The press has been going crazy on barefoot running following the publication of research by Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman (watch the video summarising the research here, or read about it in The Times, The Express or Business Week). At last it is out, and now almost undisputed that running shoes hinder running, and that running with no, or minimal foot-wear, is the way forward. BUT you need coaching otherwise you can get all sorts of new injuries if your running style has adjusted too much to shoe clad technique. See below for the logic we have always taught behind barefoot running and some practical tips on how to begin. Continue reading Running Wild
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This recipe is an old favourite on our Wildfitness courses in Kenya. It is rich and warming and delicious AND of course abides by our Wild Eating guidelines so is full of good stuff. Enjoy! Ingredients (serves approx 5) 500g Mincemeat
After watching Avatar, I have found the imagined planet of Pandora and the way the Na’vi tribe live on it absolutely inspiring. People say to me ‘Tara – it’s not actually true you know!’. But, I think much of it could be. The Wildfitness philosophy draws wisdom from how hunter-gatherers / tribal societies live. Incorporating some of their lifestyle into ours, we can get some of the benefits of their levels of health, physical prowess and freedom. But, whilst we may learn much from hunter-gatherer societies, should we idealise them? I think obviously not – we are still a species evolving; physically and culturally. New technologies and lifestyles that work with nature (the most sophisticated technology of all) can only bring more richness to the human experience. Continue reading Na’vi Fitness
Breathing we can just let happen, like a wild human would, but we can also control it (like a super wild person). We can learn how to use our breathing to gain powerful effects on the body: to switch us into a deeply calm state, to bring in more oxygen to our cells and to help us when we run or exert ourselves. To relax Most of us don’t get much time to stop and chill. We live in a blue-arsed fly state – going from work, to the gym, to the pub or we run round after our kids. Breathing can chill us out. Breathing & free-diving I have been interested in the effects of breathing for many years. Yogis are renowned for breath control, but of all the testing grounds for breathing techniques, free-diving is the most dramatic. Free-diving is where people dive to depths on a single breath: Diving depth record for humans The Freediving Two-Section Breath Up Hopefully you’re convinced of the benefits of breathing techniques (if not read our blog post Born to breath-hold? ), so here’s one to try. This is a technique recommended by Wildfitness Coach, Augusto, who is also a professional free-diving instructor. While it is a technique from free-diving, it is easy to master and still gives the wonderful effect of making you feel super chilled out. Watch the video and read the instructions below for more detail.
I was in one of my creative moods when I decided to concoct this recipe! Some friends were coming over for dinner and I needed to impress them with a warming January feast to distract them from the fact that my heating wasn’t working! I LOVE squash-based recipes… it gives an amazing texture and is a great wintery filler! I whacked in some nutmeg here as a bit of an experiment!
INGREDIENTS METHOD
Peta Bee’s article ‘Why pounding the streets really is good for your health’ gives the scientific background to some of the benefits of running but Caitlin Moran’s article ‘How running can make you happy’ really brings alive her experience of why stepping out the door to run is so much more fun and simple then a trip to the gym. She says: ”I love how sleek and extreme it is — in terms of simplicity and time efficiency, running is the Martini of exercise. If you want to, you can push yourself with it to such an extent that — up hill, in rain, wind peeling your eyeballs — you feel like you’re punching into the face of God.” Love it! Interestingly though barefoot running only gets a small mention in the ‘What’s hot?’ column as “this year’s running trend” and isn’t mentioned at all in the main article about running injuries. Also the first item in the ‘Essential Kit’ list is a pair of gel-soled running shoes. It seems that the media is still pitching barefoot running as something new, niche and a bit wacky rather than something suitable for everyone, including beginner runners. Yet it’s likely that it’s the very people who don’t enjoy running who are running in a way that isn’t comfortable for their body and who would most benefit from learning to run barefoot-style. The power of learning “wild running” (taught at Wildfitness but developed over the millennia by nature!) is that you can run and run, avoiding pain and injury and able to just revel in the exhilaration of feeling the wind in your hair!
It got us thinking. Is the whole process of looking at our evolutionary origins for guidance on the way we move, eat and live just a fad? Are our teachings at Wildfitness just a fad? Fad defined: a temporary fashion or notion. Are our teachings a fad? Well yes, in a way. Many of the things we do, believe in and live by are temporary. We are continuing to evolve, continuing to understand who we are, where we came from, how we should live. To say we have answered these questions, for anyone to say they have answered these questions is labelling yourself as limited and a bit silly. But I do believe that looking to nature, looking to what we know of our origins is a rich place to look for these answers. And I also believe that looking to nature and our evolutionary origins is a philosophy that gives a fruitful focus, more so than scientific enquiry that tries to make sense of our physiology and biomechanics outside of this context.
It’s easy to retreat to the duvet during winter in the city; and often quite sensible. But there is also a bionic edge to going for a run when it is snowing, or even inhospitably windy, dark and wet. I go in shorts, singlet and sometimes bare foot (not advisable on hard ground though…). For the first 10 minutes it hurts like nibbling goblin teeth, then your blood gets hot and you feel super human to be toasty whilst being near- naked in a storm. Watching snowflakes melt on your skin has something of the terminator 2 about it. You have to keep running pretty fast and once you are back you have about 5 minutes to warm down before you have to get inside. But the heat stays in your bones more than any warm coat or bath gives you. And people see a glint in your eye that a ‘yoga in my warm bedroom’ wouldn’t give you. Send us poetic accounts of storm runs please, it will help the tribal wild sap flow as the winter creeps. |
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Double page spread in today’s UK Times T2 section about running – with the focus being on the mental benefits and the sheer joy of running. Given that, from an evolutionary point of view, running is probably our most fundamental movement pattern after walking, it only makes sense that running is key to human health.
We recently discovered that the Paleo diet (or caveman diet, Stone Age diet, hunter-gatherer diet or whatever else you want to call the approach to eating based on the presumed ancient diet of our ancestors during the Paleolithic era) has been qualified as a “fad diet” by the National Health Service of England and American Dietetic Association.![running-in-the-rain[1]](http://wildfitnessblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/running-in-the-rain1.jpg "running-in-the-rain[1]")