Fitness workouts are intended to recruit as many muscle fibers as possible and to build functional strength rather than sheer bulk, I wouldn’t worry about following some predetermined and deliberate effort-recovery cycle. Instead, try to be slightly explosive with most of your movements. By that I mean you should apply a controlled dynamic force to each repetition such that you complete it at a speed that allows you to maintain form and a reasonable pace for the number of reps you intend to complete. Do that and, believe me, you’ll slow down naturally on that final rep or two! This method will fully load the muscle and trigger the biochemical signal to grow stronger.
Much has been written about breathing while lifting weights, some of it relevant (to protect your back from damage) and some of it conjecture. When you apply force, you should generally be either exhaling or holding your breath. This will form a sealed air space in the transverse abdominal muscles of your lower core that protect your lumbar spine. While some camps caution against holding your breath, there is no scientific support to affirm this is harmful. In fact, I find I can bang out two or three reps in a row more effectively when holding my breath and then can catch my breath during a recovery phase. There are many excellent resources—from certified personal trainers, magazine articles, books, video websites like CrossFit.com, articles on MarksDailyApple.com, and even your imagination (observing certain obvious safety rules, such as spine stability)—to help you create an ideal total body routine for your needs. The possibilities are nearly limitless as long as you honor the strategic rules of Primal Blueprint-style training.
My own prescription for health is less paperwork and more running barefoot through the grass.
—Leslie Grimutter
Obviously, Grok’s life featured the occasional brief all-out sprint, not for sport but rather to kill or avoid being killed. These bursts of speed were enhanced by fight or flight adrenaline-like chemicals flooding the bloodstream. When Grok survived a run to safety from a charging bear, the resulting biochemical signals prompted a cascade of positive neuroendocrine, hormonal, and gene expression events, the net effect of which was to build stronger, more powerful muscles and an ability to go a little faster the next time.
Modern research confirms the Primal Blueprint premise: the occasional series of short, intense bursts can have a more profound impact on overall fitness—and especially weight loss—than can cardiovascular workouts lasting several times as long. Sprinting elicits a spike of adaptive hormones into the bloodstream, delivering a potent anti-aging effect in the spirit of “use it or lose it.” Sprinting improves resilience to physical (muscle contractions) as well as psychological fatigue, allowing you to go longer and faster during sustained efforts at lower intensities. Sprinting, especially high-impact sprints (running), strengthens muscles, joints, and connective tissue. Finally, sprinting can help accelerate fat loss because the intensity of the effort has an extreme impact on your metabolic function for many hours after the workout. Sprinting has been found to elevate your metabolic function up to 30 times higher than resting baseline, a measurement known as Metabolic Equivalent of Task (MET). Thirty MET workouts send a strong adaptive signal to your genes to shed excess body fat, because excess weight is a tremendous hindrance to sprinting performance. Again, this is a survival mechanism to prepare for future (perceived as life-or-death) maximum physical efforts.
The profound benefits of sprint workouts really hit home for me back in the early 1990s when I’d take my personal training clients to the Santa Monica College running track. We’d often share this beautiful facility with some of the world’s greatest Olympic sprinters. These physical specimens were a sight to behold. Obviously, they were blessed with remarkable genetic gifts, but it was also clear they were training and living in a manner that brought out the best of their genetic potential. In getting to know some of these athletes and their coaches, it became apparent how remarkably different their training methods were from the prevailing templates of the fitness and nutrition industry.
These Olympians were not out there all day circling the track to exhaustion. Their workouts consisted of minimal amounts of very slow jogging, casual stretching (between competition-specific drills), unhurried efforts to fuss with their equipment (e.g., starting blocks or resistance tools), and, finally, a brief series of explosive efforts—lasting seconds, not hours. Their banter during these sessions was light; they were always smiling, laughing, joking, and clowning around in between the intense focus of their main sprint sets.
They also spent some serious time in the gym working very hard with weights, but these track and gym sessions were interspersed with frequent easy or rest days, including occasionally sleeping in until double figures and taking daily naps. Their training diets were not laden with tofu, frozen yogurt, and energy bars; they were more likely to feast on chicken and ribs after a workout. Carl Lewis, considered by many to be the greatest Olympic athlete of all time, with nine sprint and long jump gold medals to his credit, reportedly trained only an hour per day at his peak. Three-time Olympic gold medalist and multiple-world-record-holding Jamaican Usain Bolt emphasizes often in his interviews and autobiography how “lazy” he is in training. Maybe he’s actually onto something, since he is the fastest human in history.
Introducing sprinting into your exercise routine is not as easy as lacing up a pair of shoes and heading out the door to go jogging. Sprinting is a physically stressful activity that requires a significant fitness base, muscle strength, and flexibility. To reduce injury risk, beginners are advised to choose exercises that are low or no impact. Sprinting up a steep hill (and walking down to commence repeat efforts) offers a lower-impact option than flat running, while stationary cycling presents a no-impact option. I don’t recommend outdoor cycle sprints (except for expert riders) due to the danger factor. You can also choose cardio machines (VersaClimber, elliptical, StairMaster, etc.), but I prefer running because the weight-bearing nature (and thus the increased degree of difficulty) of the activity offers maximum benefits, such as improved bone density and greater stimulation for muscle gain/toning and fat loss. If you are unfit, inexperienced, or have joint issues, cycling or using an elliptical machine might be the best way to start.
For running sprints in particular, you’ll want to start the first few sessions gently, gradually increasing the speed and intensity of your sprints over time. You also need significant recovery time after sprint workouts. I recommend conducting a sprint workout approximately once every 7 to 10 days, and only when you have high energy and motivation levels. That’s right, even as few as two to three sprint sessions per month can produce outstanding fitness benefits and break you out of chronic cardio ruts that may have lasted years.
Running yields the greatest benefits but comes with a higher risk of injury if you are out of practice (say, if you haven’t chased down any animals or scored any touchdowns in the last few decades). Novices can start with three to four sprints of 15 seconds, short of full speed, with long rest periods (up to 60 seconds) in between efforts. You will likely experience some muscle soreness in the days after these efforts, but your body will quickly adapt to your new workout routine. You can then build up to a workout that includes six all-out sprints of 8 to 20 seconds (running) or up to 30 seconds per sprint for low- or no-impact sprint workouts (e.g., stationary bike).
All you really ever need to do is six reps, and never longer than the aforementioned times. If you try to sprint for 30 seconds, it’s not really a sprint—you can’t sustain a true maximum effort for that long running (you can go a bit longer on low-impact sprinting since it’s less strenuous). And if you try to do more reps, you’ll introduce a fatigue factor to the workout that is not advised. Instead, focus on delivering sprints of consistent quality during the workout. This means a similar time and similar perceived exertion for each effort (your perceived exertion should be just below “all-out”—where you feel powerful and in control of your technique, not strained or flailing.) If you are running sprints across an athletic field and the first effort takes 17 seconds, successive efforts should be pretty close to the same time. If you have to try significantly harder to hit 17 seconds, or if you drift up to 20 seconds at the same perceived exertion, it is time to end the workout. As fitness progresses, strive to increase speed before considering increasing the number of reps.
I also recommend supplementing your sprint workouts by conducting technique drills and wind sprints during other workouts. If you devote a few minutes during other workouts to getting your muscles and joints more resilient for sprinting, you will progress quickly and minimize injury risk. Wind sprints entail running slower and shorter efforts than during a formal sprint workout, but taking care to exhibit good technique. A handful of efforts lasting just five to seven seconds, performed at say 85-90 percent of maximum effort, makes for a good wind sprint set. This might be a warmup to a main set of faster running on sprint day, or they can be thrown into a more casual workout another day. Wind sprints and technique drills like exaggerated knee lifts, exaggerated leg turnover, mini-lunges, or hamstring “kickouts” are only moderately strenuous and will condition your muscles, tendons, and joints to perform better and recover faster during your formal workouts.
“High knees” and other drills help reinforce good technique and prevent injuries by condition muscles and joints for high-impact sprint workouts.
You should never push your body through an intense workout if you have any symptoms of fatigue, stiffness, soreness, compromised immune system, or another malaise. As discussed with strength training, your sprint sessions should be intuitive, intermittent, and spontaneous—just as they were in primal life for Grok. The occasional sprint workout will elicit the most desirable gene expression effects—much more so than workouts performed come heck or high water just because it’s Tuesday.
CLOUSEAU-ROBICS AND DOBERMAN INTERVALS
While I’ve discussed the fight or flight response in the negative context of excessive aerobic exercise or hectic modern life, you should realize that eliciting a stress response is desirable with your sprint workouts. The difference here is that the brief, intense stress is exactly what your genes crave to build fitness and strength and to optimize metabolic function.
Imagine if every so often someone rudely interrupted your jog around the track by turning a vicious Doberman loose. I guess now you’d run as fast as possible, right? Or, like Inspector Clouseau, say you hired a martial arts master as a personal assistant to launch surprise attacks when you least expect it. Preposterous as it sounds, this type of sporadic, intense, “life-or-death” stimulation just might produce far superior fitness benefits than filling in all the blanks in your training log.
Your sprint efforts should last between 8 and 20 seconds running, and up to 30 seconds for low- or no-impact activities. Choose your duration, recovery interval, and number of repetitions by your ability level. Sprints of 8 seconds or less are fueled by pure ATP in the muscle cell. Sprints of 8 to 20 seconds are fueled by lactate. Maximum efforts between 20 and 30 seconds are fueled by glucose. (Glucose fuels maximum efforts up to two minutes; after that you burn a mix of glucose and fat.) While the scientific particulars may only be relevant to athletes trying to hone sport-specific skills and mimic competitive circumstances (track-and field events of varied distance, football, soccer, etc.), you might like to vary your routine over time to include short, medium, and longer sprints.
Longer sprints—up to 20 seconds—with short rest develop your anaerobic lactic acid buffering system (a desirable ability for a half-mile or mile race), while the shorter sprints with long rest periods develop your pure speed and explosiveness (such as for a 100-meter race). All types of sprint training will stimulate your fat-burning systems, lean muscle development, and beneficial hormone flow, particularly the release of testosterone and human growth hormone. In this case, even though you will not be burning fat during the actual sprints, your body will become more efficient at burning fat to recover over the long term.
Because the weight-bearing aspect of running makes it significantly more difficult than cycling, running sprints should be shorter than cycling sprints. I prefer gradually ramping up my speed, going all out for about 15 seconds once I hit my sprinting pace, and then taking a full rest period of around 40 seconds between efforts. I’ll complete six of these efforts, typically on grass or at the beach on hard sand or even in soft sand. Sometimes I’ll get lucky and discover a clean path of deeper soft sand freshly upturned by the beach tractor—begging to be blemished by my footprints! The high-resistance sand sprinting stimulates different muscle groups, as I have to lift my knees higher to generate maximum turnover.
Ideally, you should sprint on a stable natural surface, such as a grass athletic field or the beach. Use a running track or cement road if you can’t find a suitable natural surface. While I like uneven surfaces to develop balance and foot strength for walks and hikes, don’t risk it for sprinting. Use a smooth, straight, safe course with excellent footing. It can take a long time to acclimate to running sprints, so be patient with your progress. As you gain more competency, you can also aspire to minimize your dependency on bulky running shoes and run your sprints barefoot or in Vibrams. Again, be patient as you transition toward the advanced exercise of barefoot sprinting.
On other days, my cycling sprints might consist of six 30-second all-out sprints with 2-minute recoveries. Regardless of your specific workout choice, your entire sprint session—including brief warmup and cooldown periods—will require less than 20 minutes. The Sprint Workout Suggestions in the Bonus Material section offer several options for novice, intermediate, and advanced workouts, including an exciting plyometric workout, a stadium steps workout, and a couple of low- or no-impact sprint options, such as sprinting up steep hills or on a stationary bike.
In order to prevent injury and ensure your movements are as efficient and powerful as possible, proper form is key. You must respect these important basics:
Running: Torso faces forward at all times, shoulders and pelvis square to your forward direction. Refrain from side-to-side swiveling of the hips or the shoulder girdle. Arms and hands are relaxed as pumping is initiated from the shoulders. Elbows are bent at 90-degree angles. Don’t let arms or hands cross the centerline of your body. Focus on fast turnover by striding in a motion similar to pedaling a bicycle. Lift foot quickly off the ground in a dorsiflexed position (toes pulled up, foot flexed), drive knees high, and then initiate the next stride quickly. Your heel should nearly kick your butt during the recovery phase of the stride. Envision your foot clearing the height of your opposite knee on each stride.
When you experience the inevitable tightening up midway through your sprint, focus on keeping your face, arms, and hands loose and relaxed. Notice in videos or photographs of Olympic sprinters how their jaws are slack and their hands are soft and open. Be aware of your breathing rhythm and resist the temptation to hold your breath or pant shallowly. Take deep, powerful breaths by focusing on a forceful exhale.
Triathlon legend Andrew MacNaughton let his moods dictate his workout decisions—a sage approach that took him to the top of the sport.
Cycling: Strive for a rhythmic cadence in a range of 80 to 100 revolutions per minute. Most recreational cyclists pedal at far too low a cadence, putting excessive strain on the muscles instead of balancing the cardiovascular and muscular load with an efficient cadence. Focus on applying circular force to the pedals rather than just stomping down. I highly recommend a clip-in pedaling system to achieve a proper circular stroke. Maintain a level pelvis at all times. Do not rock your pelvis from side to side in an effort to impart more force. Keep your upper body virtually still, with arms, chest, neck, and head relaxed and supple.
Be sure that your seat height is appropriate. A quick test is to place your heel (unclip it from the pedal) on the pedal axle when it’s at the very bottom of the pedal stroke. You should be able to extend your leg fully (with pelvis level) and barely touch (or barely miss) the pedal axle. A seat that is too high or too low will stress the knees and also lead to rocking. Resist the temptation to tense your muscles when the effort becomes difficult. Breathe deeply by inflating your diaphragm fully on the inhale. Because you are bent over, you should feel your diaphragm pressing against your rib cage when you inhale; then relax and allow a natural exhale.
Mike Pigg terrorized the triathlon circuit for a decade with his fluid technique and aerodynamic position.
One of the most annoying non-primal elements of today’s fitness movement is shoes. You heard me, shoes are lame. Sure, typical athletic shoes provide substantial support, cushioning, and general protection, but they also immobilize your feet inside the shoe—much like being in a cast.
Hence, the complex network of 52 bones (a quarter of the total in your entire body) and dozens of tendons, ligaments, and small muscles cannot work their magic to provide balance, stability, impact absorption, weight transfer, and propulsion.
Constantly wearing shoes during exercise and daily life leads to weakened feet, fallen arches, shortened Achilles tendons and calf muscles, imbalances between the hamstrings and quadriceps, an inefficient gait, and, of course, recurring pain and injury. The 43 million Americans who experience foot problems daily (we will spend an estimated $900 million annually on foot care products) offer another disturbing example of living in conflict with our ancestral heritage.
Granted, shoes are essential for contact sports or activities involving hard surfaces, such as football, soccer, basketball, volleyball, running on the road, and the like. However, for your purposes of conducting basic Primal Blueprint Fitness activities, going shoeless on occasion (and gradually increasing frequency over time) is possible and beneficial. Keep in mind that a lifetime spent in “casts”—desensitizing and weakening your feet for their primary functional purpose—will require that you proceed with extreme caution with your barefoot endeavors. Here again I’ll make a concession for modern life (I don’t think Grok had any broken glass to worry about on his hikes) by recommending you try gradually integrating minimalist shoes like Vibram FiveFingers into your workout and daily routine.
The Vibram FiveFingers consists of a lightweight, form-fitting rubber sole attached to a nylon-like sock and a hook-and-loop closure system. Vibrams slip onto your bare feet like fingers into a glove (with a slot for each toe) and offer excellent protection from sharp objects and debris.
The Vibram company made headlines in 2014 when they settled a class action lawsuit brought by people who became injured wearing the shoes. These poor victims claimed that they relied on misleading claims about how wearing Vibrams can help strengthen feet. Primal Blueprint Law #9—Avoid Stupid Mistakes comes to mind... Looking at the product, it’s pretty obvious you are not getting the same support as a padded shoe and that you might wanna proceed in a measured way with a transition to more barefoot time. Duh.
While Vibram offers the most authentic barefoot experience with the individual toe compartments and the form-fitting sole, it’s an extreme departure from typical active footwear and can consequently present an injury risk if you are too enthusiastic with your barefoot efforts. With the explosion in popularity of the barefoot movement over the past decade, there are now numerous other minimalist footwear options available. Consider the choices offered by Merrell (merrell.com) and other companies, where you can choose from models offering a graduated assortment of cushioning and support. More support is important for use on rocky trails. You can also strive to gradually minimize the amount of heel lift in your footwear until you are comfortable in a “zero drop” (heel is not elevated from toe box) shoe that allows for the best range of motion and functionality of your Achilles tendon.
The only exercise some people get is jumping to conclusions, running down their friends, side-stepping responsibility, and pushing their luck!
—Author Unknown
Make an effort to gradually introduce barefoot time into your workouts and everyday life, providing ample time for your feet to adjust and get stronger without undue shock. For example, on my first few long hikes in FiveFingers, I kept my normal shoes in a small pack just in case I needed them. Some mild next-day soreness in your calves and arches is to be expected after your initial barefoot endeavors. This is just a natural part of the adaptation process, just as with strength training. However, make sure you don’t experience any pain during your efforts to get your feet more primal. Be particularly careful if you are minimally active or overweight or if you have a history of foot problems or other medical issues. As with most other primal activities, it is better to ease into a new form of exercise than to overdo it.
You can get some low-risk barefoot time by adopting the Eastern tradition of removing your shoes when you enter your house and otherwise using minimal footwear whenever you don’t need the protection or decorum of more substantial footwear. Get a pair or two of minimalist footwear, use them first for walking around, then for short workouts, and gradually increase your use as you remain pain-free. Many runners will conduct their distance runs in traditional shoes, then end the session by jogging a mile or two on grass in Vibrams or bare feet. Hopefully one day you’ll work up to running some sprints barefoot—it doesn’t get any more primal than that!
1. Primal Blueprint Exercise Laws: Mirroring Grok’s active lifestyle is not a complex endeavor requiring the extensive time, money, or specific equipment that conventional wisdom suggests is necessary to achieve fitness. 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 (blending structured aerobic workouts and increased general everyday activity), 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 are attainable when you combine 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).
2. Primal Blueprint Fitness: Primal Blueprint Fitness means you have a broad range of skills and attributes (strength, power, speed, and 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 functional 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; weak muscles make for weak organs. Maintaining organ reserve with good fitness habits will make the chronological component of aging minimally relevant—organs take around 120 years to wear out naturally!
4. Move Frequently: Primal Blueprint Law #3 is a matter of blending structured aerobic workouts at a comfortable heart rate (not to exceed 180 minus age in beats per minute) with increasing all forms of general everyday movement. This means taking the dog for a stroll around the block, taking stairs instead of elevators, taking frequent breaks from your work desk to walk the halls or courtyard, performing some brief stretches, calisthenics, or yoga moves, and generally doing everything you can to avoid prolonged periods of inactivity and get your body moving.
Structured aerobic workouts such as walking, hiking, easy cycling, cardio machines, or (if you are fit) jogging at a moderate pace offer excellent health benefits, including improved cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and immune function and fat metabolism. In contrast, chronic cardio (a pattern of sustained workouts that exceed the 180 minus age aerobic maximum heart rate) can deplete the body of energy (leading to increased appetite for quick-energy carbohydrates), inhibit fat metabolism, suppress immune function, promote overuse injuries, and generally result in the condition best described as burnout. Hard to believe, but slowing down workout pace and moving around more in daily life help you reduce excess body fat in ways that more vigorous workouts will not. When you emphasize aerobic, fat-burning workouts, you produce less inflammation and oxidative damage than an overly stressful, glucose-burning exercise pattern generates.
Complementary flexibility/mobility practices such as yoga, Pilates, tai chi and properly executed stretching are recommended to increase flexibility, range of motion, balance, and coordination, to prevent injury, and to counteract the weaknesses and imbalances that arise from both being too sedentary and engaging in chronic cardio patterns. Stretching must be done properly to avoid injury risk: warm up muscles first with brief cardio. Emphasize dynamic (moving through range of motion), functional, full-body stretches on warm muscles.
5. Lift Heavy Things: Best results in strength training come from a sporadic routine of workouts that are brief in duration and intense and explosive in nature. 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 natural human movements (lunges, squats, plyometrics, pushups, pull-ups, planks, and other body weight resistance exercises) instead of isolations on narrow-range-of-motion gym machines. The difficulty of your workouts 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 exhaustive, long-duration strength training sessions that are done too frequently and are too lengthy to be considered truly explosive. These types of “chronic” strength workouts lead to an overproduction of stress hormones and send you toward burnout in the same manner as does chronic cardio.
Primal-style strength training sessions can be completed in as little as 10 minutes and never longer than 30 minutes. Twice a week is plenty for even experienced strength trainers. When in doubt, go hard or go home!
6. Sprint Once in a While: No workout is more primal than an all-out sprint. Efforts like these fueled human evolution through survival of the fittest! Today you can enjoy excellent fitness, body composition, and health benefits from intense sprinting, modeling the “use it or lose it” principle. All-out sprint sessions should be conducted sporadically when energy and motivation levels are high. Sprint efforts should last between 8 and 20 seconds for running (up to 30 seconds for low- or no-impact activities), with complete rest between efforts to ensure maximum performance. Strive to deliver consistent quality of efforts, where each sprint is similar in time and perceived exertion level. Complete four to six sprints in a workout, along with proper warmup and cooldown, Novices can do low-impact options, such as uphill sprints or stationary bicycle sprints. Formal sprint workouts can be supported by brief efforts of technique drills and wind sprints (perhaps thrown into less strenuous workouts) that improve technique and resiliency of muscles, tendons, and joints.
7. Technique: 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 (e.g., side-to-side movement) should be eliminated. Focus on striding in a circular motion (a la cycling) with center of gravity always balanced over feet. For cycling, ensure proper seat height and apply circular force while pedaling at a rapid, efficient cadence of 80 to 10 rpm.
8. Barefoot: Make a gradual transition to spending more time barefoot or in minimalist shoes during daily life and during workouts. Going barefoot will recalibrate your entire musculoskeletal system so that you walk, stand, and move more efficiently in all manner of daily activity, including appropriate fitness and athletic endeavors. By increasing your barefoot competency, you will reduce the risk of chronic pain and injury to your feet and through your lower extremities, and you will actually improve your technique, balance, explosiveness, speed, endurance, and kinesthetic awareness.
Vibram FiveFingers provide the most authentic barefoot experience. There are numerous graduated options available from other footwear companies that offer a minimalist experience with more protection and less injury risk than cold-turkey efforts. Strive to make a safe, sensible, gradual transition to a more barefoot-dominant lifestyle. By doing so, you will eliminate the hazards of wearing bulky shoes that restrict natural foot motion, weaken stabilizing and propulsion muscles, and increase risk of chronic pain and injury—the very things cushiony shoes are claiming to prevent!
