body road map

Viewing ancestral-health data through modern eyes can skew our conclusions with what to do with this information. Because we come from a movement-free culture, our relationship to moving tends to boil down to exercise. Only, exercise science, like nutritive science, has attempted to isolate the variables it perceives as most beneficial to the human. Despite the fact that we now know the quality of food varies with its freshness, the way it was fed and or grown, and even the way it was treated (or not), food is still most often evaluated by caloric quantity and percentage of fat, sugar and protein. This, despite the fact that these are not the most important variables when it comes to eating for health, they are still our culturally-selected variables.

In this same way, human movement has been reduced to variables that those evaluating science-data have determined to be most influential in health. Things like heart rate, or intensity of exercise and for how many minutes. The amount of pounds or kilograms to be lifted and the number of times before resting. The length of resting before repeating the loads again. Like nutritive science, exercise science has come a long way in the last 30 years, but also like nutrition, our relationship with exercise is deeply-tinged, culturally speaking with variables that have little to do with actual, sustainable health

-- Katy Bowman on deciphering modern 'optimal human movement' maps.