As we watch animals in nature, we see that most are physically active for hours each day – running, jumping, flying, swimming, climbing, exploring, wrestling, fighting – amidst their natural activities of feeding, play, mating, and conflict.

This activity, and high proficiency in one or more of these specific activities, usually is essential for the survival and health of each species in wild nature, and for maintenance of its evolutionary niche. As we discussed earlier in the HumanaNatura program, it is through this natural activity, in combination with a natural diet and other aspects of natural life, that animals achieve natural conditioning and maintain themselves at high levels of natural health and vitality for all, or nearly all, of their lives.

Our need for variety and intensity
This natural need for varied and periodically intense physical activity applies to people too. Like all other animals, we human animals require a range of activity, based on and consistent with our own evolutionary lineage, to achieve natural conditioning and to reach and maintain the high levels of health and fitness that represent our natural and naturally healthy state. Without this activity – either directly in its natural forms or through exercises and activities designed to replicate or optimize natural human conditioning – our health and fitness quickly suffer, and we soon begin to live at greatly diminished levels of personal capacity and vitality.

Observations of other omnivorous primates in the wild, such as chimpanzees and particularly plains-dwelling baboons, suggest that these reasonably close cousins to humans spend about a third of their time sleeping, and then divide their waking time between natural activities associated with traveling and finding food, and socializing and maintaining order and cohesiveness within their group. Occasionally, our primate cousins must run from or chase away a pack of hungry cats or dogs, or deal with other intrusions from still larger and often quite belligerent and dangerous grazing animals.

It is both impressive and insightful to watch other primate species rise to such occasions and work as a group to meet these natural challenges – revealing not just the full scope and periodic intensity of their natural activity patterns, but also the essentially social nature of primate life in the wild, and the basic truth that nature affords no individual life to primates, including humans, in our natural evolutionary niche. We are, first and always, naturally social animals.

For humans, walking is of course an integral part of our life in nature, and forms the central component of our natural activity pattern as we have discussed, but many of the other activities mentioned above are part of our natural life patterns as well. Humans naturally share in most of the activities of other omnivorous primates (foraging, climbing, wrestling, playing, fighting, courtship and reproduction, and child-rearing activities), while having some natural activities that are unique to us (tool-making and tool use, and activities related to organized hunting and warfare). To optimize our health, we need to incorporate many of these additional physical movements into our daily lives, in addition to daily walking, thereby sufficiently reproducing our natural human activity patterns and achieving complete and quite intensive levels of natural conditioning.

Walking’s natural complement
There are a number of potential forms of exercise we might add to HumanaNatura’s core walking program to enhance our fitness and achieve a complete natural conditioning regime, and we encourage you to consider what other exercises might best further your own quest for progressive health and quality of life.

In designing the HumanaNatura natural health program, however, we carefully considered which exercises best complement a natural exercise program based first on daily walking. We considered which are as efficient, flexible, sustainable, and optimal for us as possible, which are readily practiced at different levels, and which naturally lend themselves to our larger and more important goal of progressively healthier and more vital life.

As we suggested earlier in this section of the HumanaNatura program, the calisthenics exercises that follow are intended to provide an optimally balanced, sufficiently and flexibly demanding, and highly efficient exercise program – systematically exercising our entire body to achieve complete natural conditioning in just minutes a day, 3-5 days per week, when combined with the practice of daily walking.

The word calisthenics comes from the Greek words 'kallos' for beauty and 'thenos' for strength. Calisthenics are an old, often quite simple, and remarkably effective form of human exercise, and a great health-promoting product of civilized life. Like Hatha Yoga of southern Asia and Tai Chi of eastern Asia, modern calisthenics provide a balanced, complete (when combined with daily walking), and direct means of promoting natural conditioning and achieving the four physical fitness exercise goals we introduced (aerobic conditioning, strengthening, improved flexibility, increased agility or coordination).

As you will learn in practice, calisthenics do indeed bring both beauty and strength to us, greatly enhancing our physical fitness and stamina as well as our personal vitality and preparedness for life.

There are a total of twenty-one exercises in the HumanaNatura calisthenics program, divided into four groups:

• Core exercises - Six Core exercises provide a basic but still quite rigorous workout of our entire body and are meant to be performed on a near daily basis, both by people just beginning to exercise and by people following the HumanaNatura calisthenics program at the intermediate and advanced levels.
  
  
• Intermediate exercises - As your physical conditioning improves, you can add some or all of eight Intermediate exercises to the Core calisthenics program on any given day.
  
  
• Intermediate-Advanced exercises - As you begin exercising at the Intermediate level, you can add some or all of four additional Intermediate-Advanced exercises to the Core program, each of which begins with at an Intermediate level and then has one or more variations for people graduating to the Advanced level.
  
  
• Advanced exercises - With further improvement in your level of fitness, you can add some or all of three Advanced exercises to HumanaNatura’s Core calisthenics program on any given day.

Once you become conditioned to the intensity and demands of HumanaNatura’s calisthenics exercises – and the exercises are extremely intense and challenging at first for most people – the basic Core program will take about ten minutes to perform. The full routine of twenty-one exercises takes an hour or more, again depending on your level of fitness and familiarity with the exercises, and is normally not done in a single day or workout. This is due both to the amount of time involved and the desirability of day-to-day exercise variability and regular rest after intense exertion for optimal natural conditioning. It is better to vary or alternate our exercise patterns and to practice fewer exercises more deeply each time we do calisthenics.

While it is not necessary or even desirable to do the full HumanaNatura calisthenics routine in a single workout, you should at least do the entire Core workout whenever you do calisthenics, and then add a selection of the non-Core exercises. As suggested, most HumanaNatura natural health practitioners significantly vary their calisthenics workouts, for enjoyment, optimal conditioning, and for time management, balancing our exercise practices with other life goals and commitments.

The power of bodyweight
As you begin the calisthenics exercises, you will notice that there is no use of free weights in the calisthenics workout or elsewhere in the HumanaNatura natural exercise program. The reason for this is that the use of weights, and especially weightlifting machines, is usually not consistent with our principles and goals for natural exercise. Your own body weight and the whole body exercises presented are all that is required in HumanaNatura’s calisthenics program, making the program not only simpler and more natural, but also more portable, flexible, time-efficient, and much less expensive than weightlifting programs and fitness club memberships.

For people interested in exercise science, HumanaNatura’s advocacy of whole body movements and exclusive use of natural body weight is an important distinction. It is worth noting here that most weightlifting exercises and machines seek to work distinct muscle groups in isolation. This approach is contrary to the principle of whole body exercise, which is a much more efficient approach to conditioning and one of HumanaNatura’s key principles of natural exercise. Whole body exercises are a much more optimal way to foster usable strength, stamina, flexibility, and agility than can be achieved either with weightlifting exercises or resistance machines. If you lift weights today, or have in the past, you will quickly understand the power, efficiency, and many advantages of the whole body exercise approach once you begin the HumanaNatura calisthenics program.

For all natural health practitioners, we would also add here that weight-lifting, and really all machine-based and technology-reliant forms of exercise, even those that use whole body movement, implicitly foster the idea that we are naturally unable to efficiently maintain robust health through the normal activities of our lives, and even that there are inevitably times of low and high health-promotion each day (and even times of health destruction that must be intensively offset through machine-based therapy).

This is an important, often unconscious, and sometimes quite limiting idea that we would encourage you to examine in your own natural health practice. In principle, and as a practical challenge to achieve a more conscious and health-based life, we would ask you to consider the idea that our lives and our health-promotion efforts can be fully integrated – that we can progressively spend more and more of our time and life in natural behaviors that are actively health-promoting and life-enhancing.

Conditioning for life
Through daily walking and regular calisthenics – and especially by observing the ease and naturalness with which we can begin, conduct, and move from our workouts – you may well begin to see other possibilities to integrate your life and health enhancement activities. Achieving new awareness of the potential for our daily activity patterns to form an integrated and progressive expression of our natural health is, in fact, a critically important milestone in the HumanaNatura program, one which we will discuss in greater depth in the Natural Living section of the program.

For now, we would simply encourage you to use our calisthenics exercises and overall natural exercise program, not only to achieve new levels of personal fitness and vitality, but also to consider and explore your potential for life that is fully health-affirming in all respects. As you do this, you will quickly find that our calisthenics workout provides extraordinary new challenges and levels of natural health in its practice, changing and remaking us physically and emotionally, and foreshadowing and preparing us for still larger challenges and health-based changes in our lives today.

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