Before beginning natural exercise, please carefully read the Introduction section of the HumanaNatura health program and be sure to consult with your health care provider.

Once we begin to enhance our health through a natural diet, natural exercise is our next step. Like natural eating, natural exercise is a practical necessity and foundation for reaching higher levels of natural health.  Natural exercise, like natural eating, also contains important learnings about ourselves and our health, and provides similar opportunities for enjoyment and discovery in its practice. 

If natural eating takes us through the threshold of natural health, natural exercise propels us more deeply and even forcefully into our health. Natural exercise strengthens and revitalizes us, physically and psychologically, improving our stamina and expanding our capability for engagement and perseverance in the pursuit of our health and fuller life.  Natural exercise, in truth, readies us for higher and more demanding challenges and pathways, ones that take us directly to the truth of our own natural health and the opportunities we have for personal renewal and new forms of living.

When we talk about natural exercise, we mean simply a series of physical activities that efficiently promote conditioning and fitness and a more natural experience of life, by reproducing essential aspects of our ancient human activity patterns in nature.  As you will see, like a natural diet, natural exercise is remarkably straightforward in concept and simple in practice.  Where natural exercise differs, however, is in the greater demands it makes of us physically.  If natural exercise is more demanding, it also offers a much higher potential for personal growth and development in its practice.

As we have discussed already, humans in nature are intelligent gathering and hunting animals – active, mobile, highly social, using our physical agility and mental prowess to compete and succeed. Like all other animals, we are designed and optimized for a specific range and intensity of physical activities.  To be healthy and fit, in every sense of these words, we require this natural physical activity in our lives, activity consistent with the conditions of our evolutionary development.

Whenever our natural activity patterns are reduced or distorted, our health and fitness inevitably suffer. When we lose our physical vitality through prolonged inactivity, or unbalanced activity, our delight in living and natural impulses to health and well-being decline as well. Physically, emotionally, and even spiritually, we need adequate physical conditioning as an integral part of the way we live.

There are, of course, many ways to maintain our natural fitness through exercise. Team sports, moderate aerobic activities, dance, martial arts, wrestling, yoga, water sports, and other forms of exercise are all great ways of promoting our natural health and also of maintaining a network of friends with similar interests.

In the context of an exploration of natural health, however, it is worth asking a series of questions when with think about the challenge of building a truly natural, and even optimal, personal exercise program:

• What are the most efficient ways to structure human exercise to achieve natural and balanced levels of physical conditioning? 

• Which exercises are closest to our activity patterns in wild nature, and best re-connect us to the physical experience of human living in nature?

• What exercises are readily performed by most people, simply, directly, easily, alone or with others, and without significant cost?

• What exercises are most sustainable, most flexible, and most readily made a lifelong part of our lives?

HumanaNatura’s natural exercise program seeks to answer these questions, building upon the foundation of a natural diet and, in turn, enabling still deeper exploration of our natural health.

The HumanaNatura exercise program provides a simple, efficient, flexible, and sustainable means of promoting extremely high levels of health and physical conditioning, which other activities can complement.  Ultimately, these exercises – walking and calisthenics – work to reconnect us to our natural sense of physical completeness and place in the natural world, both essential attributes of our natural health.

Our natural exercise program is intended to be a daily exercise program, forming an integral part of our lives. It seeks to balance the amount of time spent each day in exercise with the overall impact of this activity on our health and well-being. Most importantly, our exercise program brings important natural human activity patterns back into our daily life, reawakening us to the natural power and pleasure of our physical health and place in nature.

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