In my last post, I discussed Irving Dardik's Superwave theory, and its application to health. Dardik believes that waves represent the form of healthy behaviors. For example, research has shown that people with more heart rate variability are healthier than those with more narrow heart rate ranges.
Dardik applied this idea of waves to exercise. In his opinion, linear exercising - for example, running at the same pace - is not healthy. Instead, exercise should be done in waves, that is, a person exercises at an increasing pace until they are out of breath, and then rests for a while.
Science is starting to show that this type of exercise does indeed have benefits. But does this prove that Dardik's theory is correct? I have my doubts.
Art Devany, of Evolutionary Fitness fame, believes that exercise should be done in short bursts as well. His theory is that of a "power law", a mathematical distribution that includes bursts of high-intensity activity.
So whose theory is correct? Possibly neither. The empirical evidence shows that short bursts of activity do have beneficial effects, but why? The easiest explanation is that this type of exercise is part of the hunter-gatherer pattern. Both the power law and superwave theories acknowlege the origins of physical behavior with our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Yet in both cases, these two theories attempt to provide a theoretical system for activities where perhaps there is no system.
First off, no one really knows what physical activities the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers participated in. We have archeological evidence, but there is no way to completely know what a "day in the life" was for an ancient hunter-gatherer. Modern hunter-gatherer tribes have been pushed to geographical extremes and hence may not be representative of original hunter-gatherer societies.
For example, did hunter-gatherers just shoot poison darts at their prey and then saunter after them? Or did they sprint after and physically fight their prey? Or did they instead run prey down over several days? No one knows for sure.
The Superwave and power law theories attempt to tidy up all these unknowns into neat little packages. These theories, while entertaining, are far from conclusive. Hunter-gatherer life was messy; too messy to fit into a nice academic theory.
