Strength is the way of nature. Tune in.

Strength is the way of nature. This is the most fundamental truth that I have realized about strength in my decades of devotion to various strength training disciplines and to a cornucopia of athletic adventure in the grasses, oceans, mountains, forests, and deserts around the world. All human strength (whether physical strength or strength of character) arises out of nature, is developed and exercised in interaction with the nutrients and forces of nature, and ultimately returns to nature. If any strength can be considered “ours” it is only borrowed from nature for a brief moment. With this foundation it makes sense to rethink how to optimally train for strength and how we can live our strongest lives.

Training is a process of learning and developing, and nature has been and always will be our greatest teacher of strength. Her lessons are infinite. Nature teaches us support and resurgence as the sun rises after even the darkest and coldest nights. We witness the unstoppable power of persistence as water steadily eats away at rock to create enormous canyon tapestries. Trees in the forest remind us to build strong foundations as we rise to withstand the daily obstacles of life. Little desert plants clinging to life in dry sand inspire us as to the resilience of life. Plant and animal survival on Earth represents a remarkable display of daily courage and tenacity. It seems strange to isolate ourselves from our teacher in our attempts to build strength, but this is what we often do.

I’ve been strength training consistently (and somewhat obsessively) since junior high. The basic strength training approach that I was taught focuses on building up an individual’s strength for very specialized outputs by achieving control over training variables and attempting to master the adaptive processes of nature. This approach mirrors our overall survival strategy in today’s individualistic, highly specialized, and technology driven civilization (which incidentally appears dangerously out of balance with nature). However, when we actually compare individual human capabilities today to those of our ancestors it appears that we are as a general matter weaker and unhealthier humans than we have ever been in our history. Today we might be really good at protecting people from nature without forcing them to develop, keeping people alive in states of disease, and training people as specialized cogs (sometimes very high performing ones, but cogs nonetheless), but we appear to be pretty terrible at capturing and living fully in our natural strength.

With customary highly controlled strength training (often performed indoors at gyms) we can learn many effective tools for achieving very specific results (like increasing the amount of weight we can squat or how much power we can maintain on a bike crank). This is somewhat satisfying and we can certainly gain a few benefits from it. However, as an overall human training philosophy the standard controlled training paradigm is incomplete, limited, and in some ways actually unhealthy. Most gym workouts and repetitive motion endurance workouts are simply not based on who we were meant to be in nature, and we actually have a lot of work to do to realign our movement with healthy and natural movement patterns. After decades of lifting weights and eight years of ultra endurance cycling, I have to swallow a few tough lessons myself about training and maintaining natural mobility. More critically, when it comes to realizing our deepest most savage strengths and living our strongest and freest lives, a highly controlled training approach or a gym environment don’t get us very far. A human body operates in dynamic interaction with countless forces of nature, and we were meant to do so with a greater holistic strength than could ever be quantified. If we don’t really open ourselves to the forces of nature in our strength training, we leave much of our strength potential untapped. When we center so much of our training around isolating individual bodies and controlling inputs and outputs we miss out on the real dance.

A philosophy of training that makes more sense is that strength training is a process of stripping away barriers between ourselves and the strength of nature. We are not somehow separate from nature, and shielding ourselves too much from it as a general matter makes us weak. On the other hand, we are also not beings that must build ourselves up to struggle against nature. Fighting nature appears to be the path to a quick death, both for an individual and for a civilization. We are nature, and we will be stronger and live fuller lives when we learn to work in better harmony with its forces and energies. In my own experience, nothing erodes our present day facades of weakness quite like sweat, dirt, grit, water, blood, and starlight, and nothing allows us to tune in to nature better than venturing into it and finding our smallness. Nature offers us plenty of opportunities to do so.

As modern humans, we can all do a much better job of tuning in to nature’s strength. As we build our relationship with nature we learn to accept its strength and interact with its forces. At Indigenous Strength we offer guidance on effective training to allow nature's strength to flow through us.