Josh Noel, writing for the Chicago Tribune, has done an excellent job of getting it right on the philosophy of ancestral health.
Called Paleo, primal, caveman or — the umbrella term of the moment — ancestral, the regimen replaces contemporary “working out” with real-life movements that our Paleolithic ancestors used to survive: pushing, pulling, lifting, squatting, bending, walking and the occasional high-intensity sprint.
…Ancestral exercise also places emphasis on short bursts of weight-bearing intensity, however, such as pushing a weighted sled or pounding a tire with a sledgehammer. The most dedicated adherents create backyard gyms that can involve carrying rocks, lifting tree branches and using “adult monkey bars” for chin-ups, climbing and dips.
Certainly, libertarians and anarchists are drawn to this lifestyle because of our innate ability to see through the façade of conventional wisdom that is built by political interests and buttressed by an assortment of money trails. We do not deny conventional wisdom for the sake of being anti-mainstream, as some people opine; rather, we naturally tend toward the procurement of skepticism, critical thinking, and other skills that the rank and file just do not seem to possess. For instance, the average person reads a headline such as, “Fat makes you fat,” and they will believe that it must be true because it was based on some “official” study that is misrepresented in the story.
Conversely, we libertarians tend to say, hey, wait a minute – how was the study interpreted by the media, who performed/funded the study, and how scientific was the study? Mark Sisson, perhaps the most visible person within the ancestral health community, calls this taking responsibility for your “own health and enjoyment of life by investigating, discussing, and critically rethinking everything we’ve assumed to be true about health and wellness.”
