The evolutionary fitness crowd has always made pretty good sense to me, but Martin Berkhan has an interesting and provocative post up at his Leangains blog, Low Carb Talibans. The comments are also good reading, if not always civil.

• If you only read one, read this one: Mark Sisson on The Primal Blueprint.
• Ross Enamait on The Power of Patience.
• Art De Vany notes the potential benefits of High Intensity Exercise Before Sports.
• Straight to the Bar collects some interesting medicine ball workouts and videos.
• Frostillicus again assembles quality links and videos.
• Wohba finds a great contact juggling video (fans of Michael Moschen will dig this).

Ketogenic diets and physical performance. Let's cut right to the chase (conclusion) on this one (emphasis added):

Both observational and prospectively designed studies support the conclusion that submaximal endurance performance can be sustained despite the virtual exclusion of carbohydrate from the human diet. Clearly this result does not automatically follow the casual implementation of dietary carbohydrate restriction, however, as careful attention to time for keto-adaptation, mineral nutriture, and constraint of the daily protein dose is required. Contradictory results in the scientific literature can be explained by the lack of attention to these lessons learned (and for the most part now forgotten) by the cultures that traditionally lived by hunting. Therapeutic use of ketogenic diets should not require constraint of most forms of physical labor or recreational activity, with the one caveat that anaerobic (ie, weight lifting or sprint) performance is limited by the low muscle glycogen levels induced by a ketogenic diet, and this would strongly discourage its use under most conditions of competitive athletics.

I found this link via Art De Vany, who says:

The Innuit diet it discusses is not for me, but the controlled studies do show that the modern high carb diet for endurance athletes is over rated (and other evidence shows that it is harmful) and the low carb diet works just fine for real world endurance.

"Real world endurance." Several authors I like (e.g. De Vany, Sisson) keep hitting the point, either directly or tangentially, that elite athletic performance practices run counter to good long-term health practices (in general, not to say the Inuit diet is a particularly healthful one).

Three Art De Vany posts for today: Sports and Spines, followed by an answer to a readers question, "Is Everything Bad?". The two posts seem tangentially related to an earlier post of his I recall, Sharp Angles.

As a follow-up to my entry on Art De Vany, I have to link to a couple of his posts I particularly enjoyed: Top Ten Reasons Not to Run Marathons and This Body is Not Made for Sports. Lots to agree with in there, although I was puzzled by this bit from his bodybuilding post:

All the problems come down to the same thing; nearly everyone who participates in competitive sports (or glamour contests) is over-trained. I think modern life has enough stress in it and I fail to see why someone would load the stress of over-training on top of it.

I vaguely recall him praising professional basketball players as a fitness ideal. Ah yes, here it is, in Evolutionary Fitness (PDF):

NBA basketball is an example of power law variation. Pro basketball is not an aerobic sport, it actually is an anaerobic sport full of power moves, quick bursts, sprints, and leaps mixed in with half time rest, quarter breaks, pauses, free throws, time outs, and bench time. What NBA players have is the ability to use these brief intervals to quickly recover their phosphate energy stores (they use the alactic pathway discussed below). NBA athletes and NFL defensive backs provide evidence that power law training makes you powerful and lean. NBA players are the leanest and most powerful in any professional sport (their body fat is around 5 to 7 percent).

I suppose those two statements are not contradictory, as I guess NBA athletes can be "the leanest and most powerful in any professional sport" and still be overtrained, but it still struck me.

If you want to do some (r)evolutionary reading on fitness, check out Art De Vany's blog (warning: 447K and growing). Even as a zealous convert to low-duration, high-intensity, varied training, it was (and is) still hard for me to wrap my mind around the possibility of such short workouts being effective. But before excerpting further, let me lead off by noting it's hard to argue with results (from his introduction):

Here are the parameters of my recent physical at the age of 65: blood pressure 111/72; pulse 58. My low density cholesterol (ldl) is 118 (below the recommendation not to exceed 130). My high density cholesterol (hdl, the good cholesterol) is 87, far above the suggested 45 or more. Together, these indicate zero cardiovascular risk. My glucose tolerance is excellent, but it is possible to be glucose tolerant and still be insulin resistant. So, I prefer to test for blood insulin, the lower the better. My blood insulin is almost unmeasurable at 3.4 relative to the ``normal'' range of 6 to 27. Insulin is the aging hormone in all species; my low insulin is one of the many factors that slow my rate of aging.

Based on body composition, strength, flexibility, reaction time, and blood profile, a research institute rated my biological age at 32 a few years ago. I don't take this seriously, but it is consistent with how I feel. My body composition and hormonal profile are not so remarkable when you understand that what we call aging in this modern world really is the accumulated damage of inactivity and dietary abuse. Hunter gatherers don't age like Westerners do because they retain their metabolic fitness.

65. Damn. Granted, he's just one guy and might be a genetic freak of nature rather than a pure product of his health regimen, but still...

The basic premise of De Vany's work is that evolution took three million years to mold us into hunter-gatherers, but that the pace at which we've changed our environment—moving to an agricultural model around 10,000 years ago and an industrial model around 200 years ago— has put our stone age bodies dangerously out of step with the times. The pathway to health lies in emulating hunter-gatherer patterns of long periods of rest punctuated by periods of high-intensity work...

Mechanistic prescriptions fail because they do not present the metabolic challenges and variety of the ancestral environment for which our bodies are designed. If your personal trainer is working you out three days a week, doing three sets of the same exercises, or, worse, 5 or even 6 days a week, find another trainer. Working out 5 or 6 days a week doing many sets of exercises per body part and spending over an hour per workout imposes a chronic load on the body for which it is poorly designed to adapt. You are flooding your body with hormones that consume lean body mass. These hormones also preferentially consume fast twitch muscle, the very substance you are after for strength, lean mass, and vitality. You are draining your adaptive capacity so that you cannot build, or even keep up with the load. Worse still, you are compromising your immune system. Virtually all the body's adaptive mechanisms are designed to deal with acute, not chronic, stresses. Exercise should mimic the activities of our ancestral existence; we are adaptive organisms that thrive on variety, not machines designed for high volume routine.

... and a diet that emphasizes fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats, while eschewing simple carbohydrates (e.g. sugar, pasta).

Homo sapiens is an omnivore; your diet must contain an ample variety of fresh plant foods and lots of amino acids and essential lipids. The only universal characteristic of ancestral and living hunter-gatherer diets is the almost complete absence of grains and simple carbohydrates. There were no simple carbohydrates like sugar and pasta in the evolutionary past. The Ice Ages were times of protein plenty and scarce fat and carbohydrate. Fruits were tough and fibrous, not the refined, sweet stuff we have today. The closest thing to a simple carbohydrate was honey that was rare and guarded by wild bees. There were no grain or cereal sources of carbohy21 drates in the ancestral diet. Hunter-gatherer diets contain an enormous variety of plant foods and are high in protein (the median is about 35 per cent of calories from protein). Human metabolism cannot handle protein levels above 35 per cent over a long term. Cofactors, in the form of fat or carbohydrate, are required in order to utilize protein. So, variety and quality are the key objectives of the Evolutionary Fitness Diet.

This is laid out in more detail in his paper, Evolutionary Fitness (PDF), a thought-provoking read through-and-through, and De Vany is currently expanding into a book. I could excerpt something from every page, but I'll content myself with just one more bit:

We are hunter/gatherers in pin-stripe suits, living a sedentary life and it is killing us in ways our ancestors never experienced. Virtually all the degenerative diseases-atherosclerosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, declining muscle mass-of modern civilization are unheard of among hunter-gatherers and were not part of our ancestral experience. Most modern fitness prescriptions are static and agricultural. These programs model the body as a machine, not as an adaptive organism.

Anyone who's been following my fledgling site knows I'm very happy with the results I've seen from ditching longer cardio work in favor of shorter, more intense workouts. So of course I was thrilled to discover De Vany's ideas support this model. Having read The Stone Age Present 10 years ago or so probably made me particularly receptive. And evolution and fitness are two favorite topics of mine. A good fit all around.