Before beginning natural exercise, please carefully read the Introduction section of the HumanaNatura health program and be sure to consult with your health care provider.

Once we begin to restore our natural health through a natural diet, bringing natural exercise into our lives is the next critical step in restoring key aspects of natural human life and further transforming our modern lives by bringing our health to new levels.

Like natural eating, establishing a daily pattern of natural exercise is a practical necessity to achieve natural conditioning and a stepping stone to far greater opportunities for progressive personal health and well-being. Also like natural eating, natural exercise affords us important insights into ourselves, our health, natural human life, and the natural world. Natural exercise increases our fitness and vitality. It deepens our interest in and capacity for the exploration and discovery of heath-based life. And natural exercise provides important new opportunities in its practice for new enjoyment of life, and for more health-oriented relationships with others and the world around us.

The role of exercise
To put natural exercise in context, we might say that natural eating takes us through the threshold of our natural health, and that natural exercise then propels us more deeply and even forcefully into higher practical realizations of our individual health and well-being. As you will learn in this section of the HumanaNatura program, natural exercise strengthens and revitalizes us in ways that are both predictable and often unexpected. Natural exercise changes us physically and psychologically, markedly improving our health and fitness, and readies us for still higher states of personal health and quality of life – through the lifelong progressive health practice that HumanaNatura calls natural living.

Through sustained and progressively challenging natural exercise, we improve not just our personal fitness and stamina, but equally and more significantly, we expand, deepen, and make more natural our daily range of life experiences, subtly developing our capacity for new engagement and perseverance in the pursuit of healthier and more compelling life for ourselves. Natural exercise almost immediately enriches our sense of self and increases our ability to consciously control our choices, bringing new momentum and practical capabilities to our lives. This, in turn, prepares us for much broader life challenges that await us on a lifelong path toward progressive health and vitality – challenges that take us directly to the truth of our natural health and its open-ended potential to foster personal renewal and new growth in our lives and society today.

For all these reasons, natural exercise is the second of HumanaNatura’s key natural health techniques and an essential part of our natural health program. When we talk about natural exercise, we mean simply a series of physical activities that optimally promote natural conditioning and fitness, and a more natural experience of daily life, by reproducing essential aspects of our ancient, long-evolved human activity patterns in nature. As you will learn in practice, and once again like natural eating, natural exercise is quite straightforward in principle and remarkably simple in practice. Where natural exercise differs from natural eating, however, is in the greater demands it makes on us physically. But if natural exercise is more demanding, it also offers much greater opportunities for personal growth, development, and even transformation, through the more robust life experiences and altered world relationships it fosters.

Conditioning in nature
As we discussed already in some depth in the Our Past section of the HumanaNatura program, humans in wild nature are highly intelligent and cooperative gathering and hunting animals. We are part of the advancing primate branch of the roughly two hundred million year old, and principally communal, mammalian line of Earthy life. Our species is one that was formerly shaped by perhaps forty million years of life in and around forests, and more recently by roughly ten million years of life principally on and around open grasslands. Because of our natural human life of foraging in clans and tribes, humans are naturally active, mobile, and highly fit mammals, combining physical agility, mental prowess, and social cooperation to live and succeed alongside other formidable grassland species, species that are often much larger and more powerful than us.

Like all other animals in wild nature, humans are naturally evolved and optimized for a specific range, intensity, and duration of physical activity each day. To be as optimally healthy and fit as we can be, in every sense that we can be these things, we require maintenance of key aspects of this natural range and level of physical activity in our lives. In other words, we need to live today in ways that are consistent with, or at least proximate to, the physical demands and environmental conditions of our long evolutionary development in wild nature (and in ways that are socially and even aesthetically consistent with our evolutionary development too – we will discuss these important factors more in the Natural Living section of the HumanaNatura program).

As you will validate for yourself in your natural health practice, whenever our natural activity patterns are reduced or distorted, our health, fitness, and well-being all inevitably suffer. When we lose our physical vitality through prolonged inactivity, or unbalanced activity, our feelings of physical and spiritual vitality, our delight in living itself, and our natural impulses to new health and well-being each decline, and seemingly in equal measure.

Humans are naturally evolved animals and need – physically, emotionally, and even spiritually – adequate natural conditioning as an integral part of the way we live, to be naturally healthy and well, and to be naturally adaptive, vibrant, and growth-oriented in our lives. Most people, living today in conditions of social rather than natural health, greatly underestimate both the impact of natural exercise in our lives and the far more robust and vigorous levels of natural fitness we can each readily achieve, and then use to gain a profound new perspective on the greatly lowered vitality of modern society.

There are of course many ways to maintain our natural fitness and vitality through exercise, and numerous techniques for assuring a full and complimentary range of physical activity in our lives. Team sports, moderate aerobic activities, dance, martial arts, wrestling, yoga, water sports, many other common forms of exercise, and even moderately demanding and varied physical labor, all can be great ways of promoting partial or even nearly complete natural conditioning. Many of these activities are also excellent ways of maintaining a network of friends who share our goals and interests, helping to further other aims in our lives.

Optimizing exercise
In the context of the HumanaNatura program, however, it is worth considering several important questions, as we think through the challenge of creating a natural and optimal exercise program – given our goals of uncovering and better understanding our underlying natural health, of finding techniques that most efficiently and directly optimize our health and fitness generally, and of promoting conditions that best enable the progressive pursuit of new health and well-being throughout our lives.

The following questions will help you to understand why HumanaNatura’s natural exercise program is structured in the specific ways it is:

• What are the most efficient ways to structure human exercise to achieve natural, complete, and balanced levels of physical conditioning?
  
  
• What types of exercise are readily performed by people – easily, directly, alone or with others, and without significant cost?
  
  
• What exercises are most sustainable, most flexible and capable of being performed at different levels of intensity, and most readily made a lifelong part of our lives?
  
  
• Which forms of exercise are closest to our earlier activity patterns in wild nature, and most apt to re-connect us to key aspects of the physical experience of human living in nature?
  
  
• What types and levels of exercise have been found by modern scientists to be most beneficial for us – best promoting quality of life, affording superior vitality and longevity, and presenting the fewest risks and undesirable side-effects over the course of a long life?

HumanaNatura’s natural exercise program seeks to answer all of these questions, building upon the foundation of a natural diet and, in turn, working to enable the still more ambitious exploration of our natural health and progressive well-being through natural living.

Exercise for healthy life
As you will see and learn in practice, HumanaNatura’s natural exercise program provides an efficient, flexible, and lifelong means of promoting extremely high levels of health and physical conditioning, which other activities can complement. Ultimately, our exercise program – based simply and entirely on walking and calisthenics – not only conditions us, but also works to reconnect us to our natural sense of physical completeness and place in the natural world, and to restore our natural strength and readiness for action in the world, all of which are essential attributes of our natural health and the foundation of progressive and health-based human life.

We should add that HumanaNatura’s natural exercise program is intended to be a daily exercise program, forming an integral and essential part of our lives. It seeks to balance the amount of time spend each day in exercise with the overall impact of this activity on our health and well-being. As importantly, our natural exercise program brings essential natural human activity patterns back into our daily life, reawakening us to the natural power and pleasure of our human life, physical health, and place in nature.

HumanaNatura’s natural exercise program allows you to efficiently and optimally exercise for life, enriching your life and in contrast to the less than ideal and common health trap of living to exercise.

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