20 September

I think this is worth looking at again. There’s a very wide fitness and exercise culture now, but this sort of evidence suggests that we’ve forgotten things about the human body and how it works. The body is stronger, faster and more agile than we realised, and that’s without any training. But we’ve come to see it as like a lump of plasticine that has to be ‘worked’ into ‘shape’. We think we are ‘in shape’, or not. In fact what might be happening is that we’ve forgotten how to let gravity shape us, to use the enormous forces already on us to our own advantage. We are elastic creatures, our bodies absorb these huge forces and store them elastically. We just have to learn to release them, like firing an arrow from an elastic bow. Instead of our effort/body-shaping approach.