By Mukaila Kareem
Modern fitness culture has developed a love affair with scientific sounding measurements such as VO₂ max, lactate thresholds, heart rate zones, power outputs and anaerobic capacity. These are simply technical ways of saying how well your body uses oxygen, how fast your muscles begin to tire, how hard your heart is working, how much power your muscles can produce and how long you can keep moving without oxygen based energy. These terms are marketed as the new commandments of health and people are told that longevity and metabolic competence depend on chasing elite numbers. But these jargons did not arise from deeper understanding. They arose from deeper disconnection linked to a world that no longer moves naturally by inventing vocabulary to explain what it can no longer feel.
Interestingly, the industry now pushes the idea that a low VO₂ max is a warning sign of early death and therefore creates a climate of fear that keeps people chasing maximal effort routines. The narrative sounds urgent because modern bodies are sedentary and deconditioned, and the jargon gives that discomfort a scientific cover. Yet VO₂ max is only a modern measurement of something ancient that has always been in plain sight except for lack of comparative insight inside the self adulating bubble of laboratory knowledge. In plain terms, VO₂ max is a way of describing how well the heart, lungs and muscles work together when life demands effort. Our ancestors never needed the number. They simply moved all day and built endurance without ever seeing a score.
Among the Hadza of Tanzania, one of the few communities still living close to our ancestral template, no one talks about performance metrics. Hadza women walk five miles or more each day gathering tubers, carrying water, collecting firewood and tending to their families. Hadza men often walk seven to ten miles while tracking game, exploring terrain and bringing food home. Their cardiovascular strength is built by their lifestyle of uninterrupted hours of slow steady movement. They do not chase numbers. They live physiology.
A recent story from Mexico exposes just how distorted the modern obsession with metrics has become. In August 2025, Candelaria Rivas Ramos, a Rarámuri woman from northern Mexico, won the sixty three kilometer Ultramaratón de los Cañones. She ran in a traditional handmade skirt and simple sandals without sponsors, without a coach and without a single performance metric guiding her preparation. Reports noted that she walked fourteen hours from her remote village just to reach the starting line. That long approach was simply life and not something called training which could have sidelined the best trained modern athlete surrounded by a battery of handlers.Candelaria’s achievement follows the legacy of María Lorena Ramírez, another Rarámuri runner who gained international attention after winning a fifty kilometer race in 2017 wearing similar traditional attire. These women, living in rugged canyon communities and walking long distances for daily needs, reveal a truth hidden behind modern fitness culture. Endurance comes from continuous movement woven into everyday life. It does not require gadgets, metrics or high intensity routines packaged as science.
The deeper problem is that we created the sedentarism that requires these jargons in the first place. Instead of reclaiming the all day movement that shaped human physiology, modern exercise culture sells concentrated bursts of effort wrapped in technical language. Metrics become marketing to unsuspecting audiences scared into believing that their health is defined by a laboratory measurement rather than by whether they simply move through the world the way humans always have.
Reclaiming daily walking will do more for human metabolism than any target number on a fitness chart. Humans were not designed for heroic bursts followed by twenty three sedentary hours. We were designed for slow steady endurance lived across the day. And that is the quiet humiliation of the modern fitness culture. While experts warn the public about low VO₂ max, indigenous women in handmade skirts walk fourteen hours to the starting line and win ultramarathons without ever hearing the term. If that contrast does not reveal how deeply we have confused health with jargon, nothing will.
Mukaila Kareem, a doctor of physiotherapy and physical therapy advocate, writes from the USA and can be reached via makkareem5@gmail.com
