Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

the scary, drill-sergeant-like, get-all-up-in-your-grille type of trainer. He looks like he could punch in a windshield with little effort. In his former job, he was a parole officer for murderers and rapists. But Tony’s not scary. Quite the opposite. At least to those of us who aren’t murderers and rapists, he’s gentle and funny, and would rather talk about literary nonfiction than strangleholds.

“Are you up for warming up with a few minutes on the treadmill?” asks Tony, almost apologetically.

Ah, the treadmill. I’ve always loathed it. Originally, in the 1800s, treadmills were used by horses to crush grain (hence the “mill” in treadmill) and as a way to reform prisoners. They also provide us with an almost too-easy Sisyphean metaphor. So there’s plenty to hate about the treadmill.

But on I get, and start pattering away—it’s only going three miles an hour. And yet, within a hundred steps, I’m panting.

I spend the rest of my training session doing lunges, working with chest press machines, and pumping dumbbells. Thankfully, Tony thinks I’m beyond the lavender-colored dumbbells. But not much beyond. I got the ten-pounders. I keep looking at the tank-topped man to my left, who is hefting sixty-pounders as if they’re tubes of toothpaste.

“Don’t worry about him,” says Tony. “You’re doing great.”

I leave with a mix of embarrassment and pride. I sweated a bit, not too much. That wasn’t so bad, now, was it? And I love the way my arms feel as if they’re floating after lifting the weights.

When I get home, Julie hugs me and presents me with a first-day-at-the-gym gift: a PowerBar with a pink candle stuck in it.

“I’ve waited for this day for years,” she says.

For the last decade, Julie has made it her New Year’s wish that I join a gym. So for her, my inaugural workout has been one of the highlights of our marriage.

The next day, I had practically no soreness. This bodes well, I thought. What I didn’t know is that the soreness often kicks in not the next day, but two days later. (It’s called “Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness,” and it occurs because of tiny rips in the muscle fibers, especially for those who are out of shape.) And man, did it kick in. I’m walking around like Lurch, straight-legged and angled forward. It takes me a full minute to sit down on the toilet—I have to ease myself onto the seat, clutching onto the sink. Oh, but I’m pleased with the pain. I must be accomplishing something, right?

Going Caveman

I’ve been hitting the gym a few times a week—and it’s been getting slightly less unpleasant—but I want to test other regimens, too. I need to be an exercise omnivore this year. So I’ve decided to sample the polar opposite of the indoor-gym workout. I’m going to try out the Caveman Workout, which is all about being natural and savage and out in the wilderness. For me, that wilderness is Central Park.

This Sunday, I will join five other men as we toss boulders and run barefoot through Manhattan’s own nature preserve.

The caveman movement—or the Paleo movement, as practitioners prefer it to be called—is still somewhat fringe, but it’s been gaining traction. The idea is simple. Our bodies evolved for millions of years to eat and exercise a certain way. Then, in relatively recent history, everything changed. Ten thousand years ago, humans started farming. A couple of hundred years ago, we began sitting at our desks all day. For total health, the proponents argue, we need to go back to the old ways—exercising in nature and eating like cavemen.

It’s an easy trend to mock. My friends have done so relentlessly: “Is part of the workout dragging women by their hair?” “What was the life expectancy of the caveman? Twenty-eight years? Good luck with that.” (Actually, the length of their life span is debatable.)

I’m skeptical of much of the caveman dogma—especially the parts about the meat-heavy diet. I’ll get to that later. But I don’t think the Paleos should be dismissed. They have some good ideas, too. It’s clear that our bodies were built for another time. So I want to give this workout a shot.

The man behind the caveman workout is a thirty-nine-year-old Frenchman named Erwan Le Corre, whose company is called MovNat, short for Mouvement Naturel.

He holds workshops around the world—from West Virginia to Thailand—and today he’s in New York. We meet at 108th Street and Central Park West at an entrance to the park.

Erwan bounds up wearing black shorts and a sporty zip-up sweater. He’s ridiculously good-looking, in a leading-man-in-a-1950s-MGM-movie way: A razor jaw, perfectly coiffed sandy brown hair, muscles that are well defined, though not steroidy.

“This is a great place,” he says, with a strong French accent, as he scans the scene. “Very natural. Very primal.” He runs up the hill to scout out the best patch of trees and rocks.

I wait on the corner with two other cavemen.

One is John Durant, a twenty-six-year-old Harvard grad with dark shoulder-length hair and blue camouflage shorts. The other is Vlad Averbukh, a twenty-nine-year-old with an accent from his native Uzbekistan. Vlad has short red hair, a short red beard, and when not running wild, drives a red Smart Car.

John and Vlad know each other well, having both appeared in a New York Times article on the caveman movement.

They chat amiably for a few minutes. Then Vlad starts pressing John on doctrinal differences. Vlad thinks that Paleos should be eating raw meat. His diet includes a lot of raw grass-fed beef and internal organs. John thinks fire was invented much earlier, and cooking your meat is just fine.

“What are your sources?” Vlad asks John.

John sighs. “I don’t want to have this debate now.”

Vlad seems annoyed, and walks off. I get the feeling Vlad is the fundamentalist caveman, and John is the reform caveman.

Erwan is ready. We leave our shirts in a pile near a rock. It’s a brisk day, and the sun apparently wants some privacy, because it refuses to come out from behind some