Principles Of Natural Exercise
HumanaNatura’s technique of Natural Exercise is based on five key principles. Since our overall aim is to promote lifelong and life-wide states of progressive natural health and quality of life, our focus in this technique is to promote exercise for natural living, rather than living for natural exercise.
Let’s take a moment to highlight these important exercise principles, and then discuss in detail how our Natural Exercise program naturally and optimally fulfills these ideals and allow us to achieve complete natural conditioning and much healthier life:
- The active human body, when engaged in a natural range of physical activities, will automatically maintain itself at high levels of physical and psychological fitness through natural physiological mechanisms. As mentioned before, HumanaNatura calls this process natural conditioning.
- A well-designed exercise program should efficiently and pleasurably ensure natural conditioning and sustained interest in healthy life. It should promote and encourage enhanced physical and mental health, be enjoyable to the practitioner, ideally require only a modest amount of time each day, and motivate and enable for other health-based learning and action.
- A complete exercise program should use exercise science and be balanced to fulfill four complementary physical fitness goals (aerobic conditioning, strengthening, improved flexibility, increased agility or coordination), and at least two psychological wellness goals (stress reduction and enhanced cognition).
- Exercises that emphasize whole body movements are generally the most efficient and effective forms of physical exercise, since they promote natural conditioning simultaneously across large areas of our body, while often requiring and promoting increased mental focus and attentiveness.
- A comprehensive exercise program should be adaptable to each individual, allowing for increased or decreased duration and intensity of use based on our overall physical and cognitive readiness for exercise, both on a day-to-day basis and over the course of our lives.
Natural Exercise components
Utilizing these principles, HumanaNatura’s technique of Natural Exercise has been designed with two components:
- Daily Walking – 30 minutes or more of walking or hiking each day
- Regular Calisthenics – 10+ minutes of calisthenics, 3-5 days per week
As you will learn and validate in your own natural health practice, daily walking and regular calisthenics are simple, natural, and highly complementary forms of exercise.
Together, they allow us to achieve complete and efficient natural conditioning, and promote extremely high levels of health and fitness in us. Daily walking and regular calisthenics combine to greatly improve our physical conditioning and stamina, foster new awareness and mastery of our physical and emotional health, expand our interaction and connection with our surroundings and the natural world, and enrich and enhance most other activities in our lives.
Walking and calisthenics each involve natural human movement and are consistent with the Natural Exercise goals and principles we have introduced. They are highly flexible forms of exercise, ones that most of us can perform throughout our lives and at many levels of duration and intensity. Because of their strong link to natural human activity patterns and “whole-body movement” efficiency, the regular practice of walking and calisthenics allow us to spend as little as forty minutes a day in exercise, while still achieving essential natural conditioning and significantly enhancing lifelong health and fitness.
Detailed overviews of HumanaNatura’s walking and calisthenics practices are provided in the next two parts of this section of the program, including step-by-step instructions and photos for all of our calisthenics exercises. Please also see the Resources section of the HumanaNatura website for information on downloading a free workout poster, or ordering a professional-quality one, containing all of the calisthenics photos. If you have specific or general questions on Natural Exercise, please contact HumanaNatura’s support staff via the Contact Us link on our website anytime.
We encourage you to explore HumanaNatura’s ideas about Natural Exercise for yourself and see how easily and naturally our exercise practices can become an integral and enriching part of your daily life. You will quickly understand the power that a regular program of natural conditioning can have in our lives – enhancing our health and fitness, promoting new health perspectives and well-being, and increasing our personal connection to others and the world around us.
Once you have begun Natural Eating, bringing Natural Exercise to your life is the essential next step in naturally transforming your personal health. As we have suggested, Natural Exercise even can foster a new lifelong movement toward progressive personal vitality and quality of life for you.
In practice, Natural Exercise proves a critical link in developing the needed momentum, and the personal strength and fortitude, to approach the third and more far-reaching challenge of restoring and enhancing our natural health across our lives that we call the HumanaNatura technique of Natural Living.