January 10, 2010
The New Age Cavemen and the City
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
LIKE many New York bachelors, John Durant tries to keep his apartment presentable — just in case he should ever bring home a future Mrs. Durant. He shares the fifth-floor walk-up with three of his buddies, but the place is tidy and he never forgets to water the plants.
The one thing that Mr. Durant worries might spook a female guest is his most recent purchase: a three-foot-tall refrigerated meat locker that sits in a corner of his living room. That is where he keeps his organ meat and deer ribs.
Mr. Durant, 26, who works in online advertising, is part of a small New York subculture whose members seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.
Or as he and some of his friends describe themselves, they are cavemen.
The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.
These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.
In a city crowded with vegetarian restaurants and yoga studios, the cavemen defy other people’s ideas of healthy living. There is an indisputable macho component to the lifestyle.
“I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,” Mr. Durant said.
The caveman lifestyle in New York was once a solitary pursuit. But Mr. Durant, who looks like a cheerful Jim Morrison, with shoulder-length curly hair, has emerged over the last year as a chieftain of sorts among 10 or so other cavemen. He has cooked communal dinners in his apartment on East 90th Street and taught others to make jerky from his meat locker.
The tribe is not indigenous to New York. Several followers of the lifestyle took up the practice after researching health concerns online and discovering descriptions of so-called paleolithic diets and exercise programs followed by people around the country and in Europe. The group’s lone woman, Melissa McEwen, 23, was searching for a treatment for stomach troubles. She started reading the blog of a 72-year-old retired economics professor who lives in Utah, Arthur De Vany.
Mr. De Vany’s blog promotes what he calls Evolutionary Fitness. Like his disciples in New York, he believes that ancient humans could perform physical feats that would awe the gym rats of today.
His followers believe that he too is capable of fearsome feats. When Mr. Durant told a gathering of New York cavemen that he had seen Mr. De Vany at a seminar in Las Vegas, Matthew Sanocki, 34, asked if Mr. De Vany looked as muscular in the flesh as in pictures on his blog.
“He looks great,” Mr. Durant said. “You feel like he could, at a moment’s notice, charge at you and trample you.”
Already, the New York cavemen are getting attention from the patriarchs of the paleo movement. One such figure, Erwan Le Corre, a Frenchman whom the magazine Men’s Health said “may rank as one of the most all-around physically fit men on the planet,” stopped by Mr. Durant’s while visiting the city in December. The men sealed their friendship with what both described as a bare-chested — and in Mr. Le Corre’s case, barefoot — run across the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges on a frigid night.
Mr. Le Corre, 38, who once made soap for a living, promotes what he calls “mouvement naturel” at exercise retreats in West Virginia and elsewhere. His workouts include scooting around the underbrush on all fours, leaping between boulders, playing catch with stones, and other activities at which he believes early man excelled. These are the “primal, essential skills that I believe everyone should have,” he said in an interview.
Loren Cordain, a professor at Colorado State University and the author of “The Paleo Diet,” links the movement to a 1985 New England Journal of Medicine article, which proclaimed that the “diet of our remote ancestors may be a reference standard for modern human nutrition.”
Another source of paleo converts is CrossFit, a fitness program known for grueling workouts combining weightlifting and gymnastics. CrossFit trainers, who teach at more than 1,200 gyms and other affiliates across the country, generally encourage clients to follow either a caveman diet or the Zone diet, which requires tracking calories. “Some of the gyms have hardcore paleo folks, and if you’re a member of that gym then you’re paleo, while other gyms are hardcore Zone,” said Anthony Budding, who manages the content on CrossFit.com.
Experts in early humans dispute some of the tenets of latter-day paleos, including the belief that fasting is beneficial and that the body is unequipped to handle an agriculture-based diet.
Still, there is a “sharp contrast” between the strength and fitness of our distant ancestors and us, said Clark Larsen, a physical anthropologist at Ohio State University. “The male or female of 12,000 to 15,000 years ago will be considerably stronger and in better shape,” he said. Unfortunately, life was short: If you made it to age 30 or so, you had done well.
New York might seem a challenging environment for the aspiring caveman. Entire professions, oblivious to the rising and setting of the sun, toil in the glare of computer monitors. More to the point, the city has gone so far as to outlaw both hunting and gathering, at least when committed in a city park. Uprooting a plant, snatching a bird egg or trapping a squirrel in a park are misdemeanors punishable by up to 90 days of jail.
“I like New York, but it’s hard to sit in a Midtown office all day,” said Ms. McEwen, a slim brunette, who prefers the term “hunter-gatherer” to describe her lifestyle.
But the surprising consensus of the paleos is that the city is a paradise.
“New York is the only city in America where you can walk,” said Nassim Taleb, an investor who gained a measure of celebrity for his theories, described in “The Black Swan,” that extreme events can roil financial markets. “People treat walking like exercise,” he said, “but walking is how humans become humans.”
Mr. Taleb, who rejects the label “caveman” in favor of “paleo,” avoids offices (including his own) as much as he can. He prefers to think on the go. Dressed in a tweed coat and Italian loafers, this paleo man is a flâneur, sometimes walking miles a day, ranging from SoHo to 86th Street.
Instead of eating three square meals a day, many of New York’s cavemen fast intermittently, up to 36 hours at a stretch. Fasting is a topic of banter at the Union Square West apartment where Matthew Sanocki and his brother, Andrew, live and run design-related e-commerce Web sites.
“Are you going for a 24?” Matthew might ask Andrew, describing a fast by its duration in hours.
Andrew Sanocki, 38, a former Navy officer, explained that he preferred working out on an empty stomach near the end of a fast, and then following up with a large meal. This is a common caveman schedule, intended to reflect the exertion that ancient humans put into finding food. It is as if, Mr. Sanocki explained, “we’ve gone out and killed something, and now we have to eat it.”
Another caveman trick involves donating blood frequently. The idea is that various hardships might have occasionally left ancient humans a pint short. Asked when he last gave blood, Andrew Sanocki said it had been three months. He and his brother looked at each other. “We’re due,” Andrew said.
Most of the cavemen at Mr. Durant’s gatherings are lean and well-muscled, and have glowing skin. A few wear trim beards. Some claim that they no longer get sick. Several identify themselves as libertarians.
They regularly grumble about vegans, whom they regard as a misguided, rival tribe. But much of the conversation is spent parsing the law of the jungle. The most severe interpretations generally come from Vladimir Averbukh, a jaunty red-headed Web manager for the city who was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Upon visiting Mr. Durant’s apartment for the first time, in August, Mr. Averbukh scowled at a tomato plant on his host’s roof deck.
“Cavemen don’t eat nightshades,” Mr. Averbukh, 29, said. He explained that tomatoes are part of the nightshade family, arguing that they are native to the New World and could not have been part of humanity’s earliest diet. Mr. Durant shrugged. (Mr. Durant said later that there was nothing uncavemannish about eating tomatoes.)
Mr. Averbukh is a pre-Promethean sort of caveman. Much of his nourishment comes from grass-fed ground beef, which he eats raw. In a bow to the times, he sometimes uses a fork.
The other cavemen in New York find Mr. Averbukh’s preference for raw beef a little strange.
“I draw the line at sushi,” Andrew Sanocki said. “Paleo man had fire, didn’t he?”
Beyond Mr. Durant’s tribe, it is likely that other New Yorkers are practicing a milder, diet-focused version of the lifestyle. An Upper East Side physician, Grant Macaulay, said he has recommended the diet to hundreds of his patients, and sends them to Barnes & Noble to buy a copy of Mr. Cordain’s “Paleo Diet.”
But these computer-savvy cavemen are not interested in living off the grid, like others who share their ambivalence toward the indoor life. And their eating and exercise habits aside, the cavemen say they have no nostalgia for the prehistoric world.
Mr. Averbukh, who drives around town in a red Smart Car, said the thought of “throwing yourself in the forest with a stick and seeing how long you survive” held no appeal.
The cavemen are happy in the modern world, they say, but simply want to regain the fortitude that they attribute to their ancient ancestors.
“The problem is that as soon as we get out of our temperature-controlled environments, we’re weak,” Mr. Durant said. “Where’s that wildness that allowed humans to flourish throughout history?”
With this view of humanity’s past, what does Mr. Durant see in his future? One idea is a restaurant called B.C. or Wild. Just in case he develops the right business model, Mr. Durant has bought the domain name hunter-gatherer.com.
WOD
Run 1 mile
100 Pullups
100 Pushups
100 Situps
100 Back ext
100 Squats
Run 1 mile
Food Rules by Michael Pollan
1. Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants
2. Don't eat anything your grandmother would not recognize as food
3.Avoid foods that no ordinary human would have in the pantry
4. Avoid foods that contain high-fructose corn syrup
5.Avoid foods that have some form of sugar
6.Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients
7. Avoid food products containing an ingredient a third grader cannot pronounce
8.Avoid food that makes health claims
9.Avoid food products with the word "lite, lowfat or non fat" in their names
10.Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not
Endurance
3+ hours after WOD or at 5:30pm for POSE practice
2x12 minute intervals with 2 minutes rest between
Nutritionist and author Jonny Bowden has created several lists of healthful foods people should be eating but aren’t. But some of his favorites, like purslane, guava and goji berries, aren’t always available at regular grocery stores. I asked Dr. Bowden, author of “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth,” to update his list with some favorite foods that are easy to find but don’t always find their way into our shopping carts. Here’s his advice.
Beets: Think of beets as red spinach, Dr. Bowden said, because they are a rich source of folate as well as natural red pigments that may be cancer fighters.
How to eat: Fresh, raw and grated to make a salad. Heating decreases the antioxidant power.
Cabbage: Loaded with nutrients like sulforaphane, a chemical said to boost cancer-fighting enzymes.
How to eat: Asian-style slaw or as a crunchy topping on burgers and sandwiches.
Swiss chard: A leafy green vegetable packed with carotenoids that protect aging eyes.
How to eat it: Chop and saute in olive oil.
Cinnamon: May help control blood sugar and cholesterol.
How to eat it: Sprinkle on coffee or oatmeal.
Pomegranate juice: Appears to lower blood pressure and loaded with antioxidants.
How to eat: Just drink it.
Dried plums: Okay, so they are really prunes, but they are packed with antioxidants.
How to eat: Wrapped in prosciutto and baked.
Pumpkin seeds: The most nutritious part of the pumpkin and packed with magnesium; high levels of the mineral are associated with lower risk for early death.
How to eat: Roasted as a snack, or sprinkled on salad.
Sardines: Dr. Bowden calls them “health food in a can.” They are high in omega-3’s, contain virtually no mercury and are loaded with calcium. They also contain iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, copper and manganese as well as a full complement of B vitamins.
How to eat: Choose sardines packed in olive or sardine oil. Eat plain, mixed with salad, on toast, or mashed with dijon mustard and onions as a spread.
Turmeric: The “superstar of spices,” it may have anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties.
How to eat: Mix with scrambled eggs or in any vegetable dish.
Frozen blueberries: Even though freezing can degrade some of the nutrients in fruits and vegetables, frozen blueberries are available year-round and don’t spoil; associated with better memory in animal studies.
How to eat: Blended with yogurt or chocolate soy milk and sprinkled with crushed almonds.
Canned pumpkin: A low-calorie vegetable that is high in fiber and immune-stimulating vitamin A; fills you up on very few calories.
How to eat: Mix with a little butter, cinnamon and nutmeg.
'Twas the night before CrossFit, when all through the gym
Not a creature was stirring, and the lights were all dim;
The jump ropes were hung by the GHD with care,
In hopes that Pukey the Clown soon would be there;
The CrossFitters were nestled all snug in their beds,
While vision of kettle-bells swung in their heads;
And Conor tool off his Vibroms, as Catlin rolled out her quad,
For they had just settled down after a long grueling WOD,
When outside the room there arose such a clatter,
Conor sprang from his box to see what was the matter.
Away to the door he flew like a flash
Stood up too quickly and threw up in the trash.
When, what to his wondering eyes should appear,
But a sick looking clown, with all sorts of gear,
With a little sly look, ever so lightly and quick,
Conor knew in a moment that that clown was sure to be a dick.
And he whistled and shouted, and called them by name;
"Now, Speeler! now, Wolf! now OPT and Bozman!
On Everett! on Freddy! and Don't forget Glassmen!
To the top of the rope! to the target on the wall!
Now dash away! Dash away! Until you all fall!
As dry heaves that before the wild vomiting fly,
When he meets with an obstacle, he doesn't feel shy!
So up to CrossFit the Clown he did fly,
With a sled full of toys, Pukey must have been high!
And then, with a twisting, Conor heard at the door,
The pounding and pawing of that stupid clown whore.
As Conor drew in his head and was turning around,
Bursting through the door, came Pukey the Clown.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of weights he had flung on his back,
And he looked like Jessie Gray as a matter of fact.
his face--how is san! his arms were so hairy!
His eyes were so red, he looked freaking scary!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
That I must repeat: o what a hoe:
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a narrow face and a real lanky belly,
To tell you the truth he was really quite smelly.
He was awkward and wierd, that old CrossFitter clown,
And Catlin laughed when she was him, that's when the clown started to frown;
A twitch to his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave Conor to worry the clown was half dead;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And loaded all the bars and then did a Split Jerk,
And just before running as he got ready to Pose,
you could honestly see, he was way on his toes;
He sprang to his sled, to give his team a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down on the Pistol.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
"Get your protein on and have a good-night"
Go to the Photo and Video Section for more Christmas fun!
Thursday December 24th 9:00 a.m. class only.
Friday December 25th -no classes gym closed
Thursday December 31, 2009-9:00 a.m. class only
Friday January 1, 2010-no classes REST DAY
Permanent change is Schedule-There will only be 5:30 p.m. class on Friday and it will be a Running class!!!!
Starting next week 9:00 a.m. class 5 days a week-Mon-Fri.
WOD
Wednesday, December 23
Lift
3x5 Bench
WOD
3 rds
7 Muscle-ups
21 Burpees with one foot jump
A Device to De-Stress Your Workout
By SARAH BOWEN SHEA
AFTER a night that included several beers and not enough sleep, Keith Gillis, a 31-year-old cyclist in Truro, Nova Scotia, set out on a 74-mile road ride with the caveat that he was feeling fatigued. Yet two-thirds of the way through the ride, Mr. Gillis said, he was setting the pace, riding ahead of his cycling partner. “Even though I’d felt tired at the start, I had the energy to lead, and I wasn’t out of breath,” he said.
To what did he attribute his stamina? A flexible mouth guard by a Canadian company called Makkar that he has been biting on while riding since April. When fellow cyclists ask him why he isn’t winded when they are, Mr. Gillis tells them, “because I have my Superman guard in.”
Mr. Gillis is among a small but growing number of athletes wearing what manufacturers like to call “performance mouthpieces” while cycling, running or weight training. One of the newest tools in a performance-enhancement arsenal, these mouthpieces are light, flexible pieces of molded plastic that fit over the teeth — and are only vaguely reminiscent of that retainer from junior high school or the bulky mouth guards worn by football players.
Dentists say these high-end mouth guards can open up the airways, prevent teeth-clenching and align the jaw. Being able to take in more air while exercising has obvious benefits — more oxygen for working muscles — while a relaxed jaw can decrease stress and help an athlete’s body function more efficiently.
“There is research to support improved breathing mechanics and reduced jaw fatigue,” said Fabio Comana, an exercise physiologist with the American Council on Exercise. “Depending on how you look at it, there is some truth to the claims.”
Unlike regular mouth guards, which are available off the shelf and at modest prices, performance mouthpieces cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars and must be custom-fitted by a dentist. Ordinary mouth guards are usually dropped in boiling water and fitted to the wearer’s teeth to protect against injury. With performance mouth guards, the idea is to reposition the jaw, anywhere from a few millimeters to, in the case of Mr. Gillis, a quarter of an inch sideways.
Two main brands are on the market — Makkar and Under Armour — and each makes the claim that it can increase an athlete’s strength, reduce stress and improve overall performance. Professional athletes have taken note: during the World Series this year, television viewers could see Derek Jeter wearing a mouthpiece made by Bite Tech, the company that developed the technology that Under Armour uses. In early November, Jon Gruden of ESPN said on “Monday Night Football” that many of the New Orleans Saints wore Makkar mouth guards.
The Makkar Pure Power Mouthguard (or PPM, as the company calls it) was introduced in 2006 and costs from $595 to $2,250, not counting the dentist’s fee. Makkar’s Web site touts the mouth guard’s use in diverse sports, including golf, soccer, swimming and tennis, and includes endorsements by the basketball player Shaquille O’Neal and the football player Terrell Owens.
Under Armour’s line of Performance Mouthwear was introduced in September with a basic price of $495. Among the professionals who wear them are Adrian Peterson of the Minnesota Vikings and Marian Gaborik of New York Rangers.
There is a big difference between the two brands: While the Makkar product must be gripped between the upper and lower teeth, the Under Armour one sits only on the lower teeth. But both are meant to set the jaw at ease.
“When you have the jaw in relaxed position, the rest of the body can be more relaxed — it’s a domino effect,” said Kathrina Agatep, a dentist in San Diego who sells both brands.
Repositioning the jaw is not the same as keeping the jaw slack while exercising. “Even if you have your mouth open when you run, that doesn’t necessarily mean the joint and rest of your body is in the maximal alignment,” Dr. Agatep said.
While the products’ potential benefits may sound good, it isn’t clear how much of an edge they actually confer. A study sponsored by Makkar in 2008 at Rutgers University found that athletes wearing Pure Power Mouthguards could jump higher and perform better at their peak, but it did not find that their endurance was any better.
“There wasn’t a huge difference,” said Shawn Arent, an assistant professor in the department of exercise science at Rutgers who led the study. “It’s not the greatest thing since sliced bread. It’s not magic. But for an elite athlete who has been training for a long time, even a 3, 4 or 5 percent increase in performance is a hard thing to come by.”
Similar research by Under Armour and Bite Tech with athletes at the Citadel, a military college, showed that using the mouth guards helped improve endurance and air flow.
Dena Garner, an assistant professor at the Citadel who has studied athletes using Bite Tech devices since 2005, said she thought some of her original findings were “a fluke.” But “every time I’ve done lactate studies with this mouthpiece, I’m finding there is a difference,” she said.
This year Captain Garner used an Under Armour mouthpiece while training for a marathon. Previously she “had been happy with running 10-minute miles,” she said, but wearing the mouthpiece, she consistently ran a mile in as little as 8 minutes. “It was pretty astounding to me,” she said. “I didn’t feel as tired as when I ran the 10-minute-per-mile pace.”
Clenching the teeth can lead to the release of the stress hormone cortisol, which, at excessive levels, can impede athletic performance. Having the Under Armour product in place “interrupts that flight-or-fight response,” said Bob Molhoek, chief executive of Bite Tech.
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