You already play the greatest sport there is

Do you live an inspired athletic life?

Pursuing athletic inspiration and celebrating this Earth as strong capable animals is something that all of us, in our own way, can do in this life. Personally, I cannot imagine a richer sport than the sport of being human. Humans possess the innate potential for a staggering variety of strengths and skills, and the range of athletic experience available to us is as boundless as human imagination.

The diversity of athletic capabilities that we can develop is unmatched in the animal kingdom. Our capacity as endurance athletes appears to be unrivaled among large mammals. In addition, we can also train ourselves to accomplish incredible acts of brute force like pulling jumbo jets, to achieve the impressive agility/strength combinations demonstrated by gymnasts, parkour athletes, acrobats, or ninja warriors, to surf monster waves, to swim across oceans, to climb the highest peaks carrying massive loads, to freedive to dangerous depths in the ocean, to hurl projectiles at deadly speeds, to slide down steep snow-covered slopes on thin pieces of wood, and to scale vertical walls of rock with only tiny cracks to hold onto. In addition to our physical versatility, our ability to make tools gives us virtually infinite athletic possibilities. Our moment on Earth is an awesome athletic opportunity. Unfortunately, many of us don’t fully realize it and we let this opportunity slip away.

Some combination of social conditioning, failure of imagination, and underdeveloped capabilities often holds us back from fully capturing our moment. Perhaps we learned that being an “athlete” meant throwing an inflated ball in a certain way, moving slightly quicker or more forcefully than another person, or some other limited concept. We might even have been discouraged from athletic pursuits because of our gender or because we were told to value other priorities. For those of us who understand our athletic nature and are already pursuing our athletic inspirations, we can probably all go a lot further and find even greater fulfillment with a bit of imagination and with more effective training. Perhaps we have not have really explored far beyond the arbitrary social rituals that we have categorized as “sports” or the curated athletic opportunities in front of us. I think that even most avid athletes in contemporary society have no idea how far they can truly go. Our society doesn’t tend to encourage people to pursue their own greatest athletic inspirations and teach appropriate training practices for such a path.

There are also some temporary obstacles inhibiting our athletic lives that actually are quite real (that is, until we remedy them). Very likely, we never developed the deep aerobic foundation and structural integrity that a life spent outside on our feet would have given us. Almost certainly, as members of our technologically dependent society, we never learned to move in biomechanically optimized ways. This manifests itself in our aches, injuries, and mobility issues, and ultimately ends many potentially rewarding athletic journeys. We often accept our decline into injury as an inescapable aspect of getting older, but I believe reality is a bit more nuanced than this. It appears to me that if we are inspired we can work on and heal from our immobility and kickstart or restart our athletic journeys at any point in life’s path.

I’m not upset about these factors that hold us back today as athletes. On the contrary, they offer tremendous pathways to shine like we never have. A bit of rust shouldn't cause us to give up on athletic exploration. For generally healthy people, the physical limitations can all be addressed with a bit of work. In my experience, being a beginner or being underdeveloped is really fun because the initial stages of development tend to offer excitement and quick rewards. It is the later stages of development in any strength or skill that require true patience and dedication. Moving beyond our current athletic limitations allows us to explore the world anew like a child. What could possibly be more rewarding than that?

The truth for all of us is that we are built from a robust athletic template that was designed to adapt to practically any challenge. Since the dawn of humanity (about 2.8 million years ago for the genus Homo and about 200,000 years ago for the species Homo sapiens), human life has primarily been an athletic dance in a powerful natural world. It’s only in the last 10,000 years (the introduction of agriculture) that this started to change, and really only in the last couple hundred years that this reality has radically changed. Humans evolved as the ultimate multi-sport athlete and versatile survivor. We often walked all day, we sometimes sprinted, we carried heavy stones and logs, we hurled projectiles with deadly force and speared animals that were much bigger and stronger than us, we moved silently and nimbly through the forest to stalk prey, we fought for our lives, we swam across rivers, we climbed mountains, rocks and trees, and we probably danced like partiers at a rave.

Since we no longer engage our broad natural athleticism for the purposes of survival in modern society, we are disconnected from an essential part of our primal truth. It appears to me that any type of disconnect with our true nature may cause some degree of unhealth and longing. Our culture is in many ways an unhealthy environment for our primal athletic selves, but I believe there is substantial healing to be found in our personal athletic journeys. We each have the power to direct our own path and reclaim our athletic birthright, but we don’t need to try to do this alone. At Indigenous Strength, we’re here to help you as strongly as we can. Together let’s experience the fullness of the sport of being human.