Return to Monke for Better Health

There are several reasons why I’ve become a health freak lately, but one of them is that I started experiencing lower back pain.

Sitting around all day is bad news, so I decided to start exercising.

After looking into various things, right now I feel like “running” and “hanging” suit me best.

Running#

This one is simple. Running improves cardiorespiratory fitness, and by increasing a calorie deficit to burn through fat, you can avoid all kinds of lifestyle diseases.

Over the past month, I’ve basically been running according to the following rules:

Never use public transit for distances of 5 km or less
- Except when pressed for time, or when arriving at the destination drenched in sweat would be inappropriate
Run at least 20 km in total per week
Keep my “Form” on intervals.icu within the “Optimal” range

What Is “Form”?#

By the way, this is what I mean by Form:

Form = Fitness (42-day exponentially weighted moving average of training load) - Fatigue (7-day exponentially weighted moving average of training load)

and apparently, staying in the -10 to -30 range is just right.

Benefits#

I can clearly feel the improvement in my cardiorespiratory fitness. Even when running the same distance at the same pace, my heart rate doesn’t rise nearly as much as it did at the very beginning.

Thanks to Miss Nagatoro and Running, My Heart Got Stronger

However, the mental health benefits feel even greater than the physical ones.

Since you can’t look at a PC or smartphone while running, it automatically becomes a bit of a digital detox. Apparently runner’s high is caused by “endocannabinoids,” so maybe it also serves as a mild form of meditation.

It’s also fun to leisurely explore the space between spots you’d normally just fast-travel between by train or car. Noticing how previously disconnected points actually connect and watching the streetscapes gradually shift brings the same kind of joy as uncovering the map in an open-world game.

And I feel like my sleep quality has improved, too. I’ve struggled with insomnia for a long time, but at the very least, falling asleep has gotten dramatically easier.

Hanging#

On the other hand, people also say that running alone doesn’t build that much muscle. Apparently, increasing muscle mass to boost your basal metabolic rate is quite important when it comes to losing weight, so I wanted to put some effort into that as well.

However, going to a gym or buying dumbbells costs money. It’s not like I want to get jacked and show off my muscles, nor do I want to be able to lift heavy weights.

When I went looking for good bodyweight exercises that don’t require any equipment, I found mentions that hanging from a bar is great.

Apparently, hanging has all sorts of benefits.

The feeling of gravity elongating your spine is, quite simply, amazing. The idea that relieving pressure from a spine compressed in daily life is good for you sounds somewhat convincing. Whether this actually translates into real health benefits, though, I don’t really know.

From a strength training perspective, hanging is said to be effective not only for grip strength, but also to some extent for everything from your arms to your shoulders. In particular, the movement called the “hanging leg raise,” where you lift your legs while hanging, also trains your abs and is said to have a dramatic effect on relieving lower back pain. And in fact, I do feel that effect to some degree.

↓ Something like this.

A List of Parks with Pull-Up Bars#

Finding a bar to hang from, however, is surprisingly difficult. Flashy play equipment has been removed from parks, and children’s monkey bars aren’t tall enough, leaving your feet touching the ground.

That’s where the following map comes in:

懸垂のできる公園リスト

懸垂のできる公園を調べてスタンプラリー的に巡って写真をアップしていきます。地域別、遊具名別のページもあるよ。懸垂をしよう。

kensui-to-watashi.com

Volunteers put together this directory of parks where you can do pull-ups, and thanks to it, I was able to find a free hanging bar at just the right height.

Why does this kind of content even exist? For the first time in a while, I felt the sheer wonder of the internet.

Conclusion#

So that’s how my recent workout routine consists of running and hanging. Training lower-body strength and cardiorespiratory endurance with the former, and upper-body strength with the latter, feels like it brings everything into a well-balanced, solid shape… or so it seems to me.

I personally like the theory—which I recall reading in something like Mean Genes—that “human bodies are still stuck in the hunter-gatherer era, and having to use our bodies in ways completely different from back then in modern society is the cause of all our problems.”

Please note that the functions and structure of our mind (brain) were largely completed back when our ancestors were living as hunter-gatherers. This suggests that the new living environments we acquired after the hunter-gatherer era ended (such as agrarian societies and globalized society) may actually make life harder to navigate for our minds (the mismatch hypothesis: Lieberman, 2013).

進化心理学で言えること・言えないこと（早稲田大学文学部教授：福川康之） #その心理学ホント？｜「こころ」のための専門メディア　金子書房

進化心理学とはどういう学問か「進化」の話は誰でも聞いたことがあるはずです．キリンの首が長い理由を説明するという，あの理論です．簡単に見ていきましょう．私たちが動物園で見るキリンはすべて長い首を持っていますが，彼らの祖先たちのなかには首の短いものもいたようです．ただし，彼らが生活していたサバンナでは，高いところにある木の葉を食べたり，遠くの敵を早く発見したりできる，長い首を持っているほうが有利でした（自然選択）．ここで重要なのは，首の長いキリンは，首の短いキリンの親よりも首の長いキリンの親から生まれやすいことです（遺伝）．ときには首の短いキリンから首の長いキリンが生まれたり，首の長い

www.note.kanekoshobo.co.jp

If this theory is correct, it makes a lot of sense that recreating the kinds of exercises ancient humans likely did on a regular basis—such as “running long distances” or “hanging from trees”—would benefit both physical and mental health.

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↑ Made with nano-banana. Incredible.