Our bodies are hardwired to be as lazy as possible

When you’re lying on a couch, watching TV and eating snacks, your body is expending the lowest amount of energy it can.

And when you’re at the gym? Working out? Hard?

Your body is expending the lowest amount of energy it can.

That’s the finding of an intriguing new study from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Researchers are revealing that any time your body adjusts – to a new activity level or to any form of physical obstacle – it always picks the option that expends the least energy.

Couch potatoes of the world, rise up!

(Or stay right where you are. Apparently it doesn’t matter.)

SFU PhD candidate Jessica Selinger is part of a team that studied the ways people adjust when their normal walking is impeded by an outside limitation.

“What we found is that people will change really fundamental characteristics of their gait,” Selinger told Yahoo Canada.

“These are characteristics that you would have had over years and years of your life, for millions and millions of steps. And you’ll change those just to save a few per cent in energetic cost.”

Test subjects were fitted with an electronic exoskeleton on their legs. This enabled researchers to apply pressures at angles that made normal walking difficult.

“It just seems to be that this is an objective of our nervous system,” she explained.

“If you go out for a walk at lunchtime, you’re choosing to expend energy. But in the background, your nervous system has this internal goal of trying to find the cheapest or most economical way for you to do it.

“In essence, the way that burns the fewest calories.”

So even when you’re exercising, your body is actively conserving calories.

“It’s not the greatest news for you if you’re exercising specifically just to lose weight, because the nervous system is working against you in some senses,” said Selinger.

“But if you’re training for a marathon or trying to win a race, this is a good thing because you don’t have to worry about finding the most economical way to move. Your body is doing that for you, saving you some energy so you’ll have it for the final push in a race.”

Does this mean our bodies are inherently lazy? That we always try to do as little as possible?

“I personally prefer the word ‘efficient',” she said.

“We can make conscious choices to counteract any laziness that we may have, but as we do, our nervous system is making us really efficient, which is typically a good thing.”

Selinger found herself amazed with the level of efficiency her team uncovered.

“If we think about our prehistoric ancestors, they didn’t necessarily have the calories available to them that a lot of us have today. This could have been a really important adaptation of the nervous system, to help stave off starvation.”

Something to think about, the next time you are – or aren’t – working out.