If we watch animals in nature, we see that most are physically active for hours each day – wandering, running, jumping, flying, swimming, climbing, wrestling, fighting – in feeding, play, mating, and conflict.

This activity, and high proficiency in one or more of these specific activities, usually is essential for survival in nature. It is of course through this natural activity, in combination with a natural diet and other aspects of life in nature, that animals achieve natural conditioning and maintain themselves at high levels of health and fitness.

This same need for varied and periodically intense physical activity occurs with people too. Like all other animals, we require a range of activity, consistent with our evolutionary lineage, to achieve natural conditioning and reach the high states of health and fitness that is our natural state. 

Observations of other omnivorous primates in the wild, such as baboons, reveal they spend about a third of their time sleeping, and then divide their waking time between traveling and finding food, and socializing.  Occasionally, of course, our primate cousins must run from or chase away a hungry pack of cats or dogs.  It is both impressive and insightful to watch them rise as a group to these natural challenges, underscoring that nature affords no individual life to primates in their evolutionary niche.

For humans, walking of course forms a key part of our natural activity pattern, but so do many of the other activities mentioned above. To optimize our health, we need to incorporate additional physical activity into our daily lives, beyond walking, to reproduce our natural activity pattern and achieve complete levels of natural conditioning.

There are many forms of exercise you might add to your walking to enhance your fitness and achieve complete natural conditioning. The calisthenics exercises that follow are intended to provide a balanced and extremely efficient exercise program, working your entire body for added conditioning in just minutes a day to complement your walking and other life activities.

The word calisthenics comes from the Greek words 'kallos' for beauty and 'thenos' for strength.   Calisthenics are an old, simple, flexible, and very effective form of human exercise. As you will learn in practice, calisthenics do indeed bring us both beauty and strength, and greatly enhance our physical fitness and personal stamina.

There are a total of seventeen exercises in the HumanaNatura calisthenics program, divided into three groups:

• Core exercises - eight Core exercises provide a basic workout of our body and are meant to be performed on a daily basis, both by people just beginning to exercise 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 five Intermediate exercises to the Core program on any given day.

• Advanced exercises - with further improvement in your level of fitness, you can add some or all of four Advanced exercises to the Core program on any given day.

Once you become conditioned to the intensity of the calisthenics exercises – and they are extremely intense and challenging at first for most people – the Core program will take 10 minutes to perform each day. The full Advanced routine of seventeen exercises takes about 30 minutes, again depending on your level of fitness and familiarity with the exercises.

Please keep in mind that it is not necessary to do the full Advanced routine every day, but you should at least do the Core workout daily whenever possible, with the exception of planned days of rest.

You will notice that there is no use of either free weights or exercise machines in the calisthenics program or elsewhere in the HumanaNatura program. The reason for this is that the use of weights, especially weightlifting machines, is not consistent with our principles and goals for natural exercise.  Your own body weight is all that is required in HumanaNatura’s calisthenics program, making the program not only simple and natural, but also more portable, flexible, time-efficient, and much less expensive than weightlifting programs and fitness club memberships.

This is an important point and it is worth adding 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, one of HumanaNatura’s key principles of natural exercise.  Whole body exercises are a much more efficient way to foster usable strength, stamina, flexibility, and agility than either weightlifting exercises or machines. If you lift weights today, you will quickly understand the power, efficiency, and advantage of whole body exercise once you begin the calisthenics program.  

We would also add that weight and machine-based exercise, generally, fosters the idea that we are unable to maintain our health through the normal activities of our lives, and that there are inevitably times of low and high health-promotion during each day.  This is an important, often unconscious, and limiting idea that we would encourage you to examine.  In principle and practice, there is no reason our lives and our health cannot be fully integrated or that we cannot spend our entire time in health-enhancing activities.

Through daily calisthenics, you may begin to see new opportunities for a more integrated view of your life and health enhancement activities.  Achieving this understanding of how our daily activity patterns can form an integrated expression of our natural health forms an important milestone in the HumanaNatura program.  We would encourage you to use our exercise program to explore the idea of and your potential for a fully health-affirming life.

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