Your whole day is a workout & these are your zones...

A few years ago, renowned author, mathematician, and the polymathest of the polymaths, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, posted a truly ponderous tweet, a tweet that resonated with me deeply, a tweet that completely changed how I looked at the whole concept of exercise in my daily life…

His charts show two distinct patterns of daily activity distribution…

The ‘modern’ distribution

Shown at the bottom, with a very big “bump” at the left of the curve – showing all of the time that we spend sitting each day – on the couch watching TV, in the car on the way to work, chained to our desk for the obligatory 8 hours of office work each day. Then, it has a smaller bump waaaay to the right – this is our “guilt bump”, where we hit the gym on the way home from work, or we hit the bike trainer when we get home from work, and we only have a limited amount of time, so any exercise that we do needs to be hard to “make it count”, right? As Nassim highlights, this leads to a ‘bimodal’ distribution – with 2 bumps at the ends and an extreme deficit, a vast desert of nothingness, in those all-important middle intensity ranges.

The ideal distribution / The ‘hunter-gatherer’ distribution.

As we saw in Chapter 1 of my book, Hunter-Gatherers have a very different movement distribution to their day, with ~4 hours out of 24 spent in zone 0 – “active movement” (40-54% Max HR), another 2 hours spent in zone 1 – “light exercise” and only ~20 minutes in those higher intensity zones that we would typically associate with “real exercise”. That is, they exhibit Nassim’s ideal “log-normal” distribution above – a pattern of a big chunk of time each day spent “just moving” – not sitting, not working out at “make it count” intensities. Just. Moving.

Clearly, this is very different to how most of us live in the Western World. Our “normal” doesn’t directly lend itself to this daily pattern of movement. While possible, living this way would almost certainly require somewhat of a departure from the “normal” way of life. But, it’s a very worthwhile departure…

As we saw in the chapter, this ‘hunter-gatherer’ way of life leads to some significant health advantages…