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Message: [QUOTE="diggerfoot, post: 2715731, member: 1673"] First, many thanks to you and others for engaging me on this topic; it helps me fulfill an important promise to a very important person. There have been times when I resorted to swimming for conditioning. As this was my last resort for exercise I did only one kind of a work out; I jumped in a pool and swam for two miles. Let's call that a default work out. I got benefits from that work out, including the euphoria that indicates something beneficial is going on with the mind, but it just didn't compare with biking, hiking or running for me. I have no means of quantifying my experience and impression of that, just to claim that my best meditative states never occurred with swimming two miles in a pool. My "default" swimming work out is not what you are talking about. I never did an anaerobic burst with swimming like I would do with other endurance activities. If there are engagements to the mind swimming like there are from mountain biking or trail running, my default work out did not involve them. There are brain health studies and there are cognitive decline studies. Brain health studies can engage wider ages and wider activities. Cognitive decline studies are more limited, since researchers do not want to wait around for decades for the results. The default exercises for older people are more likely to be closer to my swimming work out than yours. Biking also would be a tamer version than what you and I have done on the road. A default version of mountain biking or trail running probably could not even be used for cognitive decline studies. On the other hand, a default dancing work out likely would be more vigorous and mentally engaging than any other type of exercise they might use. Introducing this concept of a "default" work out leads me to a truly astonishing "study." A person thru-hiked the Colorado Trail and kept track of important metabolic numbers before and after. [URL='https://www.outsideonline.com/2125031/what-happens-your-body-thru-hike']Here is the study.[/URL] In particular, how his body treated the metabolism of fats and cortisol before and after is eye popping, though not surprising to a fellow long distance hiker. It should be noted that he was an active, fit person to begin with, who obviously knew about the health benefits of exercise, not a Bill Bryson clone. You won't see "studies" like this written up in medical journals because it's just one person. To get tests of significance you would need large numbers of thru-hikers to study. It's possible but I'm reminded that "exercise isn't patentable." The investment required for a before and after metabolic study of this nature involving thru-hikers, with no practical pay off, just won't happen. Yet what thru-hikers do would be considered a default work out for the nomadic life for which we originally evolved. This brings me to studies that have been done comparing walks in nature to walks in civilization of the same intensity. The walks in nature bring greater brain health benefits. Our nomadic origins involved walks in nature, not civilization. I suspect that any activity done in nature will have greater benefits than a similar level of activity done in civilization, because of how we originally involved. This is a little bit of a tangent, but mainstream, corporate funded science (and I'm a scientist) has misled us about our natural condition. Most people reading this probably has read somewhere that the life expectancy for nomads was in the thirties, based on paleolithic anthropology, which is to say based mainly on carbon dating. Ethnographic anthropologists always found much older members of nomadic societies upon their first discovery. Indeed, members of Huron tribes were found to be as old as 100 upon their discovery. Our European ancestors came to a continent where the societies were longer lived than the polluted Industrial Revolution societies from which they came, yet we have been led to think otherwise. [/QUOTE]

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