Tools for Natural Fitness

Part 3: The Technique...or Nature provides unforeseeable challenges.

Tools for Natural Fitness is a three part series. Part 1: Illness to Fitness describes a few important premises regarding what fitness is and how we can cultivate it. Part 2: The Tools describes the items, natural and ready to hand, that one can use to great effect. Part 3: The Technique offers some ideas regarding how one can use the tools described here to cultivate natural fitness.

…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, “What is Fitness” October 1st, 2002.

Quick recap

of the last couple posts: “Nature frequently provides largely unforeseeable challenges.” One of the reasons Crossfit became so popular in the military was because it was an approach to fitness training that placed the actual physical requirements of the military vocation at the top of its hierarchy. Those physical requirements have a lot to do with nature and not so much to do with the tools and metrics at the top of most gym-goers hierarchy: max bench, squat, etc. The military vocation often involves heightened exposure to nature and its unforeseeable challenges. Furthermore, unlike the “fast-paced” work environments advertised on job boards, the degree of uncertainty and rapidity of change in your physical environment in the military is urgently physical.

Another reason for its popularity in the military: equipment. Crossfit represents a frugal, field-ready form of training for which most of us have most of the gear we need around us all the time. Flak jacket, pack, weapon, sand, water, random heavy things (those Evinrude motors on the CRRCs always seemed strangely heavy). But when you’re in the field or on the go you don’t always have access to a gym with fancy equipment and big weights.

If we aspire to true fitness, nature itself often provides the sets, reps, and equipment to get after it. So how to get after it?

Get After It

You will need to combine a couple different things on a regular basis in order to ensure progress toward fitness. Training, practice, variety, and intensity. Glassman explains that some aspects of fitness require training: endurance, stamina, strength and flexibility. Other aspects of fitness require practice: coordination, agility, balance and accuracy. We’ll need to keep up with both. Variety applies to the kinds of movements we’re doing and the conditions in which we do them. Finally, intensity. Intensity is the difference between a walk in the park and a grueling interval workout of sprints and jumps in the park. If all you can do is walk, great. Walk. But if you seek to be prepared for the largely unforeseeable challenges nature is likely to send your way, then ratchet up the intensity.

I’ll give a couple examples of workouts you can complete with the kinds of tools I described in Part 2 but want to make a quick note about training, practice, variety, and intensity as you age. When I was younger I almost never trained for flexibility and mobility and was naturally pretty good on most general tasks requiring practice like coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. What this meant in practice is that I almost always trained at maximum intensity with speed and weight. That worked great for then. As I aged I learned the hard way that I needed to spend more time training flexibility and mobility. The training should still be intense and varied, but intensity in this case does not mean high speed and heavy weights. Intense flexibility and mobility training means more gymnastic style training with longer periods of time under tension. I still do intense sessions with speed and weight but now I also do sessions with gymnastic movements and time under tension.

Me working out now….just kidding.

Model Workouts

Here are a few ideas for workouts that you should consider as recipes ready for infinite variation. You’ll notice a few commonalities (training, practice, variety) and can play with the intensity to fit your age and current level of fitness. Structure the workouts using some of the following techniques:

AMRAP: As many rounds as possible given a certain time limit

Tabata: whatever the exercise do 20 seconds max effort then 10 seconds rest (repeat 8 times for a total of 4 minutes)

Time: How quickly can you complete a certain set of exercises.

Completion: Just get it done. (This is a good one if your workout is nearly impossible or if it falls into the “Necessary Work” category below.)

Pays to be a winner: If you’re in a group, whoever finishes first does not have to complete a penalty set. If you’re working out alone, penalize yourself if you don’t hit a predetermined target.

EMOM: Every minute on the minute. You have to perform some task every minute on the minute. The longer you take the less rest you get between sets.

Necessary Work

Install a wood burning stove in your house then stop heating with central air. Force yourself to buck, chop, and stack all the wood necessary to heat your home. Do all of this by hand or with non-powered tools. If you have a hill you have to drag logs up even better. I have a buddy with a hill he has to drag logs up and am more than a little jealous of him since my woodlot is mostly flat. You know who you are.

You’ll notice that chopping and hauling requires strength, stamina, and endurance as well as accuracy and coordination handling your maul for splitting. Legs, shoulders, back, core…it’s all there. Dragging logs on a sled up a hill ratchets up the intensity

.

Body Weight

6 rounds for time (this is called Loredo)

• 24x squats

• 24x pushups

• 24x walking lunge

• 400m run

This kind of workout is a recipe where it is easy to swap other exercises in and out. Don’t simply repeat this ad nauseum. You’ll notice that it mixes a long sprint (400m is brutal if you’re trying) with upper body work on the pushups. This is the kind of variety that makes a workout very taxing and well-rounding.

Burpee Pyramid EMOM

Do 1 burpee for every minute that has elapsed. I.e. minute 1 = 1 burpee. Minute 2 = 2 burpees. Etc. Whoever lasts longest before they run out of time to complete reps before the next minute starts wins. Or if you’re solo, try to come back down the pyramid once you missed the new minute mark. Once you get up toward 15 burpees this gets brutal.

Natural Objects

10 rounds for time

• 10x deadlift

• 10x pullup

• 50m sprint

• 10x box jump

• 20x pushup

For the deadlift, use something heavy: trailer hitch, log, rock, sandbag. For the pullup, use a bar, branch, rafter. For the box jump use a park bench, boulder, stairs, or half-wall. You can swap all of these exercises out for other ones and still get an excellent workout.

Fartlek

Think interval training but with whatever set of things you want to provide the interval. I’ll often do laps on our trails where ever couple hundred meters I’ll stop running and do some flexibility or mobility work. Korean dips, L-sits, side to side squats, etc, then back to running.

Ruck

To ruck is to walk carrying weight in a pack. Simple as that. It’s always a great workout.

But you can mix a lot of other techniques with a ruck. For example, do a ruck fartlek where you stop from time to time and do squats with the weight or pullups or pushups. Or ruck a certain distance for time. Or ruck a certain time for distance.

Closing Thoughts

Many of the techniques I described here would work just fine in a gym environment or on an indoor track. Nevertheless, I’d encourage you to train outdoors every chance you get. Natural fitness involves being prepared for the unpredictable situations nature throws our way. Some exposure to the elements needs to be part of that equation. Cold, heat, and moisture, are fundamental challenges to the human physique that nature presents. Regular exposure to them cultivates a certain toughness and grit that the ideal conditions of a gym can never equal.

The final goal of physical education is to make strong beings. In the purely physical sense, the Natural Method promotes the qualities of organic resistance, muscularity and speed, towards being able to walk, run, jump, move on all fours, to climb, to keep balance, to throw, lift, defend yourself and to swim.

In the "virile" or energetic sense, the system consists in having sufficient energy, willpower, courage, coolness, and firmness.

In the moral sense, education, by elevating the emotions, directs or maintains the moral drive in a useful and beneficial way.

The true Natural Method, in its broadest sense, must be considered as the result of these three particular forces; it is a physical, virile and moral synthesis. It resides not only in the muscles and the breath, but above all in the "energy" which is used, the will which directs it and the feeling which guides it.

Georges Hebert, The natural method : functional exercises [translated from the French: 'L'éducation physique raisonnée'