Becoming a fitness generalist

How to counter the effects of sedentary living and build an adventure-ready body

We are a species in decline.  The signs are all around us.  There is the obesity epidemic and plummeting testosterone levels.  Millennial men have the weakest grip strength of any generation.  And our children run a 90 second slower mile than 30 years ago.

And sedentary behavior isn’t just causing a decline in performance or fitness.  It’s also killing us.  Sedentary living is associated with a pile of health risks, including: metabolic syndrome, cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression and osteoporosis.  

The mechanism for this decline is pretty well understood.  Physical capacity, fitness and vibrant health are expensive.  They cost a lot of energy to build and maintain.  The body is like Mr. Scrooge.  It refuses to pay for any extras.  While Scrooge chased money, he refused to pay for “luxuries” like heating.   Similarly the body chases fertility and refuses to maintain any “extra” health or fitness.  If like many Americans you sit 15 hours a day, then your body maintains just enough physical capacity to enable sitting 15 hours a day.

You can see this play out in five different ways.

The costs of sedentary living

First, we lose our mobility.  The body only maintains the range of motion you use.  So it’s no wonder that people struggle to squat, crawl, hip hinge or hang.  The result is that basic natural movements become difficult and painful. 

Second, our muscles and bones atrophy.  If you don’t lift something heavy from time to time, you’re body sheds excess muscle.  If you do nothing, it sheds all but the bare essentials.  This is why runners are encouraged to strength train.  Running does not built enough muscle and bone density to support running performance.   The body responds narrowly to the stresses we impose.

Third, you lose or never even cultivate basic movement skills.  I like to think of movement skills as a tool kit.  The more tools you have, the more fun, exciting and useful the things you can do are.  For example, let’s say you can perform dozens of strict pullups.  That’s great.  The question then becomes, can you climb onto the bar?  Without a corresponding set of skills, pure physical capacity has limited utility outside of the gym.  To become adventure-ready, you need some skills.

Fourth, sedentary living destroys your conditioning.  Forget running a marathon for a moment.  How about a mile?  And there’s more to conditioning than running.  Hiking, climbing and sports all require conditioning.  Without conditioning, it’s impossible to be adventure-ready.

Fifth, sedentary living erodes your ability to cultivate an active lifestyle.  If you take the time and energy to build an adventure-ready body, you should take the time to enjoy it.  Yet even if you build the capacity, playing like a kids with the kids won’t just happen.  Years of sedentary living and the allures of modern living can make active adventurous living appear difficult. 

You lose the ability to see opportunities for movement, and instead you hunt out opportunities to maximize comfort.  Your mindset shifts.  A child perceives adventure all around.  A sedentary adult avoids adventure at all costs.

Consequently, even if you meet public health guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate or vigorous exercise per week, you still show negative health consequences from sedentary living.  This is known as active couch potato syndrome. 

You are putting in the work, but you still have many of the negative health consequences associated with sedentary lifestyle.  You’ve build a body that can perform, but you never use it.  In other words, an hour of exercise doesn’t wholly undue 23 hours of inactivity.

Fitness generalists: our true human potential

As you can see, we are a species in physical decline.  But this wasn’t always the case.  We’ve declined down from a peak.  Our true potential and birthright is something very different from modern sedentary humans.

Imagine trotting out into the afternoon sun on a hot summer day on the savannah.  You spot your target.  It’s a kudu.  As you chase after it, it sprints off to safety.  Like any other large prey animal, it is way faster than you are.  But you are stubborn, so you continue your chase.  Every time you catch up, it sprints away.  Minutes turn into hours.  This probably sounds hopeless and even stupid.   But after running something like a marathon, the kudu succumbs to heat exhaustion allowing you to easily kill it. 

This is persistence hunting, and this is how our ancestors tended to hunt.  They regularly ran for hours in the middle of the hottest part of the day forcing large prey animals into heat exhaustion.  Cool, right? 

Now if you’re imagining that our distant ancestors looked like the starting line of the Boston marathon, you’d be wrong.  After they killed the animal, they’d have to carry it back to the tribe.  We know that they had far thicker and stronger bones than their modern counterparts.  And they cultivated that bone from hard physical effort that required plenty of muscle. 

There is also evidence from studies of the Hadza that upper body strength was seen as the most important predictor of a hunter’s success.  And it was viewed as a powerful predictor of male reproductive success.  In other words, our ancestors probably looked more like the starting line of the OCR world championships than a pure endurance athlete.

It’s also reasonable to assume that our ancestors regularly climbed, jumped, threw, crawled, lifted, carried and fought.  They were movement generalists.

Maybe you’re thinking that we don’t do any of that because we’ve grown smarter.  But actually it isn’t just our muscles that are shrinking.  Even our brains are smaller than our distant ancestors.  

One leading theory is that this is the result of self-imposed domestication.  Picture a domestic pig versus a wild boar, and you’ll have the idea.  Basically living on a farm requires less brain or brawn than living in the wild.  And something like that has happened to us.

Some of these changes cannot be undone.  They are encoded in our genes.  I’m not suggesting you can grow a bigger brain.  But many or even most of them are not necessary.  They are the result of our sedentary lifestyles.  They are environmental and not genetic. 

The point is that expectations of health and fitness are corrupted by our modern experience.  We’ve destroyed our bodies through disuse, and because everyone does it, we assume it’s normal.  But when you take a step back from our current culture, you see that humans are fitness generalists.   Our genetic heritage is a body that’s build for adventure.  That’s our genetic normal.  That’s our birthright.

We have evolved to be strong, fast, efficient movers.  We should have lean muscular physiques, and we should know how to use them.

Let me put it another way.  A current modern human is like a domesticated farm animal.  All of its expectations about physical fitness is based on life on a farm.  But humans are capable of much more.  Our true default natural capacity looks nothing like modern humans.

Running a marathon could be normal, not exceptional.  Strong thick healthy bones could be normal.  A lean muscular physique could be normal.  The capacity and ability to climb, throw, crawl, lift, carry, jump and run could be normal.

A body that’s built for adventure should and could be normal. 

Adventure-ready Fitness

MovNat training and philosophy is fundamental to adventure-ready training.  It forms the core of my training and coaching.  It establishes a set of expectations and provides purpose.  If you can lift heavy but cannot perform basic getups or climbing, your fitness is decidedly not adventure-ready. 

MovNat is universal and applicable for people of all ages and fitness levels.  Taking the time to work through the training will reveal weaknesses and sets a foundation for adventurous living.

MovNat training also guides mobility development, strength and conditioning and lifestyle integration.  All of these domains require skillful practical movement, and MovNat training provides fantastic guidance. 

But MovNat training is more than all of that.  Sedentary living destroys and inhibits our movement skills.  You can envision a movement toolkit.  For most westerners the toolkit is pretty small.  A westerner is typically best at sitting, standing, some walking, lying down and maybe a few specialized fitness movements. 

Natural Movement training expands the toolkit.  Suddenly you have options.  MovNat training includes: jumping, climbing, crawling, balancing, traversing, vaulting, getting up and down, running, throwing and catching.  And these expanded options can be lifesaving in an emergency.  They can also provide confidence to step out of your comfort zone.  After a few months of training you’ll be ready to get off the sidelines and into an adventure.

Adventure-ready strength & conditioning

Strength training is fundamental to building an adventure-ready body.  Not only is it the antidote for atrophying bones and muscle, but it’s also useful.  In most sports there is a strong correlation between muscularity and performance.  As a general rule, the more muscle an athlete has the better she performs.  So if you want to jump higher, punch harder, sprint faster and lift heavier, then you need to build strength and muscle.

Strength training is also fundamental to building a lean muscular physique.  In fact, it’s the single most important exercise for fat loss.  There are two reasons for this.  First, it improves fuel partitioning.  When you restrict calories, your body tends to burn both muscle and fat.  So if a sedentary individual goes on a diet, he will likely lose both muscle and fat.  If you add strength training, the same individual is now losing mostly or even exclusively fat.  Most untrained sedentary individuals do not have muscle mass to spare, so this becomes very important to their fitness and health goals.  Second, building muscle increases your metabolism.  Muscle costs energy to maintain.  Fat doesn’t.  So the more muscle you have, the more you can eat.  Unfortunately fat doesn’t work that way.

Finally, the return on investment is phenomenal.  If you’re new to strength training, you’ll benefit from newbie gains.  This means you’ll gain muscle faster as a newbie than as an advanced trainee.  And once you capture those initial gains, you can put your training on maintenance.  It takes far less time to maintain muscle than to build it.  Many people fall into an unproductive middle.  They build some muscle.  Then they stagnate because they don’t increase the volume as they progress.  But they could do the opposite and reduce the volume.  The minimum effective dose to maintain muscle is probably lower than you think. 

If you are struggling to build muscle, I’d encourage you to check out my article for Mark’s Daily Apply.  In it I explore the top ten reasons you’re struggling to build muscle and what to do about it.  You can access it here.

Adventure-ready mobility

Mobility is having the flexibility, strength, motor control and balance to enter, hold and exit a position.  All four elements atrophy without adequate stress.  A classic example is the deep squat.  Most sedentary adults probably can’t easily enter, hold and exit a deep squat.  Some people lack the flexibility to get there.  Some people lack the strength or motor control.  And still other people may lack the balance.  

Outside of sedentary western cultures, the deep squat is a rest position.  It’s effortless.  It’s a natural easy alternative to standing.  When people in these other cultures spend time in a deep squat they are NOT working out.  It isn’t exercise.  It’s just a practical movement, like walking or sitting.

The deep squat is just one of a great many practical movements that the vast majority of westerners, even fitness minded westerners, cannot perform.  The operative word here is practical.  We’re talking about basic natural mobility. 

You may be thinking, why does this even matter?  After all, we have chairs, so we don’t need to deep squat for rest.

First and foremost, it affects your daily life.  It makes moving more interesting, easier and more enjoyable.  It affects how you play with your kids, interact with your environment and engage in sports or play.  It makes you a more capable and resourceful human.  Do you have the shoulder mobility to hang for your life or support a canoe overhead?  Maybe you don’t need to, but it’s more interesting if you can! 

Second, it’s relatively easy to build and nearly effortless to maintain.  It’s nothing like running a marathon or deadlifting 400 lbs.

Third, it will make you better at the activities you already enjoy.  Practical mobility is all about the basics.  When you discover you can’t do one of the basics (nearly everyone makes this discovery), it provides an opportunity to fill a major gap in your physical fitness or sport.

Fourth, it will make you more durable.  Spending time building your mobility will make you less susceptible to injury.  It will act as prehab for the wear and tear of life.  There are no guarantees, but I’d feel better about hips that can effortlessly hold a ten minute squat than hips that can’t even get there.  It even correlates well with health and longevity, and that’s never a bad thing. 

Adventure-ready living

It’s pretty hard for 1 hour of training to undue 23 hours of not moving.  Humans tend to pursue the path of greatest comfort.  And as we’ve seen our current environment provides far more comfort than our evolutionary biology would expect.  So I always recommend building an adventure-ready lifestyle alongside your training.

First, you can implement changes that won’t cost you any time.  This might include a standing work station, sitting on the floor rather than the couch, conducting telephone calls while walking, or working through light mobility drills while watching tv.

Second, you can add some activity rich routines to your life.  These could include, regular movement breaks during work, commuting to work by bike, sports or play activities.

Third, you can schedule 1 off events.  Adventurous options might include, races such as a half marathon, hiking, kayaking, climbing, obstacle course races or adventure travel.

If you take the time to cultivate an active lifestyle, you’ll massively increase your weekly volume of physical activity.  This has obvious health benefits.  It also provides a strong training effect that will make your training time that much more productive. 

Finally, it will positively affect your mindset and perceptions.  There are infinite opportunities for movement and adventure.  But we’ve lost our capacity to see or will it.  But with practice you can become the person that always participates and become the person that’s always ready.   

Concluding thoughts

Our bodies have been designed by millions of years of hard won evolution.  And for the last several hundred thousand years, our species has been fighting, hunting, running, jumping, climbing and lifting on an inhospitable planet where everything was out to kill them.  And despite the incalculable challenges, we’ve thrived.

We are the inheritors of a body custom built for high adventure.  We could be deadly fitness generalists with a lean muscular physique.  That’s our birthright.  That’s our potential.  And with some focus, awareness and discipline it can be reclaimed. 

I hope this article has given your training some new direction and a few new ideas.  I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions, so feel free to leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading!