Professor Arthur De Vany is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He has conducted groundbreaking research in many areas of economics, but is perhaps most noted for his work concerning decentralized, non-linear systems. Professor De Vany is an accomplished athlete with an extensive background that ranges from Olympic weightlifting to professional baseball. As early as 1995, Professor De Vany had syn¬thesized a holistic ap¬proach to health and fitness that he called Evolutionary Fitness. Many people current¬ly involved with the CrossFit community, including me, can trace their own fitness odyssey back to Professor De Vany’s Evolutionary Fitness. We are profoundly grateful to Professor De Vany for sharing with us his work and insights.

Would you please elaborate on how you came to form your ideas about Evolution¬ary Fitness?

I would have to say that it just happened. ¬Like most truly complex endeavors, it is hard to identify a turning point or a key inspiration or insight. There are so many intertwined layers of science, learning, experience and so many different fields involved that I don’t know at what point they came together. Nonetheless, key ele¬ments are my interests in complex systems (which was integral to my understanding of power law behavior and intermittency as components of human action) and my interest in evolution. My training as an economist was extremely helpful since it gave me the perspective required to un¬derstand how a decentralized system allo¬cates scarce resources in the self-organized human physiology. My interests in ge¬netics and cognition also came into play as it led me to appreciate the key role of gene expression and how diet and activity alter what the genes express.

At the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, my true home for the last fifteen years of my ca¬reer, I was surround¬ed by cognitive scientists, brain scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, geneticists, biologists, and information scientists. These all come into play in evolutionary fitness.

I truly began living the Evolutionary Fitness Way in about 1985 when I started cooking more at home to make our meals more healthful. My wife is a Type I dia¬betic and by monitoring her blood glucose we found many foods tended to promote high blood sugar. As we cut them back, we began to eat a more plant-based diet with leaner meats. I began to cook with color and texture as my guides and the results were terrific. Lots of fresh spices with their high antioxidant content, and lots of fiber and variety.

I then began to rethink my training. I began working out more in the manner of, say, a Mike Mentzer or Hitter. But, that wasn’t enough; it took too much time and was tir¬ing. I experimented, relying on Astrand’s wonderful text and my understanding of power law variation to find a more natural way to balance intensity with variety. The answer was the intermittent pattern that is typical of all playful activity: wild ani¬mals exhibit power law variation in activity (proven by monitors placed on fish and wild animals), and most sports like tennis and baseball are also power law distrib¬uted activities.

Would you please describe the Evolution¬ary Fitness lifestyle and explain how this approach might benefit performance and longevity?

Power law variation and intermittency mean that you don’t live in a narrow fre¬quency range: you do activities that are “all over the map,” with no typical or standard activity. You have intense bursts of activity and lots of languid, easy mo¬ments. Modern life is a stressor, with too much standard activity and not enough variety or true peace. Remember, our spe¬cies never had more than they could carry as possessions, yet they had the whole outdoors and the gifts of nature constantly before them. Our minds are not made for the standardization of life and the quest of possessions; they can never bring true peace for that reason.

The mental peace that comes with this realization is powerful. An evolutionary perspective is truly supportive: I often laugh at myself for trying “accomplish” too much and tell myself that is just my genes talking. Remember, we are alive only because we carry the genes that got us here and they “care” only about their own reproduction. Thus, as males, we do many dangerous, demonstrative things in our youth, primarily to enhance the prospects of reproducing and sending our genes into the next generation. Women are susceptible to this as well, though it mani¬fests itself in different ways.

As to longevity, an active lean body trans¬lates into a peaceful, playful lifeway and a powerful mind. Few people seem to real¬ize that mind and body are one; there is no reality to Cartesian dualism. For example, children do not learn to speak if they are confined in such a way that they do not understand the force mechanics of move¬ment, nor can they learn math unless they sense the physical relationships among things through movement. A healthy mind is the first requisite to longevity. A lean, muscular body prevents the brain from becoming resistant to the action of insulin and keeps it healthy and well-nourished. It keeps stress hormones, which are neu¬rotoxic and cause diminished brain mass, at bay.

Body composition is one of the best predic¬tors of longevity. Our male ancestors had about 11% body fat. Females were closer to 15%, just near the boundary where they may or may not be able to conceive. This kept population growth within bounds, along with other natural hazards. Thus, females had far fewer ovulations than a modern female and aged less rapidly be¬cause nothing ages as much as reproduc¬tion. A lean, muscular body, say 6 to 10% for a modern male and up to 17% for a female promotes low insulin levels, a key hormone in aging. I am aging at a slow rate (I think) because my insulin is so low it is outside the range for the lab. Low body fat also guarantees low blood fats, most of which come from a person’s own abdomi¬nal fat rather than from their diet. But, it is body composition, not just body fat that is the issue; one must have the right balance of muscle to fat to promote the hormone drives that keep you young and your brain well balanced and nourished. Your mus¬cle is also part of your immune system (it functions as a reservoir of protein to pro¬liferate killer cells when needed).

Would you please explain the concept of power laws with regard to training?

First, recall that a power law is a distribu¬tion of frequencies over intensities. Such a distribution implies that the most intense activities are few, but very high in exer¬tion. The low intensity activities are the bulk of your activities, including rest and easy walking. I do a lot of easy walking as many scientists do; Einstein and Darwin are notable examples. So did Dorian Yates when he was Mr. Olympia. For hunter-gatherers, walking is the predominate ac¬tivity, by far. Modern life leaves too little of this languid, easy, “I’m not going any¬where” kind of activity.

Second, there is no typical activity with a power law so things are not compressed into a narrow frequency range: all scales of activity occur with diminishing frequency at the higher intensities.

Third, the high intensities are really very high, but their frequency is low. Again, this is far outside the Normal distribution modern life seems to encourage. If you look at hunter-gatherers again, you find that they expend about 2 to 2.5 times their basal metabolic rate in a day, most of this in a few intense bursts on the order of 10 or more metabolic equivalents. Office work¬ers expend about 1.2 METS (equivalents of their basal metabolic rate). The hormone drives are vastly different for office work¬er or hunter-gatherer. The HG has higher testosterone, growth hormone, and lower stress hormone. Office Worker has many low level threats to which he/she cannot make a fight or flight response, and thus carries a stress accumulation that cannot be relieved. The HG has a higher threat threshold and does need the fight or flight response now and then. Still stressful, but the stress is periodically relieved through action with a consequent quenching of the adverse hormone profile induced by stress.

Routinized, lower intensity activities, even jogging, train the natural chaos out of the human heartbeat, making it less adapt¬able to stress. This pattern holds broadly for other physiological systems too.

If you want to read the research literature that investigates the ideas regarding power law training, do a search for intermittent training. You will find that it is very effec¬tive and has been studied by sophisticated scientists. This research is much harder to do than what one finds in investigations of aerobic training. That is because aero¬bic training is steady-state and the equa¬tions are easy to handle because they deal with equilibrium conditions. Intermittent, power law training is far-from-equilibri¬um training and much harder to analyze, as no steady state equations exist for in¬tense activities that can only be sustained in brief bursts.

It is not wrong to suggest that aerobic, steady state training is often taken to be the norm for training because it is studied most. And it is studied most because that is what researchers know how to do. The far more effective intermittent training is little known because the research is hard¬er to do. So, it is the old drunkard prob¬lem: when asked why he was looking for his lost car keys under the street lamp, the drunkard replied, “Because that is where the light is.” Aerobic training is heavily studied because that is where the steady state holds. It really is nonsense. The hu¬man body is a far-from-equilibrium open energy system to which a steady state analysis simply does not hold. Such an obvious point, but it took me a long time to figure it out and see why a lot of pub¬lished research has an aerobic bias to it.

Do you see a departure between the re¬quirements in preparing for elite athleticism versus the demands faced by our Paleolithic ancestors?

Only in the way skill enters into it might there be a difference. Some sports require such a high level of skill that they require many repetitive movements. It is known that hunter-gatherers also practiced a great deal. For example, young Eskimos used to be taught to throw at an early age and even had their shoulders stretched so they could throw harpoons from a seated position with great force and accuracy. No modern person compares to the skill and endurance of ancient Eskimos in kayaking or spearing. Iroquois Indians easily out-lifted American soldiers in tests devised by a physiologist. Of course, that was in the 19th Century. Things are different now.

Few modern athletes will have the vision or bone density of our ancestors; hunter-gathers have been noted for their ability to see the moons of Jupiter by naked eye, to tolerate 50 degree temperatures naked without shivering, and to bite through iron nails. Their hearing and balance are exquisite. Remarkably, members of tribes express an almost pure type; they are similar in appearance and stature because they express their genes truly, without the alterations among modern humans that are caused by vastly different diets and lifeways. Moderns have altered gene expression greatly because we do things that vastly alter the messages our genes receive; hence, there is a very large dif¬ference among modern humans relative to the ancestral past. This would indicate that some modern humans might be better at some sports, owing to the large varia¬tion in types, but it also says that any ran¬domly selected ancestor would be better at almost any physical task than a modern human.

One ethnologist visiting a tribe found that nearly all the males in the tribe could out sprint him even though he was a college sub-11 second sprinter. One of the games in another tribe consists of teams of men hoisting huge logs over their heads and running as far as they can go. Men of all ages participate. I have seen, on film, a New Guinea male who looks like an ath¬letic Mike Mentzer; he had muscles on his muscles according to the speaker on the film. He “made his living” climbing great trees hunting sloth and other tree-dwell¬ing animals. To see him go up a huge tree, fearlessly and effortlessly was mind-alter¬ing.

Your alactic and hierarchal sets are quite unique and have been found by many to be very effective. Would you please explain to our readers what they are, why you like them, and share some examples of practical implementation?

The hierarchical sets, one set of 15, one of 8 and another of 4 with increasing weight and increasing speed with no rest in be¬tween, are meant to go up the fiber hierar¬chy from slow to type II and I fast twitch fibers (the latter the fastest). The idea is to drop out the slower fibers with lighter weight and higher reps in the early sets, leaving the fastest, highest force type 1 fi¬bers to carry all the load at the end. The last set also emphasizes the descending phase of the movement because eccen¬tric movements preferentially hit the FT fibers. In addition, huge amounts of lactic acid are produced, a well-known promoter of growth hormone (GH). In addition, the genes in the muscle fibers “sense” the sig¬nal of acid or oxygen to determine whether to make fast myosin chains or slow ones. The lactic acid promotes gene expression for fast fibers. Oxygen promotes slow fiber expression. This makes sense, doesn’t it, because something has to tell the muscle how to develop and it has to be a local sig¬nal, right there in that muscle fiber. This is an example of a decentralized signal that much of my economic research deals with.

It is this gene expression signaling process that hierarchical sets are designed to exploit. This process also explains how aero¬bic exercise promotes slow twitch muscle development and not FT development.

Alactic sets are a- or non-lactate promot¬ing. They are done as a single rep, putting the bar down, resting 5 or 10 seconds and then doing another rep. This goes on for 2 to 8 reps. Doing a heavy weight just one rep does not produce lactic acid. But, it does use up the phosphates that fire the FT fi¬ber. The 5 to 10 second pause between reps trains the ability of the muscle to regener¬ate the phosphates that fuel the FT fiber. So, you are training your recovery ability in response to intense effort. This is ac¬tually the key to endurance in many high intensity sports; it is quick recovery from intense moves, not aerobic endurance that counts in these sports. In addition, after the first rep in multiple rep sets a lot of the energy is supplied by tendon and muscle elasticity, so these reps are not as intense as the first one. It is always the first rep that is hardest in most exercises because you are starting a dead weight. So, alactic sets are extremely challenging and that is good. Finally, single reps let you handle very heavy weight without fear of failure and they stabilize the joints because of the static starting position.

In light of Evolutionary Fitness, what are your thoughts as to why brief, in¬tense workouts elicit impressive gains in strength, power and endurance?

This is the pattern of activity to which the human genome is adapted. Through all of our evolutionary past, human physiology and metabolism adapted to a pattern of in¬termittency and fight or flight response. It could not have been otherwise until the advent of agricultural only 10,000 years ago. This is the pattern of activity that pro¬motes the true expression of the human genome and produces the optimal body composition of our ancestors. To live oth¬erwise is to cause the evolutionarily adapt¬ed genetic information to be expressed in unhealthful ways. Much has been made of the so-called “thrifty gene” as a cause of modern obesity. This is a genotype adapt¬ed to episodes of starvation that conserves energy and causes weight gain in a nutri¬tion abundant modern world. I think this is turning evolution on its head. Humans are an active genotype, as activity was es¬sential and obligatory to the acquisition of food. A prone-to-fat, thrifty genotype would not survive this environment and would be reproductively less successful than an active genotype. So, modern humans may fail to achieve the activity to which the active genotype encoded by evolution in their genes is adapted. The result is faulty gene expres¬sion, obesity, and ill health. When food is abundant at virtually no energy cost, the tie between activity and nutrition is bro¬ken. Activity declines and energy intake increases; that is, the real thrifty genotype and gene expression is altered adversely.

Dr. William Kraemer of Pennsylvania State University has noted an inordinate neuroendocrine response from move¬ments such as squats, deadlifts, and the Olympic lifts, particularly when they are performed at very high intensity. From an evolutionary perspective, why might this be? How do you feel we might best capi¬talize on this phenomenon to obtain opti¬mal health and elite athleticism?

It is the Growth Hormone which the move¬ments trigger as well as the whole body coordination under maximal neural stim¬ulation. Each type of muscle fiber has a neural threshold that must be exceeded to fire. The slow twitch fiber has the lowest thresholds, the fast twitch I (if that is the designation you use) is next, and the high¬est threshold fast twitch II fibers fire last. These movements go right up the fiber hi¬erarchy and trigger all the thresholds.

Many of our readers have noted an ability to gain lean muscle mass while consuming what would appear to be a calorie-deficient diet (Paleo/Zone). You have alluded to similar phenomenon with Evolutionary Fitness. Could you help our readers to understand some of the mechanisms possibly at play here?

Remember, caloric deficit is a steady state concept. Humans are almost never in ca¬loric balance at a point in time, it is only through integrating moments of positive and negative balance over a longer time period that any kind of caloric balance is achieved. So, caloric balance is an averag¬ing concept that does not apply to shorter intervals of time. It happens that when you fast and engage in intense activity of very brief duration you signal the body to conserve protein. The signal is a high level of GH, which can promote a redirection of the body’s resources to retain and develop its protein pools. Remember, protein cir¬culates through the body, in and out, and the pool goes up and down. It is possible to take in less food and still deposit pro¬tein in muscle if you lower the rate of pro¬tein wastage. This is the role of GH: it is a strong signal to conserve protein and to mobilize fat for use as an energy source. Evolutionary times would require just this mechanism. Fasting triggers a main¬tenance function: fat is burned for energy and protein is strictly preserved unless it is required to produce glucose (gluconeo¬genesis) to fuel the brain.

Would you comment on intermittent fasting and its effect on health and longevity? Do you feel that intermittent fasting is completely at odds with achieving op¬timum performance or can it be successfully integrated with a high-level training program?

Intermittent fasting triggers protein sparing maintenance and gene expression that underlines repair processes. Fasting also triggers brief flows of stressor hormones, which make the body more adaptable to stress. Fasting in the context of activity on an intermittent basis has all the benefits of chronic fasting without its downside.

What are your thoughts on pre- and post-workout nutrition?

Before the workout, an empty stomach to maximize GH production. After, I eat a normal meal (Paleo style) no sooner than an hour later. Usually, I hike, walk or shoot baskets after a workout. Absolutely do not drink “gainer” drinks or other high glucose supplements (they all are high in glucose). The sugar shuts down the GH response too early and we have already seen that muscle grows in a high GH environment, even in the face of brief caloric deficit. Body builders tend to have high insulin levels, even with their muscle mass soak¬ing up the glucose. Partly, they promote this to grow and may even inject insulin to grow more. But, there is an awfully high rate of cancer among body builders and the longevity, though hard to judge since I can find no studies of it, seems rather low. Remember, things that make muscle grow, like high IGF1, 2, 3 and 4 levels also make cancer cells grow more rapidly. Cancer is just a maverick cell that doesn’t obey the body’s messages to cease.

Please describe “a day in the life,” training, meals, play, etc?

There is no typical day. There is some pat¬tern, but lots of variety. Since I am now retired, it is almost not fair to describe my day and hard to do as well since I do what¬ever I wish. Presently, I am working out three days a week in order to rehabilitate some old injuries from sports. I am also working on core stability and dynamic sta¬bility and balance. Until the injuries cease to interfere with heavy lifting, I am doing fairly light weights but at a high pace and close to failure. I am using a trainer for the first time to check my form as my injuries have caused me to lose some form and it is helpful to have another eye to watch for a loss of form. He is very good and a stickler for form. It is nice to have someone help me do negatives in safety as I thrive on them. I am a primarily fast twitch meso¬morph and respond well to eccentrics.

Do you have a favorite Paleo-friendly recipe to share with our readers?

Probably my lunch salad is my favorite. A can of Trader Joe’s Alaskan Salmon over a bed of lettuce, fresh spices, plenty of garlic and raw vegetables such as red cabbage, broccoli, and or cauliflower. I use olive oil and balsamic vinegar for dressing. These vegetables are not only cancer fighting, but they also block DHT (the pros¬tate promoting metabolite of testosterone) and conserve testosterone by preventing it from being converted to estrogen. Re¬member, what you put in is not necessarily what you get. Inject testosterone and you get more estrogen and a shut down of testosterone production.

Finally, is there a timeline for the completion of Evolutionary Fitness?

Well, no. I have my doubts about how it might sell. If I do finish, which this interview is encouraging me to do, it will be to put this message out there.