After an interesting five weeks of nutrition, we now turn our attention to fitness. This first week will focus on a simple principle: for sustainable fitness, exercise should never be the main goal – it should just be a byproduct. 

In other words, never try to exercise just because you know you should. Exercise is effort and the human mind instinctively tries to avoid effort. 

Instead, design your life in such a way that exercise just happens as you go through your day. This is how we evolved: our forefathers used their bodies regularly in their daily lives and got their required exercise completely automatically. 

Over the coming week, we’ll cover four ways to apply this principle in the modern world, starting with:

Transportation by human power

One of the greatest public health tragedies of our modern age is the fact that so many cities have been built for cars instead of people. Worldwide, the sedentary lifestyles encouraged by this design philosophy is killing millions and racking up hundreds of billions in healthcare costs (e.g. studies from the US and UK). 

The dominance of the car in many cities makes it difficult to fully capitalize on personal transportation as a form of automatic exercise. But almost anyone will be able to identify some short trips where they can walk or cycle instead of relying on fossil power with lots of CO₂ emissions. 

Take a minute or two to honestly think through all your personal transportation needs. Are there any short trips to work, the shops or friends that will be possible to walk or cycle? If so, grab them with both hands!

Making the transition

If many years of driving everywhere has left you badly out of shape, making this shift will be tough. You will need a few months to gain the fitness required to make human power the default means of propulsion for any reasonably short trip. 

This will be the biggest test. Like any other lifestyle change, the best advice is to make gradual sustainable changes. The other forms of free exercise to be discussed later this week can really help here. 

Another thing that can be a great help is an electric bicycle. These bikes make it a lot easier to ditch the car for shorter trips, particularly during that tough initial stage when your fitness is not yet up to scratch. 

Motivation

If you need some more motivation, take a look at this nice article about the benefits of displacing just half of car trips shorter than a mile with walking or cycling. For the US, this includes almost $1 billion in lower costs, avoided CO₂ emissions equivalent to taking 400000 cars off the road and $4 billion in avoided costs from poor health and premature death.

Once you get reasonably fit, travelling 1 mile by human power is nothing. In fact, a fit person living in an intelligently selected location can easily get away without owning a car, achieving fully automatic healthy levels of exercise (and huge financial savings).  

So, really think carefully through any possibilities you have for travelling by human power. Then join me tomorrow when we talk about some fun and revitalizing opportunities for automatic exercise.