Establishing Foundations

Everyone involved in fitness shares the values of strength, speed, agility, endurance, and overall health, to become an optimal performing human organism. Think about the phrase, “optimal performing human organism”. What does that mean? Humans are a living organism, just like every other animal on earth, except due to our comfortable lifestyles, many of our species have forgotten the importance of taking care of our physical being, and live only in the conscious mind. Physical activity is how humans interact with the environment, and taking care of our bodies is to use them in the way we were designed by nature herself. Movement. The human organism eats, moves, and manipulates their surroundings. Being healthy means eating right, athleticism, and strength.

Survival can only occur if an organism is fed. With fast food, prepared frozen meals, and processed foods as a whole, humans have become very susceptible to eating poorly. Obviously this causes disease that makes you feel and look like shit. There are many schools of thought on what to eat for a healthy life, but optimal nutrition comes down to eating real food that grows and lives on the earth. When you start thinking about food as fuel for yourself as an organism, it’s plain to see that eating real food is the absolute most essential component of health. Don’t sell your fitness potential short by settling for a quick, easy, delicious bullshit meal that ultimately poisons you. Eat real, whole foods, because fueling your body optimally is the basis for health.

Humans are born into the world with nothing except for their body. This means that before pursuing any form of strength training in the weight room, you must first learn to move and manipulate your own body. As an infant, we begin with crawling, and literally progress in “baby steps” towards walking and running. The same goes for creating a strong, functional, athletic body. As a child, it is important to be active and interact with fellow tyrants on the playground, and all parents should encourage physical activity in their child’s life. So when it comes time to strength train, whether you’re in middle school and want to start getting stronger so girls will notice you, or you’re a college student tired of being inactive, it’s important to progress slowly and establish foundations.

Bodyweight training is in my experience the most important way to begin gaining functional strength. Developing the kinetic chain and coordination it takes to progress in the weight room will be incredibly enhanced by performing bodyweight movements. The basic movements of pushups, pull ups, bodyweight squats, and sit ups are all important to developing strong motor patterns. Hell, if you can’t do a pushup, don’t go into the weight room expecting to perform the bench press with correct form. Using low intensity loads from bodyweight movements allows the body to develop proper form and establish the foundations for athleticism. But this form of training goes beyond pushups and sit ups. Start sprinting, go on hikes, let your body interact with the natural world and climb some trees. Being able to confidently move your body is the base for strength, agility, and endurance. Challenging yourself to a pistol squat or muscle up pushes your physical abilities to manipulate yourself through space. These will all aid in the ability to establish functional strength, solid endurance, and overall athleticism. Only when you are can perform bodyweight exercises with ease and grow bored with achieving scores of repetitions are you ready to progress to the weight room.

The weight room is where we go to learn to safely and effectively move heavy shit. Our primal ancestors spent their childhood running in the wild, wrestling with each other to prove their dominance, and not until they were developed as a strong adolescent, did they begin helping the tribe with various duties, such as building shelters or dragging a mammoth carcass back to camp. So when it’s time to get strong, go to the gym and start lifting heavy shit. Compound movements are the key to gaining functional strength. Deadlifts, squats, and pressing the barbell overhead are all going to support the ability to manipulate heavy objects in the real world. But get creative, and push yourself, or a prowler in the case of strength training. Apply your athletic abilities established from the bodyweight training to facilitate in muscle stimulation to gain some serious strength. Doing 50 bodyweight squats takes serious endurance and strength, but that won’t help your tribe carry a deer up a hill to your camp after a morning’s hunt. Make yourself stronger in the weight room, so you can better interact with the world you live in.

It’s just as important to develop cardiorespiratory fitness as well. You might be able to pull 405lbs off the ground, but if you’re winded after walking from your car to the gym entrance, you’ve got bigger problems. Fortunately for most of us that hate the long duration cardio like running mile after mile, exercise physiologists have discovered that high intensity interval work is a more effective conditioning tool. Jacking up your heart rate with running long distance is catabolic, meaning it destroys your precious muscle gains and makes you skinny fat. However, running sprints or doing intervals with bodyweight movements for maximum intensity for a prescribed work-rest ratio can jack up your heart rate, ventilation, and anabolic hormones to create a leaner, harder beast. Taking up a martial art is a great way incorporate conditioning into your fitness regimen while learning to manhandle any neighboring tribesman that sets foot on your territory.

But don’t fall in to the trap of only focusing on one aspect of training, and then progressing to the next and ultimately staying at one modality. Maintain balance. It’s important to always maintain healthy eating habits, and once you learn to move your body efficiently, it isn’t going to cut it to evolve to weight training and forever focus on lifting heavier shit. It needs to be a continuous cycle. Use all of these tools and integrate them into your interaction as an organism with the world. Bodyweight movements can be excellent accessories to heavy compound lifts. But my favorite way to get the most out of my training is to go out in nature and use it. Go to a park with your lifting partner and challenge them to a foot race, or see who can pick up the tree that fell over and blocked the trail. This is where everything ties together. Lifting weights just to lift heavier every week can be rewarding, but it doesn’t serve much purpose to be strong just for the gym.

So start early. Form good dietary habits, learn your body, and become stronger. These three fundamentals are only a portion of what it takes to be a healthy individual, but establishing the foundations in each of these realms will facilitate you as an optimal performing organism in the animal kingdom. Live by them, continue to progress, and pass these skills down to your children to breed a stronger human. That is the way of a true Alpha.