If you are dieting or are planning to start a diet, you need to understand the connection between bodyweight and glycogen, that is how carbohydrates get stored in your liver and muscles, so you don’t overestimate your weight loss as you cut carbs—or your weight gain if you add some back. Understand the connection and you’ll have a much better chance of keeping your cool for the long-haul when swings inevitably happen.
So what exactly is going on?
http://naturalathletics.b…erfect-day.html
From Natural Athletics comes a wonderfully descriptive post from Rafe Kelley regarding a recent training day of “parkour” or “natural movement” (a la MovNat or Methode Naturelle), which I think is simply human play. Sit back, read a snippet, and if you want it in full, go to Rafe’s site:
The weather is beautiful, so we decide to make the trip down to Larrabee State Park, an amazing area of beautiful old forests and a rocky beach with formations of Chuckanut sandstone carved into fantastic shapes for climbing by wind and rain. …
[So] we simply go, running along fallen logs, vaulting rails along the trail. Then, deeper into the woods, running downslope, leaping up and over a fallen tree and taking a large gap across a creek–too much fun; had to do it twice, taking the even bigger thirteen foot or so gap on the way back, this one over a waterfall. Downslope again, slipping sliding to the lower creek bed, two step tic tac off a fallen log across the stream and continue on upslope, which ends with a chest high rock–vault on top, keep running. Upslope again, boulders strewn across, pull on them to gain leverage, a vault here, a jump there, finish the slope, wait for Dane to catch up. More slope ahead, dirt trail, fallen logs, boulders; perfect.
Time for a race, a no holds barred race, inspired by Teghead–a traceur from the UK. We’re off, both go for the pull on the arms, hands in the face, spinning–Dane’s getting in front, I dive for his leg, pull him around, clinched up almost falling down slope, I have to avoid the log, break, he’s spinning–shove–I am in the clear, put that rock between him and me, almost there–aha, top of the slope. So fun, but so tiring.
…
We catch our breath, looking out down the beach. There is a point sticking out 800 yards away as a crow flies, maybe a mile overland, rocky beach the whole way. Is our training only for sprints I ask myself? This what I have needed to do, a real run. “Lets go here to there,” I say, “No stops.” We’re off, moving smooth at first, scrambling over the rocks, hugging faces, ocean inches away. Quick traverses, spinning around obstacles, up and through holes in the rock, vaulting up to boulders, balancing on driftwood, a quarter of the way…Tired. Dane passes me, he isn’t slowing down. Quads burning, no more power moves, I’m struggling just to run. Watching my feet, gotta keep running, but have to stay safe, every foot placement has to be secure, 100% focus. Dane is out of sight. I round the bend; he is climbing the last face, the last cove is between me and him, just small rocks and then the end. I want to slow to a walk so bad–doesn’t matter, have to finish–watching every foot placement, every foot placement, slippery rocks in the stream, can they be trusted, jump, jump, I guess so. We are almost done, roots hanging from the slope, traverse and ascend, I pull myself over the final lip. There’s Dane looking out at the water. I lay down. He wins this round.
…
We’re moving on, tide going out. Sandy beach now. We find some rocks–big rocks–the biggest one we can move. It looks like a shark head, maybe some 200 pounds. Full squat, bear hug, lift and carry. Dane’s turn; it doesn’t come off the ground–a point for me. We find some rocks, throw them, press them, carry them. Dane finds a big one, clean and press. Damn, that looks heavy. My turn. I press, get stuck in the middle, can’t finish; bring it back down, split jerk, full overhead, unstable, bail out from under it.
Onwards, almost to the end. We come to a big sloped wall. Amazing horizontal wall run; my feet slip when I try to hug it too close. Next time, even though I know this, am telling myself ‘Lean out, lean out.’ It’s damn scary, but it works. Every foot placement is solid and I’m running. High drop to the ledge after the wall run is awesome. Dane is climbing. Climb up 70 feet off the ground. We look out. So beautiful: San Juan island in the west, tip of the snow-capped Cascades in the south. Finally, we make it to Clayton Beach for big kongs over a massive rock into the sand to finish the day, climb up the last rock and watch the sunset.
I’ll be sore for a week.
Thanks, Rafe! Inspiring.
http://www.coconutketones.com/
Originally emailed to family, I want to share this here, as well.
The gist is that coconut oil has a shorter length saturated fat that gets converted by the liver into ketone bodies. Ketones are used by our bodies for energy and our brains and heart both apparently like ketones a lot. The tie-in to dementia is that it may be the case that dementia is being caused by our brains losing the ability to burn glucose (the metabolic unit created from carbohydrates) for energy; therefore, over time our brain cells start starving and dying. In these cases, ketones subvert the busted glucose metabolic pathway and get the nerve cells the energy they require.
Obviously, it’s hard to say for sure based on her anecdotal research alone if this is a true ‘cure’ or preventative measure for Alzheimer’s, but really, given there is no particularly effective cure or treatment for the disease, giving a couple tablespoons of coconut oil a day to someone suffering from dementia is easy to do and worth a shot. Spread the word.
H/T Seth.
http://www.jafra.gr.jp/eng/sumi.html
photo credit: jasja dekkerPrior to Seth Roberts mentioning it on his blog (here), I had never heard of the Japanese dish called “Natto,” which is a fermented soybean product. Apparently, it contains a great deal of Vitamin K2, is anti-bad-bacterial, and effectively lyses human thrombus. If you’re like me, that last bit probably made no sense to you, so below are some definitions until I paste liberally from an interview on Natto held with a Japanese expert on the food, Professor Hiroyuki Sumi, who has been nicknamed “Dr. Natto.”
The K2 angle on Natto is particularly fascinating, particularly in light of how expensive it is to supplement K2 via products like butter oil. I’ve been wondering in reading more into fermentation from sources like Seth Roberts when I would see a tie-in to Vitamin K2, which is produced by our own gut bacteria as noted below.
In an experiment conducted out of sheer curiosity, I found that natto contained a strong enzyme that lyses thrombus.
I am Japanese and regularly eat natto, so one day I took some natto to my laboratory. That was in 1980. I usually prepared thrombus in a laboratory dish and measured its strength by adding urokinase to it, but that day, I added natto instead. I found that natto contained a strong fibrinolytic enzyme, judging from the large area lysed. After coming back to Japan, I repeated various experiments, and first presented the results of my research in 1986. NHK and various newspapers reported my discovery of the enzyme named ’nattokinase ’,and before I knew it, I had become Dr. Natto. Originally, I was interested in fermentation. After I graduated from the Department of Fermentation Technology at Yamanashi University, I entered the Department of Medicine because I wanted to continue my study of enzymes further. In the field of fermentation, Japanese technology is the most advanced in the world. I think this is the field in which we achieve our most original results.
I studied more than 200 foods from all over the world, but none surpassed natto in terms of fibrinolytic activity.
…
――What are the functions of nattokinase and Vitamin K2, which are contained in natto?
Dr. Sumi: It is said that natto became a popular food in the Edo period, and that the voice of natto sellers was constantly heard in the city of Edo.Regarding the effects of natto,there are many anecdotes concerning its efficacy for stomachache, and flu, and for helping women give a birth. This is because natto has a high nutritive value and is easy for the body to absorb. In addition, natto has an antibacterial effect. In the old days, food poisoning was very common, and people used natto in order to prevent cholera, typhoid and dysentery.
Natto is highly antibacterial, and also contains di-picolinic acid, which suppresses O-157.
In a food dictionary of the Edo period, it is written that natto neutralizes poisons and stimulates the appetite.Neutralize poisons refers to an antibacterial effect. Recently, it has been found that natto contains di-picolinic acid, which suppresses O-157, and that natto has an antibiotic effect. Natto suppresses the growth of harmful bacteria while encouraging the growth of beneficial bacteria such as lactobacillus. The best-known component of natto is nattokinase, an enzyme that lyses thrombus. Recently, the Japanese diet has come to resemble the American one, and consequently, the incidence of thrombosis in Japan has increased. The incidence of thrombosis in the heart and brain is higher than that of cancer, if myocardial infarction and cerebral infarction are included in the total. Natto has attracted attention as a food that helps to prevent senile dementia, which is one type of thrombosis, because nattokinase lyses thrombus for a very long time when eaten directly instead of taken by injection.
Vitamin K2 in natto is essential for preventing osteoporosis.
Natto contains another useful component, named Vitamin K2. It is said that 60% of women over the age of 60 suffer from osteoporosis, which Vitamin K2 helps to prevent. In order to maintain healthy bones, a number of studies suggest that it is important to obtain Calcium and Vitamin D from milk. Recently, however, it was found that a protein named osteocalcin acts as a kind of glue that helps to incorporate Calcium into the bones, and that Vitamin K2 is necessary in order to produce this protein. Furthermore, according to the results of recent epidemiological research, the amount of Vitamin K2 in the body of people who suffer from osteoporosis is decreasing compared with that of healthy people.
Obtaining sufficient Vitamin K2 is not a problem for healthy people, because they have a colon bacillus that is constantly producing Vitamin K2 in the alimentary canal. However, when people become older, or take medicine containing antibiotics, this bacillus weakens and produces less Vitamin K2. It is becoming clear that Vitamin K2 produced by this bacterium is closely connected with the prevention of osteoporosis, and the Ministry of Health and Welfare has approved Vitamin K2 as a medicine for osteoporosis. Unlike natto, yeast, a lactobacillus, and Koji do not contain Vitamin K2 that comes from a bacterium. Bacillus natto is a unique bacterium throughout the world, and moreover people can ingest it in the raw. Therefore, natto is receiving considerable attention as the only food that contains Vitamin K2 from a bacterium.
Vitamin K2 has the chemical name menaquinone 7. At present, Vitamin K1, or menaquinone 4, is synthesized for use in the medicines approved by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. When the components of blood are analyzed, one vitamin that is found more often in healthy people than in osteoporotic people is menaquinone 7. A lack of menaquinone 7 causes osteoporosis. Because Bacillus natto produces menaquinone 7, eating natto helps to prevent osteoporosis. It is important to obtain the fundamental components of bones by consuming milk and Shiitake mushrooms, but Vitamin K2 is also necessary. Menaquinone 7 has only recently appeared in the analysis data of the Science and Technology agency, and samples are not on sale yet.
It is possible to obtain enough vitamin K2 from one packet (100 g) of natto.
One hundred grams of natto contains approximately 1,000μg of menaquinone 7. A normal person is supposed to consume 1μg per 1 kg of body weight each day, which means that a person of 60 kg should consume 60μg of menaquinone 7. Therefore, 10 g of natto supplies enough menaquinone for one day. If the colon bacillus is weakened, a packet of natto supplies a sufficient amount of menaquinone 7.
…
As a result of attempts to make natto more palatable, the amount of its effective components decreased.
Extremely undeveloped natto has been increasing as a result of attempts to make natto more palatable, especially for people in the Kansai area in Japan. Such natto has a weaker odor and is less sticky. When the US authorities occupied Japan in 1945, they prohibited the sale of natto because they thought that cholera and typhoid were often caused by such a rotten food. Since then, about three types of purely cultured bacillus have been used to make natto. As a result, natto became tastier and safer, but on the other hand, the amount of the anti-bacterial material, Vitamin K2, and nattokinase decreased. Comparing a 1936 report on the components of natto and its activity with current data, it is found that the anti-bacterial component has dramatically decreased.
http://jhogan.livejournal.com/73389.html
James Hogan recently posted his “four principles for effective dieting,” which were developed from his personal experience with dieting. It’s a great read on what has worked for James (and as he says, this is a nine-year trend in the making). Comparing notes to my own experiences (Better Health via IF and Low-Carb), I see a lot of overlap. In particular, regular measuring, incremental change, and intermittent fasting (which somewhat translates into Johnson’s Up-Day Down Day) all worked well for me. Of all of those things, I think fasting is the best way to improve your habits because it so starkly breaks rank with existing eating habits.
I also really liked how Hogan articulates targeting the “Healthy Stretch.” I liken this to falling into the dieting “zone.”
Anyway, it’s worth the read in full, so I’m just going to excerpt James’ the four top-level principles:
Finally, I like noting that I know James through Patri through the Seasteading Institute. I suppose I know Patri from having read David Friedman’s blog originally and stumbling into Patri’s works on the old Catallarchy site. What’s fun about these somewhat unpredictable connections is that my old childhood (and adult friend – he was a groomsman of mine) friend Andy happened to be the primary creator/writer for Johnson of the UDDD. The internet: making the world a smaller place a day at a time.
http://www.blog.sethrober…id-eskimos-eat/
Seth Roberts dug up some 1935 research that discusses the prevalence of fermented fish and oils in the Eskimo/Inuit diet. That research in combination with the observed “Inuit Paradox” (The Inuit diet consisting almost entirely of meat and Omega-3 rich fish fat) incited further research into the cardiovascular benefits of Omega-3 fatty acids. Roberts point, which he’s made before regarding Weston Price’s findings, is that little attention has been paid to the fermented aspect of these ancient human diets.
As someone who regularly reads numerous blogs that discuss evolutionary fitness, diet, paleo-diets, etc., I can attest that Roberts is right: the fermented food angle is overwhelmingly ignored by people who should know better, with the notable exception of Stephen at Whole Health Source (Maybe one or two others have mentioned fermented foods in passing, but it is overwhelmingly given short shrift).
When I say the Paleo/evohealth pundits should know better, I mean that it just makes intuitive sense (whether the back-fitting story is ultimately true or not) that, prior to refrigeration and other modern food preservation technologies, human beings would have been forced to eat fermented foods. This would be for no other reason than the fact that (for example) a band of humans probably couldn’t polish off a wooly mammoth in one sitting. There would be leftovers; and no way were these hunter-gatherers going to let that hard-earned food go to waste!
Apply the same concept to fruits and vegetables ripening at a certain times of the year as well as other food-timing problems and you reach the unavoidable conclusion that human beings must have regularly eaten rotten or semi-rotten foods.
I suspect Seth Roberts is on to something.
[At first, Stefansson didn’t want to eat decayed fish.] While it is good form [in America] to eat decayed milk products and decayed game [well, well], it is very bad form to eat decayed fish. . . . If it is almost a mark of social distinction to be able to eat strong cheeses with a straight face and smelly birds with relish, why is it necessarily a low taste to be fond of decaying fish? On that basis of philosophy, though with several qualms, I tried the rotten fish one day, and if memory serves, liked it better than my first taste of Camembert. During the next weeks I became fond of rotten fish.
So Eskimos ate fermented whale oil and a lot of rotten fish. (”A lot” because if they didn’t eat a lot of it, Steffanson wouldn’t have felt pressure to eat it.) I had no idea that Americans used to eat decayed game.
http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/psychhuman.html
Bruce Charlton has made his a final proof of his 1999 book Psychiatry and the Human Condition available online in its entirety. The book book is described as, “an optimistic vision of a superior alternative approach to psychiatric illness and its treatment, drawing upon modern neuroscience and evolutionary theory.” From the parts of the book I’ve managed to read so far, this book could well be worth reading in full.
The part I’d like to focus on here is Charlton’s discussion of hunter-gatherers and their relative happiness. The subject of happiness and the human condition from a psychiatry/psychology perspective is of keen interest to me right now as I am just finishing up Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness (Also see recent discussion on Is Technology Making us Miserable?).
Charlton’s take is that H-G societies were “leisured and egalitarian” and H-Gs experienced a “Golden Age for humans.” Though I’ve yet to read it all, Charlton says that the “scanty” evidence available to support this statement is “consistent and unambiguous.” I believe part of the evidence is the apparent diminished health of agrarian societies combined with the greater stratification of class and status systems brought about by division of labor. That agrarian societies would migrate voluntarily to cities to partake in the industrial-mercantile society just furthers the argument.
I intuit that the hyper-specialization and -isolation experienced by modern human beings doesn’t fit with our evolutionary programming, even as it provides us with amazing new technology and toys. Having said that, I see no reason a balance can’t be struck between the perks of modern existence (technology) and the biological programming of functional/fulfilling community (family) and a more generalist approach to productive activities.
More on this later. And I have more reading to do. In the meantime, read the two bits from Charlton’s book below, which discuss in detail relative degrees of happiness and whether or not the human condition (which Charlton argues hasn’t been designed to be happy) can be improved.
From Chapter 1, Psychiatry and the human condition
Degrees of happiness The lifestyle of nomadic foragers involve little forward economic planning beyond the communal decisions over when and where to move camp, and the logistics of hunting and gathering. This means that most problems of life related to the social realm – especially around the question of competition for mates – and this lay behind the power struggles, disagreement, discussions and violence. And the primacy of social life in hunter gatherer societies is what has been the decisive force in human evolutionary history – the main focus for natural selection is within-species, human versus human competition.
In summary, the ancestral hunter gatherers experienced a way of life that was – in world historical terms – leisured and egalitarian, and enjoyed health and life expectancy at a high level. Of the three kinds of society as described by Gellner: hunter-gatherer, agrarian, and mercantile, it is probable that hunter-gatherers had the best life, overall. Hunter gatherer societies are the happiest and peasant societies are the most miserable – while industrial-mercantile societies such as our own lie somewhere in between.
That, at any rate, is the conclusion of anthropologist Jerome Barkow – and his opinion is widely confirmed by the reports of many independent anthropologists who have experienced the alternatives of foraging, agrarian and industrial society. The ‘naturalness’ of nomadic foraging is also shown by differences in the harshness of child rearing practices in different types of society. Child rearing involves varying elements of forcible training that are necessary to prepare children for their social role. Peasant societies typically employ extremely repressive forms of socialization, extreme discipline, restriction, and the use of child labour. Industrial mercantile societies (such as our own) are much less tough on children – but still require many unnatural behaviors (eg. sitting in classrooms or examination halls for long periods of time without speaking or moving). But nomadic foragers are able and willing to give their children even more freedom than the most liberal ‘modern parent’ – and such a relaxed upbringing of unstructured interaction with peers apparently prepares the child properly for the adult life to come.
Another line of evidence is patterns of voluntary migration. When industrial mercantile societies develop, they are popular with the miserable peasantry of agrarian societies who flee the land and crowd the cities, if given the chance. Not so the happier hunter gatherers who typically must be coerced into joining industrial life. My great grandparents left their lives as rural peasants and converged from hundreds of miles and several countries to work the coal mines of Northumberland. They swapped the open sky, fields and trees for a life underground and inhabiting dingy rows of colliery houses. Being a miner in the early twentieth century must have been grim, but apparently it was not so bad as being an agricultural laborer.
From a psychiatric perspective, then, there are sharp differences between ancestral societies and modern societies. In terms of their general social situation modern humans are faced with a wide range of new problems – although we console ourselves that for the bulk of the population life is much better in an industrial mercantile society than in a warrior-dominated medieval peasantry. Nevertheless we now live in a mass society, full of strangers who there is no reason to trust since they are neither family nor friends. Although resources are vastly more abundant, resources are linked to status and there are massive inequalities in their distribution.
This means that there is a much higher proportion of intractably low status people in modern societies than in the societies in which humans evolved. Since status is the most important factor in determining a man’s sexual attractiveness, this is a major source of dissatisfaction. Men will devote enormous effort and take great risks in pursuit of the highest status, but for most people in delayed return economies the odds are stacked heavily against them succeeding.
Improving human happiness? Even if, somehow, the impossible were achieved and humans returned to the kind of egalitarian, immediate return, foraging societies in which we spent much of our recent evolutionary history – then unhappiness would still be common and intractable. Humans did not evolve to be happy – natural selection rewards reproductive success, not happiness. Happiness is – from this perspective – merely the ‘carrot’ which compliments the ‘stick’ of pain – a lure to draw us onwards, to make us strive – but happiness is a reward that we can never permanently grasp nor enjoy at leisure.
So much for the bad news. Happiness drives us, it is not a permanent state. And this really is bad news because there is little we can do about it, short of changing human nature. The good news is that this might prove possible – at least to some extent. Just as human ingenuity has landed us in the predicament of a sub-optimal modern human life, so the same ingenuity has proved a range of technologies of gratification through which we can attain a variety of surrogate satisfactions. – something that will be discussed more towards the end of this book .
Essentially the broad shape of society and its possibilities for happiness are the way they are for reasons that are accidental, unplanned, and intractable. We inhabit a society that grants few satisfactions and offers limited possibilities of fulfillment. It is also a society in which psychiatric symptoms are endemic and a major cause of human misery. In our favour we have increasing knowledge of the causes of human misery, including the understanding of psychiatric illness, and increased power to alleviate that misery provided by the armamentarium of psychopharmacology. All this understanding and therapeutic potential has arisen within the past few decades, and we have hardly learned how to use it.
My point is that the human condition of Western man is intractable in its fundamentals, but amenable to improvement in important ways. Things are worse than they might be. One aim of this book is to explore some of these means of improvement, and to do this will require an evaluation of the extent and nature of psychiatric illness.
The purpose of this book is therefore to suggest how knowledge and technology might be deployed to ameliorate the human condition. We are not talking about utopia, but we are talking about the potential for significant and worthwhile improvements in well-being for substantial numbers of people. However, power can be used for many purposes. And potential agents for good are almost inevitably also potential agents for harm. The possibilities for benefit from psychopharmacology is, although not universal, nevertheless immense. Whether these benefits can be realized under prevailing social conditions is altogether a different matter.
http://books.google.com/b…7GZycC&pg=PA180
I have not read much of Loren Cordain’s works, but I stumbled upon a passage from Rafe Kelley’s Natural Athletics blog (here) that appears to be quoted from Chapter 10 of Cordain’s book, The Paleo Diet for Athletics, which just landed a place on my ever-growing Amazon wish list.
The passage is quoted below, as quoted from Google Books and Kelley. It’s a fascinating insight to how some hunter-gatherers still forage for food in modern times. The bit about anthropologist Kim Hill’s experiences ducking beneath vines and branches all day reminds me of a sequence in Erwan Le Corre’s MovNat video (ELC MovNat links here) where Le Corre dashes through the woods weaving a path through the underbrush.
What I wonder (And expect a full-scale blog post on this soon) is how we can find a balance between our extremely specialized modern existence when foraging for food means driving to Kroger and hunting is playing corporate politics and pushing for a raise and our undeniable biological programming that expects us to be active, problem-solving generalists. As far as diet goes, it’s simple enough to suggest exercise should involve cross-training and wide variability. But what about fitness? A one-hour workout session makes for a nice compartmentalized way to look and feel in shape, but it makes exercise an end in and of itself rather than a means to secure our continued existence.
I don’t want to run eight hours a day, mind you: I just want to find a better, more fulfilling balance.
Chapter 10 — The Paleolithic Athlete: The Original Cross-Trainer
Ten thousand years sounds like a long, long time ago. but if you think about it in terms of how logn the human genus (Homo) has existed (2.5 million years), 10,000 years is a mere blink of the eye on an evolutionary time scale. Somewhere in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, a tiny band of people threw in the towel and abandoned their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. These early renegades became the very first farmers. They forsook a mode of life that had sustained each and every individual within the human genus for the previous 100,000 generations. In contrast only a paltry 400 human generations have come and gone since the first seeds of agriculture were sown. what started off as a renegade way of making a living became a revolution that would guarantee the complete and absolute eradication of every remaining hunter-gatherer on the planet. At the dawn of the 21st century, we are at the bitter end. Except for perhaps a half dozen uncontacted tribes in South America and a few others on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, pure hunter-gatherers have vanished from the face of the earth. . . .
Very few modern people have ever experienced what it is like to “run with the hunt.” One of the notable exceptions is Kim Hill, PhD, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who has spent the last 30 years living with and studying the Ache hunter-gatherers of Paraguay and the Hiwi foragers of southwestern Venezuela. his description of these amazing hunts represents a rare glimpse into the activity patterns that would have been required of us all, were it not for the Agricultural Revolution.
“The Ache hunted every day of the year if it didn’t rain…GPS data I collected … suggests that about 10 km per day is probably closer to their average distance covered during search. They might cover another 1-2 km per day in very rapid pursuit. Sometimes pursuits can be extremely strenuous and last more than an hour. Ache hunters often take an easy day after any particularly difficult day, and rainfall forces them to take a day or two a week with only an hour or two of exercise. Basically they do moderate days most of the time, and sometimes really hard days usually followed by a very easy day. The difficulty of the terrain is really what killed me (ducking under low branches and vines about once every 20 seconds all day long, and climbing over fallen trees, moving through tangled thorns etc.) I was often drenched in sweat within an hour of leaving camp, and usually didn’t return for 7-9 hours wi th not more than 30 minutes rest during the day.”
“The Hiwi on the other hand only hunted about 2-3 days a week and often told me they wouldn’t go out on a particular day because they were ‘tired’. They would stay home and work on tools, etc. Their travel was not as strenuous as among the Ache (they often canoed to the hunt site), and their pursuits were usually shorter. But the Hiwi sometimes did amazing long distance walks that would have really hurt the Ache. They would walk to visit another village maybe 80-100 km away and then stay for only an hour or two before returning. This often included walking all night long as well as during the day. When I hunted with Machiguenga, Yora, Yanomamo Indians in the 1980s, my focal man days were much, much easier than with the Ache. And virtually all these groups take an easy day after a particularly difficult one.”
“While hunter gatherers are generally in good physical condition if they haven’t yet been exposed to modern diseases and diets that come soon after permanent outside contact, I would not want to exaggerate their abilities. They are what you would expect if you took a genetic cross section of humans and put them in lifetime physical training at moderate to hard levels. Most hunting is search time not pursuit, thus a good deal of aerobic long distance travel is often involved (over rough terrain and carrying loads if the hunt is successful). I used to train for marathons as a grad student and could run at a 6:00 per mile pace for 10 miles, but the Ache would run me into the ground following peccary tracks through dense bush for a couple of hours. I did the 100 yd in 10.2 in high school (I was a fast pass catcher on my football team), and some Ache men can sprint as fast as me.”
“But hunter-gatherers do not generally compare to world class athletes, who are probably genetically very gifted and then undergo even more rigorous and specialized training than any forager. So the bottom lines is foragers are often in good shape and they look it. They sprint, jog, climb, carry, jump, etc all day long but are not specialists and do not compare to Olympic athletes in modern societies.”
The blockquoted material within the blockquote is from Rafe Kelley’s Natural Athletics.
I’ve been knee-deep in reading everything I can find on Erwan Le Corre’s MovNat, which is an extension and expansion of Georges Hebert’s Methode Naturalle.
In a fantastic example of how the Internet makes our worlds smaller and builds community across large geographic boundaries (See The Power of Blogging), I’ve been able to dialogue with Erwan over email. I can’t attest to his physical fitness (though plenty of others have!), but I can attest to his genuineness of purpose as a philosopher who seeks to understand and express our true nature as human beings. I think I’d say I’m seeking the same thing.
I’ll be sure to update this repository if I find anything else.
Update: I’ve been informed that Kevin, a fan of Erwan Le Corre and MovNat, has created a site dedicated to Hebert’s Methode Naturelle. Check it out!
http://naturalathletics.b…ral-method.html
Searching around for more information on Erwan Le Corre, Georges Hebert, the Methode Naturale, MovNat, and parkour led me to extensive and informative post by Rafe Kelley written in August of 2007. Rafe trained with Erwan Le Corre in France and has a background in many athletic endeavors including CrossFit and parkour.
Kelley’s experience in CrossFit is of interest to me because CrossFit is often billed as a generalist fitness regiment. However, my four month CrossFit stint was enough to tell me that, as much as CrossFit may be better than any number of other training styles, it still misses the mark as far as a wholistic, generalist training regiment. Perhaps what bothers me most about CrossFit is the combination of a handed-down-on-high workout routine (centralized, highly structured model) with an ostensibly generalist slant to training. In other words, there’s a dogmatism and borg-like quality to CrossFit which is a huge put off to me. I’d be incredibly curious to know if there are serious athletes who aren’t in some way vested in the CrossFit infrastructure who have converted entirely to CrossFit. It just seems to rigid and one-size-fits-all to me. Sure, one-size may fit most, but I wonder if the rigidity of CrossFit is more about converting the masses and expanding the franchise. Just feels like something got lost in the mass expansion.
Excuse the tangent. The meat of his post is Rafe Kelley’s, which I am heavily quoting below:
This is the post I intended to open this blog with a statement about what I know about the Methode Naturelle as my training in Methode Naturelle is going to be the focus of this blog. Up until this spring my primary training focus had been parkour dating back to march of 2005, before that it was gymnastics though with substantially less dedication, and before that it was basketball and before that martial arts. I am now at the point that I can say that the Methode Naturelle has superseded parkour in my training as parkour superseded gymnastics, for me it is more primal more vital more complete like when I started training parkour I have the feeling of how in the world did I miss this before. Why didn’t I ever follow through on my desire to mix parkour training and self defense and why did I yearn for barbells, kettlebells etc when I had so many rocks and logs available to me, what possessed me to waste beautiful sunny days inside training crossfit?
So I am at the point were wish to dedicate my training to the Methode Naturelle and I wish to also help other people follow the same or a similar path. The complication though is that my understanding of the Methode Naturelle is still very incomplete I hesitate to call my training Methode Naturelle, I think of it rather as Methode Naturelle inspired. Imagine for instance you wanted dedicate your life to Muay Thai training but had only had a four-day seminar on it to base your training on. I do think that the Methode Naturelle is bit easier to explore on your own, the principles are relatively simple though the degree of depth possible is seemingly limitless. So the purpose of this post is to explore what I do infact now about the Methode Naturelle. …
The idea of training to have the essential capacities of our hunter forager ancestors had appealed to me ever since I started parkour. It was my goal to eventually open a school teaching what I saw as the original warrior arts. …
The aim of the Methode Naturelle is to develop a complete and healthy human being physically, mentally and morally through the training of the vital natural capacities of the human species that were necessary for our survival as hunter foragers. … The motto of the Methode Naturelle is etre forte pour etre utile meaning be strong to be useful. The training of the Methode Naturelle is not to reach an aesthetic goal or to win an athletic competition it is to prepare the individual to be a strong useful person capable of helping him or herself and the others around them in wide variety of situations.
The vital movement capacities of the Methode Naturelle are to walk, run, jump, climb, quadruped, balance, swim, lift, carry, throw and defend.
A Methode Naturelle training session should be between 20 and 60 minutes and include as many of the natural capacities as possible (generally). The ideal conditions for Methode Naturelle training are in a natural environment with as much of the body exposed to the elements as possible while maintaining modesty. Which is not to say you cannot train the Methode Naturelle in the city or a gym or with shoes on only that this training is not the ideal.
Training should be daily or close to it.
A Methode Naturelle session maybe natural or methodically which is to say one might simple start moving through there environment looking for ways to practice all of the natural capacities for a given time period or one might instead plan out specific route hitting specific capacities or even build a specific course to train each capacity. The obstacle courses seen throughout the world in military training are derived from this last method.
Training each of the ten capacities alone is not sufficient one must be able to chain them together. That is to train one capacity directly after the training of another capacity so that there is no rest between them. so the body is forced to learn to adapt to moving easily between different capacities. This can be very challenging; each capacity has specific physiological demands, which must shift when moving to a different capacity. Furthermore one should be able to mix capacities to be able to run, swim and balance while carrying for instance, or defend yourself while balancing, or swimming, or while climbing this of course adds yet another layer of challenge.
The Methode Naturelle aims to develop a generalized physical capacity not specializations. That is to say to it is the belief of the Methode Naturelle that the athlete who is able to run fast, but also far, to lift very heavy weights but also to climb, to defend himself but also to swim is more useful then the athlete who is peerless at any one of these activities but incompetent or even just less competent at the others. The Methode Naturelle is expressly non competitive because competitive sport is seen as not useful, friendly games are fine but the expression of excess that is modern sport is contrary to the goal of usefulness both in the aim to win at all costs and in the requirement for excessive specialization. The Methode Naturelle athlete, will never run with speed of the sprinter nor the endurance of the marathoner, he or she will never develop the upper body strength of the gymnast or the fighting mastery of the martial artist, he chooses instead, to be as good as he or she can at all of these things and more because he or she never knows what capacity will be called on, for him or her to be useful. According to the Methode Naturelle the generalist is the most useful athlete.
It seems to me very easy to adapt the Methode Naturelle towards developing specific attributes. I am not sure how Hebert approached this, however Erwan talked about seeking to always train the areas were you are weakest. I think this applies both to a specific capacity and also the duration, volume intensity of the training, so one might need to work on their overall running capacity or might specifically need more endurance, or more speed. This can be adjusted by including shorter or longer periods of relative rest (walking, balancing etc) the key is not to stop moving or rest completely. A Methode Naturelle session composed of lots of relative rest, and many short high intensity movements will develop strength, speed, and power, one were the pace is relatively constant and as hard as possible for the given session will develop cardio respiratory endurance, and stamina. My impression is that the later style of training is considered the more basic and important. The amount of relative rest and intensity of work is just one of the many ways in which you can vary your stimuli to develop a broad overall capacity. For instance perhaps one is very strong but lacking in accuracy and wishes to work on the throwing capacity, for this individual finding the heaviest rock he or she could and throwing it would be much less beneficial then finding rock that was much lighter and casting it at a challenging target. In the Methode Naturelle one should always adapt ones training in such a way as to strengthen your weaknesses.
One of the things Erwan often said about the Methode Naturelle was it was not a conditioning program like Crossfit, or RKC or similar functional fitness programs. The Methode Naturelle is an entire method for the development of the human animal. In modern athletics we often dichotomize practice vs. conditioning, one develops technique the other develops physical attributes. This dichotomy is false though, doing precision jumps will develop strength, power, and stamina for jumping as well as correct technique, while doing dead lifts or squats will not only increase the strength of the legs but also will develop a specific lifting skill. I believe this dichotomy arises because of specialization, for instance sprinting is to specific a physical capacity to develop the entire ability of the human being so in order to be the best sprinter one must also lift, and jump and do various other drills but when one trains for a complete physical adaptation the distinction between skill and condition disappears almost completely, when your goal is simply an overall adaptation does it matter if your ability to climb is more due to finger strength or more due to correct technique? If one continues to train correctly both skill and condition should advance together.
… What I have seen consistently though is that the athlete with a highly developed overall physical capacity will need very little time to learn the skill of the athlete who focuses on technique. Traceurs often seem obsessed with developing the saut du chat technique for instance and there are constantly questions on how to do it. I train gymnasts though and they will do this technique very well with absolutely no training at all simply when given an obstacle to overcome were this is an appropriate technique. In short fundamental training proceeds technical training in importance.