Natural Exercise
Before beginning Natural Exercise, please read carefully the Introduction section of the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program and be sure to consult with your health care provider.
Once we begin to transform our health through Natural Eating, bringing Natural Exercise to our lives is our next foundational technique in the HumanaNatura system. Natural Exercise helps us to restore essential dimensions of natural human life and works to further increase the vitality and quality of our modern lives.
Like Natural Eating, the daily practice of Natural Exercise is simply a requirement for our health, in this case to achieve the critical process of natural conditioning that is the hallmark of all healthy life. But Natural Exercise does more than increase our physical fitness and personal vitality. As is the case with Natural Eating, Natural Exercise leads to and enables still greater opportunities for natural health and progressive well-being.
When practiced consistently and attentively, Natural Exercise affords us important insights into ourselves, our health, the natural world, and natural human life. It deepens our interest in our health and increases our capacity to explore heath-based life. Equally, Natural Exercise provides important new opportunities for the healthy enjoyment of life, for the experience of the natural world, and for more satisfying and health-oriented relationships with others.
Defining Natural Exercise
To put Natural Exercise in context, we might say that Natural Eating takes us through the threshold of our natural health, and that Natural Exercise then propels us more deeply and even forcefully into higher realizations of our health and well-being potential.
As you will learn in this section of the program, Natural Exercise strengthens and revitalizes us in ways that are both predictable and often unexpected. Natural Exercise often alters us physically and psychologically, markedly improving our fitness and sense of well-being. And it readies us for more robust and deliberate daily life, and the higher states of personal health and natural harmony available to us, through the lifelong progressive practice HumanaNatura calls Natural Living.
For these important reasons, Natural Exercise is the second of HumanaNatura’s four natural health techniques and an essential part of our Personal Health Program. At this point, you may wonder exactly what we mean by Natural Exercise and how it differs from other forms of exercise. Let’s turn to some definitions.
When we talk about Natural Exercise, we mean simply a system of physical activities that efficiently and optimally promotes natural conditioning, by reproducing essential aspects of our ancient and long-evolved human life and activity patterns in nature. We will discuss natural conditioning next, but want to underscore that Natural Exercise does more than promote physical fitness. It equally encourages a broader, richer, and more natural experience of daily life, oneself, and the world.
As you will learn in practice, Natural Exercise is similar to Natural Eating in that it is science-based in principle and remarkably simple and natural in practice. Where Natural Exercise differs from Natural Eating, however, is in the greater demands it places on us, both physically and practically.
But, if Natural Exercise is more demanding, it also offers much greater opportunities for growth, development, and even transformation. This occurs through the more robust actions, broader natural experiences, and altered world relationships that Natural Exercise works to foster.
Conditioning in nature
As we have discussed in some depth already, in the Our Past section of the program, humans in wild nature are highly intelligent and cooperative gathering and hunting animals. We are decedents of earlier primate species and thus part of a key branch in the larger, roughly two hundred million year-old mammalian line of animal life on earth. This lineage is principally notable in being communal and cooperative, and represents an advancement on more primitive and competitive forms of animal life that came before its new general adaption.
Our own hominid sub-species, Homo sapiens, was shaped by perhaps forty million years of life in trees and tropical forests, and more recently by roughly ten million years of life increasingly on open grasslands. In this long natural life of human foraging in clans and bands on the savannahs of Africa, humans were naturally active, mobile, and highly fit animals. Our ancestors used physical agility, mental prowess, and social cooperation to live and succeed alongside other formidable grassland species, species that are often much larger and more physically powerful than us.
Like all other animals in wild nature, humans are naturally evolved for a particular ecological niche and general pattern of life, including a specific average scope, duration, and intensity of physical activity each day. For us, this physical activity includes extensive walking, in the seeking of new temporary encampments and in gathering, hunting, and scouting. Our natural activity includes behaviors related to play, nurturing and teaching, and display and mating. And it naturally includes defensive and proactive combative behaviors, both to protect and promote ourselves and our social groups. To be naturally healthy and fit, in the full sense that we can be these things, we require key aspects of this natural range of physical activity each day.
Put another way, if we are to maintain and optimize our natural health amid modern life, we need to live in ways that are consistent with, or at least considerate of, the physical demands and long reality of our natural evolutionary development in wild nature. On this point, we also need to live in ways that are socially and even aesthetically consistent with our evolutionary development – thereby aligning ourselves with other critical health factors we will take up and explain in the Natural Living section of the program.
As you can quickly validate for yourself in your natural health practice, whenever our natural activity patterns are reduced or distorted, our health, fitness, and well-being inevitably suffer. When we lose our physical vitality through prolonged inactivity, or unbalanced activity, our feelings of physical and emotional harmony, our natural delight in life and the world, and our natural impulses to new health all decline, seemingly in proportion to the level of our estrangement from these natural patterns of life.
Since humans are naturally-evolved animals, we need adequate natural conditioning – daily engagement in our essential range of natural physical activities – as an integral part of the way we live. Physically, emotionally, and even spiritually, this is unavoidable if we are to be optimally healthy and well, and to be naturally adaptive, vibrant, and growth-oriented in our lives and life perspectives.
Many of us, living today in conditions of social health rather than natural health, greatly underestimate the impact of natural conditioning on our health and lives. Lacking natural physical and emotional fitness, we are unaware of or unconsciously devalue the far more robust state of life engendered by this conditioning, one that we ironically each can quickly achieve and maintain throughout our lives.
In this way, we frequently fail to appreciate the power and essential need for Natural Exercise to achieve vigorous human life, how this technique naturally engenders profound new perspectives on our lives and new natural harmony with the world around us, and the degree to which our health and well-being are curtailed when we live in an unnatural and unconditioned way.
Optimizing exercise
There are of course many ways to maintain our fitness and vitality through exercise, and numerous techniques for assuring a full and complimentary range of physical activity in our lives. Team sports, moderate aerobic activities, dance, martial arts, wrestling, yoga, water sports, many other common forms of exercise, and even moderately demanding and varied physical labor, all can be excellent ways of promoting partial or even nearly complete natural conditioning.
Many of these activities are also excellent ways of maintaining a network of friends who share our goals and interests, or of developing a skilled practice, helping to further other aims and health requirements in our lives. But it is important to point out that only a minority of these activities offers extended and attentive experiences of the natural world and still fewer intentionally aim at assuring optimal natural conditioning.
In the context of this program, it is worth considering several important questions, as we think through the challenge of creating a natural and optimal exercise program. These questions point to essential considerations in meeting the program’s underlying goals – to uncover and better understand the underlying requirements of our natural health, to find techniques that most efficiently and directly optimize our health, and to promote conditions that in turn enable the progressive pursuit of new health and well-being throughout our lives.
The following questions will help you to better understand why HumanaNatura’s technique of Natural Exercise is structured the way it is:
- Which forms of exercise are closest to our earlier activity patterns in wild nature, and thus likely to be highly advantageous for us and even reconnect us to essential aspects of natural life?
- What are the most efficient ways to practically structure human exercise to achieve complete and well-proportioned levels of natural conditioning?
- What exercises are most sustainable, most flexible and capable of being performed at different levels of intensity, and most readily made a lifelong part of our lives?
- What types and levels of exercise have been found by modern scientists to be most beneficial for us – best promoting quality of life, affording superior vitality and longevity, and presenting the fewest risks and undesirable side-effects over the course of a long life?
- Which types of exercise are most readily and enjoyably performed by people – easily, directly, alone or with others, and without significant cost?
- What exercises are most sustainable, most flexible and capable of being performed at different levels of intensity, and most readily made a lifelong part of our lives?
HumanaNatura’s approach to Natural Exercise seeks to optimally address all of these important questions, building upon the technique of Natural Eating and, in turn, working to enable added exploration of our natural health and well-being through the technique of Natural Living.
Exercise for healthy life
As you will see and learn in practice, HumanaNatura’s Natural Exercise technique – based simply and entirely on walking and calisthenics – provides an efficient, flexible, and lifelong means of promoting extremely high levels of natural health and conditioning, which other life activities can then complement.
As suggested before, our approach to Natural Exercise not only physically conditions us, but also works to reconnect us to our natural sense of physical harmony and completeness in the world, and restores our natural strength and readiness for creative action in our lives. All of these benefits are of course essential attributes of our natural health and form a new modern foundation for progressive and health-based human life.
HumanaNatura’s Natural Exercise technique is intended to be a daily exercise practice, forming an integral and essential part of our lives. It seeks to balance the amount of time we spend in exercise each day with the overall impact of this activity on our health and well-being. Importantly, our approach to Natural Exercise also brings essential natural human activity patterns back into our life, reawakening us to the natural power and pleasure of human life, our physical health, and our place in nature.