Intro to Tools for Natural Fitness

Part One: Illness to Fitness

You may have noticed two types of physical excellence in your observations of the world. The first you’re likely to encounter in a gym: a big, bulgy type, doing carefully calibrated movements of perfectly planned and balanced weights. This one can lift enormous amounts of weight in a series of mostly standard and recognizable movements. The tools of their training are usually custom made for the purpose of training—manufactured with handles, knurling, and precise amounts of weight.

The other type you might encounter on a farm or in an infantry unit in the military. Often not visually impressive, this type is nevertheless able to sustain uncomfortably strenuous activity for absurd lengths of time or enact feats of strength or finesse apparently incongruous with their size and proportions. This type’s tools for fitness are derived from everyday life and the natural world and usually lack handles and balanced weight.

We can see how the differing physiques and abilities of our two athletes are adapted to their training environment and tools. Whether we agree that their approaches contribute well or poorly to fitness depends on what fitness is and therefore what it is for.

In my first Marine Corps unit I remember a ground-fight between an impressively muscled officer—clearly a committed gym-goer and clocking in around 200 lbs—and a young infantry NCO who probably weighed 140 lbs. That 60 lb delta probably did help the muscle-bound officer, but not enough to prevent him losing the match quickly as his smaller opponent worked him over with a combination of skill and wiry intensity. I’ll leave out whether the officer’s Annapolis-inculcated sense of superiority to the grunt set him up for failure. At least he was willing to fight and not simply hide behind his biceps and rank.

I admit, the dichotomy between these two types is overly simplistic. Infantrymen can be large and sculpted—and gym bros can certainly be small and out of shape. Also, as with most things in nature, there is generally an alignment between the aesthetically attractive and the functional—the human body is no different. Unfortunately, it is also common in human nature for our aesthetic attractions to be perverted. Bodies disabled for normal human life by deposits of excessive tissue, muscle or other kinds, constitute much of the marketing material for fitness, nutrition, and clothing brands. All this to say that there is nothing wrong—and a great deal right—with a beautiful physique. It is in fact, a potential indicator of fitness.

But there is enough of a distinction in my experience between a gym physique and a field physique—if you will—to merit a few observations about the methods and tools we use to pursue fitness.

First, a few premises:

Premise 1: A physical training regimen should contribute to fitness. (The more it contributes to fitness, the better training regimen it is).

Premise 2: Properly used physical training equipment should contribute to fitness.

These first two premises beg a question answered by Greg Glassman in his 2002 essay for The Crossfit Journal, “What is Fitness?” As he points out, a definition of fitness that can celebrate a marathon runner and Eddie Hall as superb examples of the same thing is a terrible definition. I’ve written about Glassman’s article before and will observe that I return to it often as a source of natural common sense in this fad-prone part of human life: fitness. Here is an important excerpt from his article:

“The general public both in opinion and in media holds endurance athletes as exemplars of fitness. We do not….The essence of [our] model is the view that fitness is about performing well at any and every task imaginable…..Our fitness, being “CrossFit,” comes through molding men and women that are equal parts gymnast, Olympic weightlifter and multi-modal sprinter or “sprintathlete”….

The implication here is that fitness requires an ability to perform well at all tasks, even unfamiliar tasks and tasks combined in infinitely varying combinations. In practice this encourages the athlete to disinvest in any set notions of sets, rest periods, reps, exercises, order of exercises, routines, periodization, etc. Nature frequently provides largely unforeseeable challenges; train for that by striving to keep the training stimulus broad and constantly varied.

-Greg Glassman

“Performing well at any and every task imaginable….” This establishes a high standard for physical fitness and leads to our final premise, also articulated in Glassman’s article.

Premise 3: Sickness, wellness, and fitness are all measures of the same thing: health.

Health, according to Aristotle, is the perfection of the body and therefore fitness is the body’s virtue. With this definition in mind, and recalling our premises, we can say that exercise (and the equipment we use in exercise) should contribute to the body’s perfection as a whole.

Since the body is how we naturally encounter the physical world, a perfectly healthy body that exhibits the virtue of fitness should indeed, as Glassman writes, be able to “perform well at all tasks…even unfamiliar tasks and tasks combined in infinitely varying combinations.” A normal human encountering the physical world is almost inevitably presented with a host of tasks that vary in weight, balance, duration, intensity, and temperature to name a few. The virtuous body is able to maintain and even increase its health through its encounters with these varying tasks and challenges. A body lacking the virtue of fitness is likely to suffer injury and illness as it is ill-fitted to the rigors of reality. So illness and fitness are two different points on the same scale.

In the same way that we cultivate a virtue by practicing it, first in small ways, but always in reality rather than abstraction, our efforts to cultivate fitness should resemble the reality of the challenges and tasks our bodies are likely to encounter rather than the abstraction of idealized states. The tools and techniques we employ in exercise should be those best suited to fitting our bodies to reality and ought therefore to resemble that reality as closely as possible.

In the next article on fitness I’ll focus on the particular tools and techniques that typify these two very different approaches to fitness and make a case for a natural method in training.