Harvard professor debunks the ‘10,000 steps per day’ myth | Daniel Lieberman

Did you know treadmills were invented as prison torture machines? Modern exercise is confusing. Harvard professor Dan Lieberman sets it straight. Subscribe to Big Think on YouTube ► Up next, Harvard professor debunks the biggest exercise myths ► Today, most of us tend to medicalize exercise, turning it into something that we “have” to do. Case in point: the treadmill. If our main goal was enjoyment, there’s no way we’d regularly spend 45 minutes walking in place on these expensive machines. But our relationship with exercise — or, more generally, physical activity — was not always so discrete and joyless. For much of human history, people got plenty of physical activity by not only walking long distances, but also by doing activities that were both necessary and socially rewarding, like hunting, dancing, and sports. Harvard biologist Daniel Lieberman argues it’s t