Name: Harvard professor debunks the ‘10,000 steps per day’ myth | Daniel Lieberman
Uploaded: 2023-01-15T17:55:12.000Z
Duration: 8 min 13 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

They're a strange, modern piece of equipment

and we spend a lot of money to go to a gym-

that makes you work really hard to stay in the same place.

We think treadmills are synonymous with exercise,

that makes you work really, really hard for no purpose

other than to make you move without getting anywhere.

Most of us, if we're forced to be on a treadmill,

we watch something on our iPhones or whatever

I'm a Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology

at Harvard University, and I'm the author of "Exercised,"

The very first treadmills were probably invented

by the Romans or even some other ancient peoples like that

They were invented by a man named William Cubitt

to prevent prisoners in England, like debtors' prisons,

So they would make prisoners sort of trudge for hours a day

to make it unpleasant for them to be in jail.

And of course now, people still trudge on treadmills,

I don't know anybody who really enjoys being on a treadmill.

- So many modern forms of exercise are kind of like

cod liver oil-they're not really pleasant.

- 'Extra sunshine for us in winter and spring.'

- We do them because they're good for us.

and take them to your car, that's physical activity.

When you sweep the kitchen floor, that's physical activity.

But exercise is discretionary, voluntary physical activity

The word exercise comes from the Latin 'exercitatio,'

When you were plowing a field, for example,

that would be considered exercise in sort of early English.

On the other hand, it also means to be exercised,

to be upset, to be confused, to be anxious,

You know, we get exercised by our math exercises.

They find it hard to do, they're not quite sure

how much to do, there are all kinds of myths surrounding it.

- 'The burning is a signal that your muscles

- Most people don't do it because they want to,

they do it because it helps to stave off death

and using kind of an anthropological perspective,

my goal really is to help people be less exercised

Walking is the way which humans get around, get food.

It's kind of fundamental to who are as a species.

Today, in the modern Western world, with cars

and escalators and elevators and Zoom and TV

The average American, before the pandemic,

was taking something like 4,700 and something steps a day.

One of the ways which we medicalize exercise

there's a certain amount you should do, right?

"You should take two aspirin, you should get eight hours

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Harvard professor debunks the ‘10,000 steps per day’ myth | Daniel Lieberman

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