Endurance Lessons From the Palaeolithic Era

I often feel as though some of life’s most important questions can be answered by looking into the past. Spanish philosopher George Santayana claimed: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Simply, those ignorant of history will repeat the mistakes of those made in the past. This applies across all domains, but certainly applies to endurance sport. The training practises of Igloi, Lydiard or Zatopek have laid the foundations of modern day practises. The Norwegian method - initially popularised by Marius Bakken and more recently the Ingebrigtsen brothers and Olav Aleksander Bu - tends to include multiple “double threshold” training days per week. These training days include two workouts, one in the morning and one in the evening, where blood lactate is close to its maximal steady state. The morning workout often includes longer repetitions (for example, 6 minutes) and the evening workout includes repetitions of a shorter length (1 minute). The evening workout, where the repetitions are shorter, can be ran at a velocity that exceeds the usual maximal steady state as the repetitions are too short for blood lactate to exceed its maximal steady state. This concept, although popularised by the Norwegians, is an Igloi training principle stemming from the mid-1900’s. Blood lactate monitoring has also become extremely popular across all endurance sports in recent years (again, popularised by the Norwegians), but had been used by Jan Olbrecht many years before Olympiatoppen (Norway’s Olympic Centre) conducted their first lactate pilot-test on their athletes. 

A major factor in Norway’s endurance sport success (which has been built on the foundations of years of sensible political decision making) is their ability to analyse history and identify what may be applicable to the modern day. However, I believe it’s possible to go back much further than the 1900’s to identify clues as to what may be the most effective way of achieving improvements in endurance performance. Evolution is extremely delayed and it’s hypothesised that the modern day body is fine-tuned to the everyday life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors (Boullosa, 2013), which was only 0.4% of human history ago. This means we have a period of close to 10,000 years of exploration to analyse patterns to identify what may be the best way of training and treating the human body.

An ignorance towards this hunter-gatherer lifestyle is a neglect of our genes, which can have huge implications for modern day public health. Our circadian rhythms are mostly governed by natural light, but the rise in screen-based technology in the last 10-15 years has thrown a spanner into the works of the rhythm which may have contributed to the average 6,000 fatal car crashes (through drowsy driving) per year in the United States. With zero available technology available during the hunter-gatherer era, all food was natural, which explains why a greater consumption of ultra-processed foods is now associated with a rise in all cause mortality. If our bodies evolved quickly, we would have (or soon will) develop a resistance to the harmful effects of ultra-processed foods, but this is not the case and evolutions of such speed have never occurred throughout human history. 

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not a perfect representation of how modern day humans should treat their bodies, but it’s a lifestyle that has crafted the modern day genomic makeup. Just like the Norwegians, when chasing improved physical performance, it’s important not to blindly follow the lifestyles of different eras but to identify what aspects of different lifestyles might successfully translate to the modern day. There have been vast amounts of post-palaeolithic innovation that has hugely benefited the modern day human in both a general health and endurance performance sense: health wise, the increased consumption of hard food has been associated with humans’ increase in brain mass while the invention of footwear - specifically carbon plated footwear - has been associated with improved running economy above certain velocities. Those in the palaeolithic era didn’t choose to run/walk barefoot, they just didn’t have access to shoes.

By analysing the activity patterns of those whose lifestyle our genes are designed for, we may be in a better place to identify what training methods may provide physiological adaptations in the most specific way. It’s important to begin with a discussion on the variances in motivations for exercise between modern humans and hunter-gatherers. Exercise was vital for survival (through the retrieval of food) during the palaeolithic era but that no longer applies. Thousands of years ago, humans moved to eat but now humans eat to move. Despite this important contrast - which we will refer to later in this article - there are many palaeolithic exercise practises that are transferable to the modern day endurance athlete. Firstly, the vast amount of movement during this era was conducted at a low intensity, likely due to the lack of available carbohydrates forcing a reliance on fat metabolism. Despite modern day endurance athletes never lacking access to carbohydrates, the majority of exercise is still conducted at a lower intensity (often below an intensity in which the autonomic nervous system can recover from within 24 hours, which tends to align with the first lactate threshold). A systematic review by Molmen, Amquist and Skattebo (2025) which included almost 6,000 participants, found that low intensity training can be equally as effective as high intensity and sprint interval training over the long term. The ideas that more stress = more adaptation may be accurate over the short term, but does not apply over >4-5 months, which may be explained by thousands of years of our ancestors completing low intensity exercise to forage, hunt and gather other resources.

Outside of low intensity training, it’s suggested that there was a demand for occasional sprinting/high intensity work but completed in a structured manner, rather than sporadically. The reasons for this aren’t totally known, but it’s known that possessing an expectation for a stressor (in this case, a the physical stress of a sprint or high intensity movement) may enhance the body’s physical condition to handle that upcoming stressor (through an increased motor unit recruitment or adrenaline response, for example). When a human expects something, they’re often better prepared for it. For example, the most brutal rugby tackles tend to occur when the pass receiver is unaware of the incoming tackle attempt. A lack of awareness from the pass receiver prevents a physical response (often in the form of “bracing” or “tensing”), making them much more likely to be the victim of strong contact. A similar concept can be applied to running: when we complete repetitions in a structured manner, our bodies may physically adapt to ensure that intensity is completed at a higher quality. 

Therefore, if the training focus is on high quality repetitions (the quality of high intensity repetitions tends to take priority during the competition-phase of the majority of endurance athlete’s training blocks) then ensuring they’re completed in a structured format may be an effective intervention in ensuring that quality is achieved to the highest possible degree. This could apply to both extremely short repetitions (like strides or sprints) or to longer repetitions. However, it’s unlikely that those during the palaeolithic era completed many continuous high intensity efforts due to the lack of available glycogen. This may explain why some studies suggest short repetition lengths yield better performance improvements than intensity-matched longer repetition lengths (Rønnestad, 2020). It’s possible that we respond better to short bursts of intensity due to our genetic makeup expecting that to be a form of work crucial for life and death. Jan Olbrecht, mentor to Bob Bowman (who went on to coach Michael Phelps to 23 Olympic gold medals), followed an “extensive spiced with intensive” approach to training sessions, an approach that almost completely aligns with what we know of the activity patterns of hunter-gatherer populations where the vast majority of work is completed at a low intensity, but also includes small “bursts” of high intensity work. 

An example workout could be: 60 minute low intensity run followed by 6 x 8 second hill sprints with a 3 minute static recovery in between repetitions or 20 minutes low intensity, 3 x 12 x 30s/15s, 20 minutes low intensity

It has been suggested that the hunter-gatherer valued recovery in between more physically demanding days of hunting or scavenging in order to be fully prepared for the next physically demanding day. A physically demanding day likely resulted in enough food to cover energetic demands for a short period, before having to retrieve more food. This method is representative of a polarised endurance training model, where physically demanding days are separated by multiple “easier” days. However, many of the physically demanding training days in a polarised model are 1) pre-determined in the training programme and 2) measured by intensity. This varies with the methods of those 10,000 years ago, who measured work demand by intensity and volume (due to the inability to conduct continuous high intensity work as a result of a lack of carbohydrates). For example, a physically demanding day for a hunter-gatherer may have been a five hours of low intensity movement, despite the internal load of such an effort likely representing 99%> in the first zone of a five zone model. The intensity of their work was not pre-determined either, which contrasts to the common practise of modern endurance sport where large amounts of training are pre-determined with smaller adjustments made to suit the context of that specific day. In an ideal world, I believe that an athlete self-regulating when to complete their most physically demanding workouts would be best. However, as mentioned previously, the contrast in motivations between hunter-gatherer and modern day endurance athletes makes this situation more complex. Humans are no longer required to complete exercise to stay alive, meaning there's a much bigger likelihood of being demotivated and willing to skip workouts if conditions aren't perfect. 10,000 years ago, exercise was governed by the amount of food that was retrieved in the previous days. Modern day humans are not naturally motivated to exercise because there isn't a direct reward at the end, meaning having pre-determined programmes and training workouts will reduce the effectiveness of demotivation and potentially hold the athlete accountable.

The nutritional practises of the hunter-gatherers can also stimulate an interesting discussion on endurance sport nutritional ideas. Studies on hunter-gatherer populations estimate that their diets included up to 35% more protein and 40% less carbohydrates compared to the modern day human (Cordain et al. 2000). As previously discussed, this forced those hunter-gatherers to complete low intensity exercise due to their reliance on fat metabolism. It’s difficult to deny the potential benefits of low carbohydrate (or even fasted) training on fat adaptation (Geil and Nybo, 2021), but it’s certainly possible to argue whether this type of diet is optimal over the long term. The reality is that the majority of ultra-endurance athletes already underestimate their caloric demands (Colangelo, 2025), putting them at an increased risk of low energy availability which can lead to damaging conditions like relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S). The most important factor in an endurance athlete making improvements is consistency, and fuelling sufficiently is vital in ensuring consistency is possible. Although every athlete may see benefits from low carbohydrate or fasted training, this type of diet should be exclusive to those who need it to make further improvements (for example, someone like Kilian Jornet, who’s possibly the greatest mountain runner of all time). Someone like Jornet has developed such an immense level of fitness that requires non-running stressors to stimulate further adaptations, and altering diet or fuelling may be effective. However, all recreational athletes will certainly continue to improve with consistent training, which is made possible through sufficient fuelling. 

In summary, many of the staple endurance principles are likely so effective because they're what our genes are designed to withstand. This is most applicable to low intensity running. For the layman, it could (rightfully) be assumed that the best way of achieving training adaptations is through large volumes of high intensity work ("no pain, no gain"), but through studies of the fastest endurance athletes of all time and our ancestors (dating back to 10,000+ years ago), it's clear that this is not true. I do believe there's more to be explored regarding short repetition workouts, though. Of course, I'm not abandoning the idea of long or continuous high intensity work (especially due to their value in regards to race specificity), but both research (although still small in quantity) and history tells us that short repetitions combined with short recovery periods may be effective in inducing aerobic adaptations. This is the first article on this topic and there I plan on re-writing this following more learning.

References

Boullosa, D. A., Abreu, L., Varela-Sanz, A., & Mujika, I. (2013). Do olympic athletes train as in the Paleolithic era?. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.), 43(10), 909–917. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-013-0086-1

Colangelo, J., Smith, A., Henninger, K., Buadze, A., & Liebrenz, M. (2025). Exploring the presentation of REDs in ultra endurance sport: a review. Journal of eating disorders, 13(1), 210. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-025-01381-0

Cordain, L., Miller, J. B., Eaton, S. B., Mann, N., Holt, S. H., & Speth, J. D. (2000). Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 71(3), 682–692. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/71.3.682

Gejl, K. D., & Nybo, L. (2021). Performance effects of periodized carbohydrate restriction in endurance trained athletes - a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 18(1), 37. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12970-021-00435-3

Mølmen, K. S., Almquist, N. W., & Skattebo, Ø. (2025). Effects of Exercise Training on Mitochondrial and Capillary Growth in Human Skeletal Muscle: A Systematic Review and Meta-Regression. Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.), 55(1), 115–144. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-024-02120-2

Rønnestad, B. R., Hansen, J., Nygaard, H., & Lundby, C. (2020). Superior performance improvements in elite cyclists following short-interval vs effort-matched long-interval training. Scandinavian journal of medicine & science in sports, 30(5), 849–857. https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.13627