Life is too powerful to waste chasing things that don’t matter. When it comes to our bodies and our athletic lives this is equally true. So let’s figure out what matters.
To optimize our experience of life and to develop deep capabilities to experience nature, it’s critical to ensure our training makes sense from a long term athletic development perspective. We start with an understanding of what capacities an outdoor athlete requires. Most of us are not currently training all of these capacities and that will eventually catch up with us, limit the quality of our experience, or in some cases lead to injury. Even very fit people who exercise frequently and generally follow guidance from the fitness industry are probably neglecting at least one and probably more of these capacities altogether, because the fitness industry doesn’t focus on long term athletic development.
The essential capacities of the outdoor athlete can be broken down as follows:
Mobility. This refers to our ability to move well and includes flexibility, good movement mechanics, balance, and good range of motion. Good mobility is essential for preventing injuries in the long run and being able to perform athletic movement. The state of a modern human’s mobility tends to be fairly unhealthy. Chairs and couches are mobility killers. Repetitive motion exercise over time often leads to muscle imbalances or ignores certain muscles. For example, biking is especially limited in its range of motion and in the muscles that it develops so it needs to be balanced with a good mobility program. In addition, most typical approaches to weight training don’t really develop good mobility. Although it is important to devote some attention to improving our flexibility and motion, we shouldn’t get stuck in it and ignore our other fitness capacities. When we start getting injured or find out how bad our mobility is, it’s easy to get caught in a never ending rabbit hole of just doing “corrective exercise.” There is no perfect way to move or perfect posture before we can do anything else, and we don’t want to spend our whole lives on Swiss balls and foam rollers. In our culture, serious yoga practitioners, martial artists, rock climbers, parkour athletes, and ninja warriors will probably have a fairly good foundation for mobility.
Aerobic Base. This refers to our low intensity endurance energy system. This is the key to any truly deep adventure in nature. It’s also the area where human potential really stands out in the animal kingdom. However, it is an area where shockingly few Americans are actually strong or even healthy, and this is sadly true even for many people who run or bike a lot or do lots of “cardio” (a word that I would like to ban from the English language because it glosses over the most critical training distinction for an endurance athlete). Different intensity levels train different energy systems and most people run or bike or do “cardio” at intensities too high to actually develop the aerobic system. Ironically, most “aerobics” classes aren’t actually aerobic and the current high intensity interval trend certainly doesn’t develop our aerobic base. The key to being a strong endurance athlete is how fast we can go using our low intensity fat burning aerobic systems. Our truth as humans is that we can become really fast at a pace that feels pretty easy, so long we do our work properly and avoid the short term temptations. Short cuts do exist for short term performance or short term weight loss but not for long term development. I’ll cover all of this in greater detail in a future blog post because there is so much distortion and misinformation today about optimizing aerobic training.
Muscle Strength. This refers to our muscles’ ability to produce force. In fitness and athletic training literature this is typically referred to as “strength.” However, at Indigenous Strength we use the general term “Strength” more holistically to also include such things as resilience, tenacity, grit, and the ability to take a bold stand in life. For general outdoor athletic performance, power is actually more important than muscle strength. However, muscle strength appears in this list before power because a solid foundation of muscle strength is necessary for power. Some experience with strength training is critical for safe and proper power training. In addition, certain levels of muscle strength are needed before we can safely train explosiveness at higher intensities.
Power. This refers to our ability to produce force at high speed and our explosiveness. This is essential for moving with speed and agility and for landing our feet. It’s actually critical for injury prevention when we are on our feet in rugged natural terrain or when we do things like skiing. Power is virtually ignored in most normal fitness workout programs today (but once again, the ninja warriors and parkour athletes are crushing it in this area). Training for power is perhaps the most fun form of training that exists. It’s a bit like being a kid again, and the training is intense and short. Once we are tired we can no longer produce the stimulus that’s necessary for power gains.
Work capacity (optional). This refers to our ability to carry heavy stuff for long periods of time. Some people refer to this as “muscle endurance” but in the fitness industry that term is typically used to refer to lifting a weight for at least 15 repetitions, and work capacity for the outdoor athlete is a different beast entirely. Work capacity is included as a long term capacity with the caveat that it’s not necessary for all outdoor sports activities so it doesn’t need to be included in everyone’s long term development plan. However for those of us who are inspired by adventures that involve carrying heavy packs around in the mountains (backpackers, mountaineers, big game bowhunters, etc.) this is an essential capacity that must be trained. People who carry children on their backs on hikes with some climbing have the headstart on work capacity.
Stay tuned for Part 2 next week. We’ll discuss long term development as opposed to training for short term goals. Our time outlook has a big impact on how we train and is very important for a full lifespan optimization plan.
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