The Actionaut

I don’t mean to do a plug for a movie I have no connection to, which most people are going to see anyway, but James Cameron’s “Avatar” flick has a tremendous amount of resonance in how we ought to be, live and perceive our environment.

Hunter Gatherer Lifestyle
In the movie, the Na’Vi tribe has a lifestyle of total communion with their ecology. Everything is connected to their Goddess Eywa (quite literally, through some form of organic technology, as every living creature seems to have the equivalent of a USB port, be it plant or animal, even the soil), like a huge hard drive where you can download and upload memories. They attempt to not disturb any ecological balance, and any kill is justified and respected. The Na’Vi, indigenous to Pandora, are tall, lean, beautiful, agile and extremely fit. They are “Wild Fit”, as a matter of fact. They train all day long by riding their native equine and bird equivalents, climb trees, cling to vines, scale mountains and more. The forest is their playground, their gym. Quickly into the movie, you care more for the natives of Pandora, truly connected to their planet, than you do for the humans, who act as a colonizing virus (a concept explored in movies like The Matrix Trilogy) after putting their own planet, Our planet Earth, in ecological jeopardy (nice to know in many centuries, we still haven’t resolved our environmental issues).

Wild Na'Vi Fitness

Similarities to Our Ancestry
Well, not just our ancestry if you consider we still have a few tribes of true Hunter Gatherers, such as the Hadza in Tanzania. But, humans used to be hunter-gatherers before they were farmers, over 200,000 years ago. Farming (and a newly acquired sedentary lifestyle) lasted 10,000+ years until we became the modernized “zoo humans” we are today, thanks to the industrial revolution. We have the technology, which seems soulless compared to how the Na’Vi’s “theo-technology” (a term I just coined for this post, but will not claim was not used elsewhere, if someone happens to have beaten me to it), but we are disconnected, figuratively. We may connect to the World Wide Web, send tweets and social network updates via our smart phones, but we are detached from our immediate surroundings, all focused only on our tech devices. The Na’Vi remind me also of the Masai warriors my wife and I encountered when honeymooning in Tanzania. Very tall, lean, able to read the bush and track animals even in the dark, with a built-in GPS into their brain, their skin so dark it seems it had a bluish tint to it. We don’t need to travel 6 light years, though I thank Jim Cameron for the experience, the reminder, the awareness, the message.

Masai fitness

Movies: Not Just To Escape
Yes, movies allow us to escape from our worldly matters, but great ones also bring us back, especially when the message is subtly obvious (great oxymoron, but stay with me here…). Last year’s “Wall-E” showed ballooned humans, degenerating after trashing the Earth. Here, we saw us colonizing another planet to steal rather than undo what we did to ourselves. The answer in both cases was a return to our roots. It’s not just fitness. It’s a change of perception (which the movies provide), hopefully for a change in lifestyle, not just exercise and proper eating. It’s a call to Action!

Comments (8) Dec 26 2009

What are Natural Movement Patterns?
The natural movement patterns in our bodies enable us to do things like running, fighting, lifting.  We evolved in an environment where we needed to do intense short exertion with lots of rest or ‘active recovery’ in between.  We might have hunted, fought, run away etc. and then spent the afternoon sitting under a tree or gathering berries… We’re still the same human beings we were over 200,000 years ago! It’s just that we started to farm when we became sedentary, introduced a bunch of ailments, nutritional deficiencies and more as a result for about 10,000 years, and since the industrial revolution, we became modernized, caged humans, akin to living in a zoo! (And we know how animals are meant to live in cages…). Evolution-based fitness systems teach us how to train utilizing the innate gifts nature bestowed upon us that we societally ruin by not using them (entropy). It takes us 9 months to come out perfect and a lifetime to undo it. Evolution-based fitness is about learning how to take full advantage of our movement systems, among others (which I will cover in other posts).

How to Move Pain Free:
The key to getting a lean and pain free wild body is to mimic the movements and intensity that our bodies are designed for. The movements that you do most often:  standing, walking, running, or whatever sport you do e.g. biking, are those which will have most effect on your body.  Doing certain stretches or isolated exercises may help to alleviate pain but you have to change your movement patterns to change the load to your structure and therefore heal or prevent injuries.

Taking Care of the Shoulder (TCS):
In today’s blog post, I want to talk about one of the most commonly affected body parts: the shoulder. Injuries there can be passive, or recurring, chronic or acute, although in my personal belief, if you take care of it and understand its design, you’re less likely to injure yourself under circumstances where you have a semblance of control over your environment (unless someone is purposely attempting to hurt you), like when you ski, climb, play sports or lift (if an accident occurs then, it’s usually a culmination of judgment errors).

Shoulder Evolution:
Our primate cousins’ shoulder girdle is designed of brachiation (picture apes swinging on vines, like Tarzan). We may not swinging on vines daily, but working on expanding our gluteal real estate hunched our desks isn’t what we’re meant to do either when movement is in mind. The majority of our shoulder injuries come from the fact that, due to the lack of brachiation in our daily movement patterns, especially certain body building movements design to “build” the shoulder, our scapula has developed a downward rotation (sagging shoulders, poor posture, tight chest from too much bench pressing…).

Shoulder Mobility:
Stretching movements (like Yoga or Superjoints, Z-Health as well as a series of “wild” or natural movement patterns) aimed at allowing more range of motion can give you the flexibility and mobility you need to open the shoulder girdle. In training, you need to learn how to compress that same joint in order to keep it stable and avoid leaking or dissipating strength by not “connecting” your shoulder, “corkscrewing” it into your torso. That leakage vs linkage, the latter very proper to the RKC system (Russian Kettlebell Certification) is what keeps you strong and injury-free.

Remedy:
Train with me or any RKC certified instructor by visiting dragondoor.com. Or go on a Wildfitness vacation in Africa (make sure to tell them I sent you), which you can find at wildfitness.com

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Comments (1) Dec 17 2009