Primal Fitness Fundamentals

In this day of age, we have come a long way compared to the cavemen that once walked our planet. Technology has completely changed our world (and not always for the better when it comes to health and fitness). It has made it easier for us to harvest and gather crops and kill animals for meat. - just go to the grocery store. It has become so advanced that fruits, vegetables and animal products are being mass produced at a large scale to accommodate a huge population of people. Cavemen used to have to walk and sprint for days (bodyweight exercise) to feed their family and there certainly wasn't enough food to feed outside their clan, or last for more than a couple of days. While this may seem terrible, this kind of activity kept them fit even when not fully fed. Now that we have all this technology helping us gather our food it has created a negative impact on our population. We have now become sedentary throughout our days and barely even have to get up to make our own food. Instead of hunting for some meat, we drive to our local grocery store, or butcher shop. Instead of picking from fruit trees, we pick it up at the store or even have it delivered to our house. These conveniences, we have created to make our lives easier, have made us motionless, overweight and unhealthy. In order to combat our now sedentary way of life, we have created gyms that provide a means to fitness but these machines only help us so much. Most of these machines only target specific areas of the body and cause us to do motions our body was not efficiently designed to do. Instead, we should be focusing on primal fitness using compound exercises with just our bodyweight to get us to ultimate health. Primal fitness, also called caveman fitness, is a combination of movements that your body was designed to do to help develop full body strength and health. It is also called functional fitness as it develops muscles used for everyday tasks. In other words, it is the practice of using your body and what nature has given you to remain fit and healthy. Nature can provide an unlimited amount of resistance and endurance in a way that gyms just cannot deliver. Cavemen needed to be fit in order to get their food and survive out in the wild. These activities probably included walking for miles, sprinting, crawling, swimming and climbing; to name a few. These examples are all great examples of what primal fitness entails. Now that you do not need to hunt or gather your own food, due to great technological advances, primal fitness can be evolved into a more modern way to mimic these movements. Paleo devotees are dedicated to the pursuit of health and fitness through a diet free of processed foods, wheat products that bloat and fatigue the body, and filled with energy-yielding foods that power their workouts. When you view how these workouts and this diet complement each other, you can see how this program could work for you.