Nassim Taleb advocates free style expertise:
“My idea of naturalistic/Paleo fitness: the broadest domain bandwidth, freedom from the captivity & injurious gym machines (resembling Tayloristic methods in working out). So started walking/sprinting on “rough”, fractal surfaces. I am lucky to have a place within walking distance from the best park for that; along the coastline with close to a mile of rocks. Exhilarating, except for my broken nose. Just as chess skills only help you in chess (we know that those who can play chess games from memory don’t have strong memory for other matters), classroom math only helps in classrooms, weight training in gyms almost only helps you in gyms, a specific sport almost only helps you in that specific sport, and walking on smooth Euclidian surfaces causes injuries somewhere deep inside your soul. When you run and jump on rocks, your entire brain and body are at work; you stretch your back better than with yoga; every muscle in your body is involved; no two movements will be identical (unlike running in gyms); you become yourself.”
I agree mostly, one must stay away from the torture machines in the gyms. Flat surface walking was always a man’s routine though, it’s acceptable and much preferred to the unnatural repetitive motions in a gym or the deranged weight lifting. My second best to the rock formations are the Harvard Stadium steps, I climbed them today, and of course swimming. Taleb mentions in the post Erwan Le Corre who is an advocate of the free style exercise (video) and John Durant, an advocate for the Paleo diet, the pre-agriculture era diet of hunters gatherers. This diet has no grains, sugars or milk. The core of the diet are meat, greens, nuts, berries and vegetables. I must also mention that the highest form of exercise is still a fee style dancing, it’s even unconstrained by the prey or food gathering patterns. And this precisely is the subject of the song by the Killers – Are we Human or are we Dancer?