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Aren’t we designed to be active at any age?
Indeed, activity is key to health in many ways — I summarised a bunch of research into the dramatic and positive effects of exercise on the brain here. But the famous evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman gives an interesting take on this. This is called The Active Grandparent Hypothesis.
And what is that?
Well, exercise has a focusing effective on metabolic processes he writes in the paper. This means that exercise is not just good for you in the common understanding of burning fat, for example, but stops negative metabolic processes happening that kick in if you’re inactive.
So exercise is good because it refocuses the system!
Yes, but more than that: activity and exercise can damage the system (at micro levels) but then this promotes regeneration and repair. As the runner’s saying goes: “You don’t stop running because you are old, you get old because you stop running.”
Doesn’t this mean that all these things that save on activity are bad for our health?
Absolutely. We have evolved to manage resources well for survival so tend to be lazy, but in modern society this is too much and then leads to degeneration of our system which, especially when we’re ageing, needs activation.
