Calisthenics Program
When we observe animals in nature, we see that most are physically active for hours each day – crawling, walking, running, jumping, flying, swimming, climbing, exploring, wrestling, fighting – amid their natural patterns of feeding, socializing, self-defense, and mating.
This general activity, and high proficiency in one or more of these specific activities, usually is essential for survival, and for maintenance and development of the species’ evolutionary niche.
As we discussed earlier in the program, it is through natural activity, in combination with Natural Eating and other aspects of natural life, that animals achieve natural conditioning and maintain themselves at high levels of health and vitality for all, or nearly all, their lives.
Our need for added activity
This natural need for varied and periodically demanding physical activity of course applies equally to people. Like all other animals, humans require a specific range and intensity of activity, corresponding to or consistent with our natural evolutionary lineage.
In this way and in combination with a natural diet, we too are able to achieve natural conditioning and maintain the high levels of health and fitness that represent our naturally healthy state. Without this activity – either directly in its original natural form or through exercises designed to replicate and optimize our natural activity patterns – our health and fitness quickly suffer, and we soon begin to live at diminished levels of personal vitality and natural harmony.
Observations of other omnivorous primates in the wild, such as chimpanzees and particularly plains-dwelling baboons, suggest that these reasonably close cousins to humans spend about a third of their time sleeping, and then divide their waking time between 1) natural activities associated with traveling and finding food, and 2) socializing and maintaining order and cohesiveness within their group. Occasionally, our primate cousins must run from or chase away a pack of hungry cats or dogs, or deal with intrusions from still larger and often quite belligerent and dangerous grazing animals.
It is both impressive and insightful to watch these less-advanced but related primate species organize and work as a group to meet these natural challenges. They reveal not just the full scope and periodic intensity of our natural activity patterns, but also the fundamentally social and actively cooperative nature of all primate life in the wild. Observing their life underscores a basic truth of evolutionary science – that nature affords no individual life to primates, including humans, in our natural evolutionary niche. In nature, we are, first and always, social and cooperative animals.
For humans, nomadic and predatory walking is of course an integral part of our life in nature. As we have discussed, walking is our dominant activity and forms the central component of our natural activity pattern. But many of the other activities mentioned above are also part of our natural life, and humans naturally share in most of the activities of other omnivorous primates. This includes foraging, climbing, wrestling, playing, fighting, courtship and reproduction, and child-rearing activities. In addition, humans have additional natural activities that are unique to us and reflect our advancement as a species. These include tool-making and tool use, dance and music-making, and activities related to organized hunting.
To optimize our natural health, we therefore need to incorporate other physical activities and exercises into our daily lives, in addition to daily walking and hiking. In this way, we can sufficiently and even optimally reproduce our natural human activity patterns, achieving complete natural conditioning and often impressive levels of physical fitness.
Walking’s natural complement
There are a number of potential exercises we might add to HumanaNatura’s core recommendation of walking and hiking to promote enhanced fitness and achieve a complete and optimal natural conditioning regime. We encourage you to consider what other exercises might best further your own quest for progressive health and quality of life, and that best take advantage of the setting that is your life today.
In designing the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program, we considered quite carefully which exercises would best complement a Natural Exercise program based principally on daily walking and hiking. We evaluated various options to achieve an efficient, flexible, sustainable, and optimal companion exercise system that would serve the vast majority of people. We looked at which exercises are readily practiced at different levels and throughout our lives. And we considered which exercises naturally fit into our larger and overarching goal of progressively healthier and more vital life.
As suggested earlier in this section of the program, the calisthenics exercises that follow are HumanaNatura’s response to these varied and important considerations. The exercises are intended to provide an optimally balanced, sufficiently and flexibly demanding, and highly efficient complement to the practice of daily walking. Combined with walking or hiking, the calisthenics exercises allow us to systematically exercise our entire body and achieve complete natural conditioning in a surprisingly small amount of time. For most of us, a calisthenics workout will be done 3-5 days per week and last from 10-30 minutes.
The word calisthenics comes from the Greek words “kallos” for beauty and “thenos” for strength. Calisthenics are an old, generally simple, and remarkably effective form of human exercise. Calisthenics are in fact one of the great health-promoting products of earlier civilized life. Like hatha yoga of southern Asia and tai chi of eastern Asia, when combined with daily walking, modern calisthenics provide a balanced, complete, and direct means of promoting natural conditioning.
As you will soon learn through their regular practice, calisthenics do indeed bring both beauty and strength to us. They greatly enhancing our physical fitness and stamina, and work to increase our personal vitality and preparedness for life. When calisthenics exercise is structured and performed correctly, and combined with daily walking, it ensures that we achieve all four of the physical fitness exercise goals introduced: 1) aerobic conditioning, 2) strengthening, 3) improved flexibility, and 4) increased agility or coordination.
There are a total of twenty-one exercises in the HumanaNatura calisthenics program, divided into four groups:
- Core exercises - our six Core exercises provide a basic but still quite rigorous workout of your entire body. They can be performed on a near daily basis, by people just beginning to exercise, by people wishing to exercise at this level, and by people following our calisthenics program at the intermediate and advanced levels.
- Intermediate exercises - as your physical conditioning improves, you can add some or all of eight Intermediate exercises to the Core calisthenics program on any given day.
- Intermediate-Advanced exercises - as you begin to develop calisthenics mastery at the Intermediate level, you can add some or all of four additional Intermediate-Advanced exercises to the Core program. Each of these exercises begins at an Intermediate level and then has one or more variations at the Advanced level.
- Advanced exercises - with further improvement in your level of fitness and mastery of calisthenics, you can add some or all of three Advanced exercises to the Core calisthenics program on any given day.
Once you become conditioned to the intensity and demands of HumanaNatura’s calisthenics exercises – and the exercises are extremely intense and challenging at first for most people – the basic Core program will take about ten minutes to perform.
Please note that the full routine of twenty-one exercises takes an hour or more, again depending on your level of fitness and familiarity with the exercises, but the full program is normally not done in a single day or workout. This is due both to the amount of time involved and the desirability of day-to-day exercise variability for optimal natural conditioning, including rest after intense exertion. As we will discuss in more detail, it is better to vary or alternate our selection of calisthenics exercises, practicing fewer exercises more deeply each time we do a calisthenics workout.
While it is not necessary or even desirable to do the full HumanaNatura calisthenics routine in a single workout, you should however at least do the entire Core workout whenever you do calisthenics, adding whatever selection of non-Core exercises you want. As we will discuss, most HumanaNatura natural health practitioners regularly vary their mix of non-Core exercises in each workout, allowing increased enjoyment, optimal conditioning, and time efficiency – balancing our exercise practices with other life goals and health opportunities.
The power of our body
As you begin the calisthenics exercises, you will notice that there is no use of free weights in the calisthenics workout or elsewhere in the HumanaNatura technique of Natural Exercise. The reason for this is that the use of weights, and especially weightlifting machines, is usually not consistent with our principles and goals for Natural Exercise. Your own body weight and the whole body exercises presented are all that are required in HumanaNatura’s calisthenics program. This makes the program not only simpler and more natural, but also more portable, flexible, time-efficient, and much less expensive than weightlifting programs and traditional fitness clubs.
For people interested in exercise science, HumanaNatura’s advocacy of whole body movements and exclusive use of natural body weight is an important point. It is worth noting here that most weightlifting exercises and machines seek to work distinct muscle groups in isolation. This approach is contrary to the principle of whole body exercise, which is a far more efficient approach to conditioning and one of HumanaNatura’s key principles of Natural Exercise.
As you will learn in practice, whole body exercises are a much more optimal way to foster usable strength, stamina, flexibility, and agility than can be achieved either with weightlifting exercises or resistance machines. If you lift weights today, or have in the past, you will quickly understand the power, efficiency, and many advantages of the whole body approach to exercise once you begin our calisthenics program.
For all natural health practitioners, we would also add here that weight-lifting, and really all machine-based and technology-reliant forms of exercise (even those that use whole body movement), implicitly foster an undesirable outlook regarding our health and fitness. This outlook involves the idea that we are naturally unable to efficiently maintain robust natural health o our own and through the normal activities of our lives.
The presence and promotion of exercise machines even assumes that there are inevitably times of low and high health-promotion each day, and even times of active health reduction that must be offset through intensive, machine-based therapy.
Conditioning for life
This important, often unconscious, and implicitly health-limiting idea is one we would encourage you to examine, on an ongoing basis, in your life and natural health practice.
In principle, and as a practical challenge to achieve a more conscious and health-based life, we would ask you to entertain the idea that our lives and health-promotion efforts can be fully integrated. By this, we mean that it is possible to progressively spend more and more of our time and lives in activities that are naturally and actively health-promoting and life-affirming.
Through daily walking and regular calisthenics – and especially by observing the ease and naturalness with which we can begin, conduct, and move from Natural Exercise – you may begin to see other possibilities to integrate your life and health enhancement activities.
Achieving new awareness of the potential for our daily activity patterns to form an integrated and progressive expression of our natural health is, in fact, another critical important milestone in the HumanaNatura program, one which we will discuss in greater depth in the Natural Living section of the program.
For now, we would simply encourage you to use our calisthenics exercises and overall Natural Exercise program, not only to achieve new levels of personal fitness and vitality, but to consider and explore your potential for life that is fully health-affirming and naturally vital in all respects.
As you do this, you will soon find that our calisthenics workout provides extraordinary new levels of natural health in its practice, changing and remaking us physically and emotionally, and foreshadowing and preparing us for still larger opportunities to bring new health-promoting change to our lives.