This weekend I have just watched the film Castaway starring Tom Hanks; I must be the last person on the planet to do so.   This isn't a film review but rather a review of how we live our lives today compared to our primitive ancestors.   On the film Tom Hanks' character ends up stranded on a remote island for four years, having no choice but to fend for himself for survival.   Do you think he got fat by sitting around all day?   I think not, as there was no processed food, no soft drinks or limitless calories on hand.   He was forced to work his body the way it was designed for to help him survive by pulling, pushing, bending, twisting, squatting, lunging, throwing and even climbing his way through a typical day.   There was no sitting in front of a computer screen 8 hours a day sipping coffee and developing postural problems.   Nor was there any late nights or mental stresses of every day life.   There wasn't any time for all that, after a typical day fishing, making fire, cooking, gathering fire wood and materials for shelter, sharpening hunting tools and building a raft to get off the Island you can be sure that anyone in his predicament would be asleep by sunset.

Before you get your Atlas out and search for a remote tropical Island in the hope of losing weight and to get you out of the rat race just hang on, modern living doesn't have to be so bad.

The same body but in a different era  

We still have the same bodies and physiology as our caveman ancestors and our DNA is still almost the same too.   It takes tens of thousands of years to change our DNA just a tiny fraction of a percent.   Since modern man was able to walk upright 100,000 years or so ago his diet was meat based, it is only in the past few thousand years that man started eating an agricultural diet.  

Compared to our ancestors we move less, eat more, have higher stress levels and eat poorer quality foods.   The majority of us do very little exercise daily, sedentary lifestyles dominate our existence leaving our bodies under worked and over fed with the wrong fuels.   These sedentary people are like F1 racing cars stood in a garage forever unused.   Able bodies become weak and breakdown if they aren't used, sadly this is the way of life for the majority of the population; this eventually leads to postural changes leading to pain and potential injury.       

A careful balance needs to be found with modern lifestyles to compensate with what we have lost through evolution.  

Nutrition      

Many people think organic food is a fad or a rip off, well let me tell you organic food has always been here long before we started using fertilisers on crops and feeding cattle hormones and drugs for commercial gain.   Organic food is natural, the way it should be without any interference from mankind.   When food is organic it is clean and full of nutrients without the chemicals or drugs used in conventional farming.   Our bodies can digest and assimilate organic food easier and it doesn't pollute our insides at the same time.  

Just think of how many additives we have in our food chain today, they can be found in every processed food out there.   Our ancestor's internal organs didn't have to filter these foreign substances nor did they have the side effects that go along with them.  

Exercises related to our ancestral past

Cavemen and women didn't need to go to the gym and they certainly didn't need slimming clubs.   You would only catch a caveman or cavewoman jogging if they were hunting and that would likely be a short sprint, everything related with daily living was exercise.   This is the big difference compared with today's population, science and technology has strived over the years to make our energy consuming jobs and chores easier to do and in some cases non-existent, all resulting in a blow to our health & fitness levels.   Don't get me wrong, not all science and technology is hampering our development, in many cases it has advanced us as a race.   But you have to think long and hard about what strenuous activities we encounter in this day and age, for many people getting up off the toilet or getting out of the car is the most strength they require all day.

When designing exercise programmes we can duplicate what our ancestor's bodies were designed for.   Following is an example of what movements would need to have been performed for survival in the Stone Age.  

Twist

Pull

Bend

Lunge

Squat

Push

Gait (walk, jog, sprint)

Below are some gym exercises that could be included in a functional exercise programme related to the above movements.

Take a step back in time

As you draw the above information together, you will now understand that your caveman body is probably hibernating in comparison to the movements performed daily by our ancestors, and all whilst probably being drip-fed by nutritionally dead food that has only being around in a blink of an eye in evolution time.  

The message I'm trying to get across with this article is that we can start today with eating smarter and living on par with our ancestral past when it comes to food quality and the choice of movements we perform.   We all have a choice of what we eat; obese people especially focus too much on calorie consumption and overlook food quality, and your typical gym goer concentrates on endurance activities rather than movement.   In my opinion these are the two main areas that needs the most attention, nutrition quality and thought out programme design.        

Moving in the manner our bodies were built for will burn more calories, strengthen the muscular system, strengthen our bones and shape the body the way mother nature intended.