Wildfitness is a fitness holiday company with the aspiration to help people eat, move and live in harmony with nature. Find practical tips in our Wild Eating, Wild Moving & Wild Living sections, or go to our Wonderations category for more philosophical musings on nature, the wild, our health, the role of science, the meaning of life etc! Enjoy and please let us know what you think.
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
(without fins) – men 88 meters, women 60 meters
(with weights to get down and balloon to get up) – men 214 meters, women 160 meters Continue reading Born to breath-hold?
The Freediving Two-Section Breath Up
(Stomach & Chest)
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 1 Onion
2 Garlic cloves (but add more if you’re eating alone!)
½ Butternut squash (cut up roughly)
1 tsp Nutmeg
Stock (1/2 pint of water and 1 dessert spoon of Bouillon powder)
Tamari soy sauce (4 good slurps)
METHOD 1.Gently fry onion, garlic with the nutmeg in a splatter of oil and 1 slurp of Tamari soy sauce in a large saucepan
2. When brown add butternut squash and keep mixing for 5 minutes
3. Add stock and 3 slurps of Tamari soy sauce
4. Simmer until squash is soft
5. Blend until smooth (I use a Vitamix which is fab but you can also use any other blender)
6. Lastly, be inventive! I grated another half a nutmeg and sprinkled on top. But you can also make a swirl of yogurt or add a sprig of parsley.
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.
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’s the new year and with it comes the inevitable press and magazine coverage focused on helping advise people who want to shape up and jog off the “festive excess”. Refreshingly though there has been increasing coverage in the UK press on the phenemenon of barefoot running. Off the back of the success of Chris McDougalls’s book Born to Run and press on Vibram Fivefingers and Vivo Barefoot shoes, maybe there is hope that this formerly niche practice (we’ve been teaching it at Wildfitness for over 3 years and I think people thought we were mad to start with!) will soon become mainstream.
Ben Fogle discusses barefoot running in the Telegraph on Jan 4th, ‘Barefoot running: Joggers race to put their foot in it’, where he mentions the former boxer Jackson Williams who is preparing to be the first man to run across Australia barefoot.
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.
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.
Goji berries from South America, detox juice fasting, food pyramids, raw food only – how the heck do we know what to eat these days? At Wildfitness our filter is: what would a wild human eat? An agile, natural, instinctive, intelligent, wild human – in touch with nature – in harmony with nature?
What do our ancestors tell us?
From what we know about them, they would have been hunter-gatherers. We assume they would have ‘hunted’ meat and fish, and ‘gathered’ fruits, veg, seeds, nuts, eggs and seafood. Perhaps in their ‘gathering’ they also manipulated the plants around them to some degree – either by nurturing or planting them. No grains or dairy or refined artificial foods. They would have eaten mostly raw foods, seasonally. They would have eaten when they were hungry and not eaten when they were not hungry.
What does science tell us?
Science is great at measuring the effects of certain foods in the body. We know that antioxidants protect us from certain diseases. We know that ingestion of heavy metals poisons our system. We know that deficiencies in Vit C cause scurvy. We know that high glycaemic foods release insulin and can lead to diabetes. This is clear quantitative information and without this testing process we may still be drinking snake oil at full moon. Science, however, is never cleverer than nature. It is the study of nature and can’t supersede it.
Our primate ancestors spent a lot of time hanging out in trees and swinging through the branches (what fun). There is actually an official term for this type of movement, in which the suspended body swings from one hold to another using only the arms (and momentum rather than muscle strength). It’s called brachiation. You may not have heard this term before because very few animals are capable of brachiating. In fact the only animals that do are the lesser apes, spider monkeys, orangutans and… humans.
Yes, we should all be capable of brachiating – just think back to when you were a kid playing on monkey bars. But the truth is that as “zoo humans” we spend less time swinging through trees (sadly) and more time sitting in front of our computers. In this seated posture our shoulder blades are rotated forward and downwards and our chests contracted…you are probably sitting like this right now and have just sat up to correct it! With time this seated position can lead to various shoulder problems and pain. So what do we do to counter-act it?
Start hanging!
It’s as simple as that. Hanging from our arms immediately opens up the chest, rotates the shoulders backwards and helps improve flexibility and strength in the shoulder joint. It’s basically what our bodies are designed to do!
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]")
What do our ancestors tell us?
