Tools for Natural Fitness

Part 2: The Tools

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 will offer some ideas regarding how one can use the tools described here to cultivate natural fitness.

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Natural fitness suits a human being to his natural environment—it allows him to do what he is likely to need to do (physical actions in almost infinite variety, duration, load, etc) in any given day so as to contribute to health rather than illness and physical degeneration.

You may find yourself thinking… “well, all I really need to do on any given day is roll out of bed, sit in a chair or a car, walk a couple hundred feet, then eventually roll back into bed. To excel in my physical environment doesn’t require any fitness at all.” You’re probably right. Depressing. But even if this is your scenario, the conclusion is not true. A body engaged in such limited activity and range of motion will begin to lose what little it has and eventually tend toward immobility and pain.

A body that is naturally fit should be capable of much, much more. We’ve gotten in the bad habit of outsourcing some of the most fundamentally human parts of our lives: food production and self defense. Leaving aside the character implications of this, it’s also contributed to a forgetfulness regarding the physical capabilities a normal human being should have. Someone who is naturally fit is capable of the work necessary for food production and self defense, and these two tasks are not easy

So if you’re not in the fields or in a fight everyday, how to stay in shape so that you can be if you need to be or have the opportunity to be? We’ll talk about particular techniques in Part 3, but here are the natural tools that are available to most of us whether you can access a gym or not.

Scythe (and other primitive tools)

Just kidding…okay not really. Scything is a great workout (see picture above) and is great for core and trunk flexion. Digging holes and shoveling snow can be brutal. Bucking and splitting wood by hand is excellent. Get a weighted maul for the splitting then haul the wood in a sled. Every step of the way involves robust physical activity even if it’s not really a workout.

Body weight.

It’s the original and the best. Your body can and should be a finely tuned instrument. Depending on your size it gives you a convenient weight set that is with you wherever you go. Already good at moving it normally? Moving it abnormally can give you a killer workout: i.e. crawling, jumping, pulling, etc.

Hills

You can find hills in many locations and where there are not hills there are usually stairs. Hills are brutal for legs and lungs and the same piece of earth can present an existential challenge to nerds and super-athletes alike. Just add a few pounds or a few miles per hour and something easy becomes very, very hard.

Logs

Logs are one of our favorites at my company Iliad Athletics because they are so uncomfortable. Yeah, we love that. Carried alone or as a member of a team, a log is going to chafe your skin, bounce around, tilt the wrong way at the wrong time…it’s glorious. I love that the weight is rarely evenly balanced and that it does not offer convenient grips for your hands. Often just getting it off the ground can leave you breathless.

A few downsides for logs: once they are cut they slowly begin to lose weight as the moisture in them dries up. They are not inert matter like weights in the gym. Also, you have to be a little careful as it’s easy to thwack yourself or a buddy accidentally, especially as you get tired.

Sand

If you carry sand, it’s heavy. If you run on sand, it’s slow. Win-win. Many of us don’t have sand to run on regularly, but the Adam’s Cursed on the coasts can knock this one out.

There are some fancy fitness sand bags out there but I’ve used a “pig egg” for years and recommend one to everyone. They are cheap to make and super versatile. The graphics below demonstrate how to make one.

I’m experimenting right now with some of the sand bag offerings that are available from a company called GoRuck. I’m interested in their sand bag kettle bells for use in school PE programs because sand is a lot softer than steel kettlebells. You’d have to work pretty hard to injure yourself with a sandbag kettlebell. I’ll let you know what we find.

Water

Water is like sand. It’s an excellent weight or you can immerse in it and swim. Either one makes for an excellent, natural workout. Water jugs are also a safety essential to have on hand almost no matter what you’re doing.

Children

Throw a sweaty, wriggling kid on your shoulders for a normal hike and turn it into the Bataan death march. They’ll probably be gripping you around your throat to hold on so you have the added benefit of working out in an oxygen restrictive environment…like training at altitude but instead of altitude, you are being slowly choked out by someone you love. What’s not to like?

Rings and Bars

These are perhaps the least natural items on this list but they imitate things so widely found in nature and contribute so fundamentally to fitness that I include them here. Rings and bars allow for dips, pullups, L-sits, muscle ups, etc. You can lash an old chain link fence post between two trees with a little paracord and you have an excellent pullup bar. The image below is a playground / gym that I lashed for my kids several years ago. You’ll notice the pullup bar on the left, the rings on the right, and the long climbing rope in the center.

Next post we’ll go through a few ideas for how to make sense out of all these tools. Simply having them does not result in greater fitness and a haphazard approach to training is unlikely to yield the best results. As usual, our training philosophy for integrating these tools is drawn from the work of Greg Glassman, founder of Crossfit. Using these tools with Glassman sequencing and variety is the trick. Stay tuned.