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.
It’s cool (and rare unfortunately!) when a journalist “gets it”. So often journalists who cover Wildfitness can’t seem to stay away from the fitness clichés… playing up how tough the training is and focussing on how skinny they got. So it was a nice relief to read the great coverage in The Independent’s ‘Traveller’ section (Sat 20th March) by Matt Carroll, who joined one of courses in Crete, entitled ‘How I joined Crete’s fit club’. He realised that rather than being faddy we’re all about the super simple – “a new approach to exercise where the emphasis is on sunshine, fresh air and relaxation.” (Though it’s fairly comical that this is described as “new” – surely it is the most ancient approach to ‘exercise’ there is?)
He says: “Pop your head into any high-street gym and you might notice rows of complicated-looking machines, and miserable-looking people desperately trying to conform to unrealistic physical stereotypes. The philosophy behind Wild Fitness is to do away with this and get back to exercise basics. So one of the first things we were taught was to forget everything we’ve been taught; this meant no weights machines and no ridiculous balancing acts with Swiss balls. Just six days in the great Greek outdoors – running on the beach, swimming in the sea and taking regular snoozes.”
The point being that if you enjoy moving and eat simple, delicious foods that nourish and satisfy you, then good health and fitness is no longer an arduous add-on to your life but the natural outcome of a lifestyle. He says, “Months later, I’m still managing to stick to the diet (almost) and am enjoying my workouts instead of dreading them.” But clearly enjoying exercise is so alien to the newspaper editors that they still included a photo of him grimacing in pain! Seems the fitness industry (& media) are still a way off from changing yet.
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
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
2 Red onions, peeled and chopped
2½ Tomatoes, Chopped
½ Bay Leaf, Crumbled
2.5 Pepper Corns, crushed
4 Garlic Cloves, Crushed
1 Aubergine, thinly sliced lengthways
1 Courgette, thinly sliced lengthways
2 Sweet Potatoes, peeled, thinly sliced and blanched
1.5tsp Coconut Oil
125ml Beef Stock
1tbsp Tomato Paste Continue reading Our Famous Beef Moussaka
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.
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 
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.
