You may have heard about the “paleo diet,” which harkens back to caveman days in terms of your food choices. “Paleo fitness” applies a similar philosophy to exercise, with movements that are more explosive and less structured than what you typically see in the gym. Today reported May 28 that the workout involves movements like climbing trees and lifting rocks and logs – "practical tasks, physical actions that you would perform in the real world, both in day-to-day and challenging situations,” says Erwan Le Corre, founder of the MovNat program, who helped pioneer the fitness regimen. “People … perform basic human movements such as squatting, kneeling, stepping, balancing, crawling under an obstacle, jumping over another one, then lifting and carrying an object — or someone — over a distance, and many other movements,” he says. “Instead of plunking people in gyms and have them do boring repetitive workouts using machinery and trying to isolate muscles, we have them move a lot, to move in many ways they used to when they were kids.” The more varied the movements, the better for health, fitness and resiliency, adds Le Corre. “Physical education a hundred years ago was about developing physical competency for real life,” says Brandon Sewall, director of training at Primitive Movement. “Now fitness is degraded to padded machines and artificial movements patterns that are all about building vanity. It’s all about building show muscles instead of ‘go’ muscles.” Many of the paleo fitness workouts hearken back to childhood as much as the time of the Neanderthals; participants may walk and balance on unstable surfaces, hang from tree branches, toss cobblestones, or carry a boulder down a beach. Some carry risks, however, such as climbing trees, so you may want to adopt the philosophy but incorporate into a more conventional workout. “Transition away from the machines that guide the movement and use more free weights that are three-dimensional movement,” says exercise physiologist and personal trainer Jason Karp. “And then use your own body weight. Do body weight exercises like chin-ups and pull-ups and pushups rather than lifting external weights off the ground. Do things that are similar to what you do in real life, like squats, which is like bending down to pick up a pile of laundry.”
Posted on: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 13:45:07 +0000
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