How many steps do you walk every day? Do you hit 10,000 steps, which experts recommend and is about 5 miles’ worth? Do you match the daily walking of a Hadza man or woman (8.3 or 5.5 km/day, respectively)? If you’re anything like the average American, you’re doing 5,117 steps a day, well shy of the 10,000 step mark and flirting dangerously with a formal sedentary classification. But we’re not alone (though we’re the worst). Of the four industrialized countries studied, not a single one found the mark. The Australians seem to come close, walking 9,695 steps a day. The Swiss follow with 9,650, and the Japanese are a bit further off with 7,168 steps per day. Contrast that with rural South African women, of whom just 11.9% can be classified as sedentary (under 5,000 steps a day) and for whom an average day means walking 10,594 steps (many of them done while carrying a load), or Amish aged 18-75 (PDF), who walk an average of 18,425 steps (men) or 14,196 steps (women) each day, and we’re all looking pretty darn sedentary.
Posted By: Mark Sisson
How the Primal community loves the concept of a dietary paradox. How we eagerly point to its various manifestations as supportive evidence for our way of eating, living, and moving. You know the French Paradox and how it confounds the experts. To mention all those smug surrender monkeys with their brie and their butter and their duck confit and their Gauloises and their seeming imperviousness to heart attacks is to make Dean Ornish binge on bran and pull out tuft after tuft of frizzy hair. And then there’s the lesser-known Israeli Paradox, which attempts to answer why Israelis have skyrocketing rates of heart disease despite a skyrocketing intake of “healthy” omega-6 fatty acids. In its wake, Walter Willet might be found weeping into a mug of safflower oil. There’s even an American Paradox – those who ate the most saturated fat had the least coronary heart disease – that had the minds of researchers thoroughly boggled.
Posted By: Mark Sisson
Having yielded to those of you who still insist on running a marathon, yesterday I offered a training strategy that gets you the best results with the least amount of damage. Today’s post is about fueling a marathon – what food to eat and when to eat it. It’s not solely about race day nutrition, because if you just focused on what to eat the day of the race, you’d be missing out on a lot (and you’d likely have problems finishing, or at the very least your performance would suffer). It’s about what to eat while training, a few days before the race, and the day of the race itself. This is the stuff I would do if I had to go back and do another marathon with my current knowledge. I might tweak things slightly if I was trying to make the Olympics, but for the average, relatively fit Primal dude or gal who wants to check this off their bucket list? This is the perfect way to fuel your efforts. And this works equally as well for those of you who think a century ride (100 miles on a bike) might be in the cards.
First, let’s examine what to do while you’re training. What do you eat? How much of it do you eat? Low-carb, high-carb?
Posted By: Mark Sisson
Leading into this post, I promised myself that I wouldn’t try to dissuade people from running marathon(s) or any long distance races. I already do that plenty in other posts, so today’s is geared toward the folks that simply are going to run a marathon or marathons, regardless of what I say. I know these people exist because I used to be one. Running a marathon can be a huge bucket-list accomplishment. With that in mind, when people write in to ask me about training for a marathon, I think about what I would do in that situation knowing what I know now. How would I train to do the least damage and get the most benefit? Truth is, if I put my mind to it, and you had elite level potential, I could most likely train some of you to win the thing outright, but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about finishing the race without embarrassing and/or hurting yourself. It’s about accomplishing something big, something special. It’s about training for a decent, respectable showing in a marathon. One (or two, or three if you must) and done.
Posted By: Mark Sisson
Many people, myself included, prefer streamlining fitness to obsessing over its minutiae. Although I’m no fan of their footwear, Nike’s “Just Do It” really does capture my view of what exercise should be. Find what you like doing and what works for you, and simply go do it. But not everyone is that way. Tons of people truly enjoy the nitty gritty details. They like the research, the nutrient timing, the supplementation. They’re the ones discussing the respective differences between sumo deadlifts, regular deadlifts, and Romanian deadlifts. They’re the ones who want to wring out every last drop of performance.
I get that. I used to be like that, too, but now I take more of an academic interest. That’s not to say I don’t pay attention to what I’m doing, because while I like to think I’m just going with the flow and doing what I enjoy, I also like knowing that what I’m doing is effective. Basically, I don’t like wasting time. Plus, many readers fall into the latter category of those who want the details.
Posted By: Mark Sisson
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