Fight or Flight Fitness

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Big changes coming to Fight or Flight Fitness.

In real life survival situations you do not know 6 months, 1 week, or even 1 day ahead of time when you might need to travel by foot 10, 30 or 50 miles (see this introduction post). So in true survival of the fittest fashion you have to ask yourself what is the most useful fitness program (see this post of the best survival of the fittest programs).  At other times you might have to sprint for your life, and again you are not going to know ahead of time when you need to do this. Sprint training is important and that is why I have written about science behind sprint intervals, and 4 minute a day of sprint training. Now the reality is you need to include shorter interval training with longer slower endurance tasks as outlined in this post.

Now you might call this type of training for survival caveman training for they had to actually exists in a living condition where there physical fitness did determine their survival. Not that cavemen trained for survival fitness it was just that their lifestyle would be what we call training. They would have to sprint, they would have to take long treks as part of their daily or weekly life.

But now days we do live the life of the caveman. We do not sprint, we do not travel for long distances on foot. But maybe we should be. If you want to lose fat try combining sprinting with occasional long distance treks. It will melt away the pounds, give you a slimmer belly. If you want to be fitter than any other time in your life try this type of training (but read on for the added real life wrinkles).

However, one big problem is timing. I can’t go into the research right now (but I will soon) is you don’t want your training to be predictable. You need randomness in your training. The caveman did not know when they might have to sprint: if they came across game to hunt, or had to escape a predator. They didn’t have time to stretch their legs and do a 15 minute warm-up program, they had to go now. And the same thing with their long distance treks. Sure sometimes they knew when the tribe might be migrating to a new location, but it wasn’t like they had full control on how much food they ate before these trips. You rarely knew when or where you next meal was coming from. They sure didn’t have much opportunity to carbo load like almost every person running a marathon in our current times.

And in our modern times if we are talking about survival fitness you don’t know when you might have to sprint, or when you might have to run/walk say 20-100 miles.

Adding in the growing science behind the number of benefits that are found with a more random based training approach and the one obvious answer is to make this paradigm a cornerstone of your training. And this is exactly what Fight or Flight Fitness will be offering. Does this sound interesting to you? Do you want a better prepared body, in a faster time frame that traditional training, and that is far more functional than any other system out there? Then sign up for the newsletter on the right hand side of this blog.

Sure I am adding in some hype here, but just at a common sense level I think you can tell this makes sense. The best way to prepare your body for random life events is by a random training method. Say you get an email that says go sprinting (also in the near future we can enable this to occur in a more real time fashion via mobile messaging). Then two days later you are told to run/walk a long distance (based on your current fitness level). The thing is you won’t know ahead of time of what is going to happen, and your body won’t know. And that is where some of the big adaptive changes will be found.

Sounds interesting to you? Sign up for the newsletter to find out more in the near future.

I have only been able to give you the briefest outline of this new training paradigm, and haven’t even touched all the science behind it but I will hash out the details in coming posts. But the newsletter will contain additional details that really make the program come to life.

Are you prepared?

happy training

Many of us want a very detailed layed out exercise program – but the reality is that if we just get off our butt and get out there and do something physical you are not only automatically better off that laying paralyzed on your couch but probably ahead of the vast majority of everybody else.

Chuckie V who was a world class ironman triathlete (you might remember the mohawk guy) and two time completer of the pacific coast trail (a 2,700 mile hike – wow!) has a good post on caveman training here.

In training, don’t be afraid to occasionally take the caveman approach and find some shit out for yourself. Go ape-shit! After all, where’s the fun in playing it safe? No Internet forum is going to know what works for you, or what doesn’t. No coach or scientist or “expert” is going to either, without some trial and error. You need to think like the bumble bee or the caveman or the German goddess and do what it takes to learn for yourself. This is the best form of learning and it’s called EXPERIENCE. We learn from experience and we gain experience from making mistakes. Go out on a limb, because as any Neanderthal can tell you, that’s where the fruit is found.

Chuckie offers coaching service but is not afraid sometimes you just got to go learn yourself. He offers these caveman tips in a followup blog piece.

1) Eat like a caveman. This means avoid eating food in packaging or food that contains more than one ingredient. It does not mean drinking tea or coffee or smoking something that grows in the ground. If you can’t get through a single day without coffee, a drug, something is wrong.

2) Train like a caveman. Go out all day and see what you can discover for yourself; go primal! Discard the power meter or the heart-rate monitor or the bike computer or the GPS or your MP3 player or your watch. Eschew all electronica and get in tune with your own frequencies. It may take some time to descramble them.

3) Get in touch with your fears. Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed. Cavemen were full of fear and theirs were far more tangible than yours likely are.

4) Make some mistakes. They will likely not cost you your life, so go on, make them. Then, more importantly, learn from them. If you’re too afraid to make mistakes, you’ll never be a caveman.

5) Under-dress. Try it: you’ll learn how fragile and insignificant you truly are. You are just a smudge of a fingerprint on a window of a skyscraper, a speck of sand on vast beach on a tiny island in an endless sea floating in a universe without boundaries, a molecule of nothingness.

6) Get lost. Go somewhere new, somewhere unfamiliar, and get acquainted with it and with yourself. Leave the city of comfort and find the wilderness of your intuition.

7) Sleep outside, under the stars. Talk about feeling insignificant! If you don’t think this will have an affect, you haven’t tried it. Those same stars are the very ones your caveman cousins gazed at each night and I’m willing to bet they knew more about them than you or I do.

If you lack raw physical talent, try making up for it with lots of long and hard training. If you fail then, at least you gave it an honest effort. Throw hard work at almost any problem and the problem is no longer a problem. Of course, it’s the hard work that then becomes the problem, but only if you abhor it.

9) If it can’t be done, give it a shot. Find out for yourself whether it’s true or not. Those who repeat that it can’t be done are almost always interrupted by someone doing it. Just as it was back in the days of the caveman, rules are constantly rewritten.

10) See if you can do this once every so often and perhaps more than just a day; maybe a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. I propose trying it one day a week, a designated Day of the Caveman. I’m not advocating giving up on society (as you might think I have) but rather to not let it suppress you or shape you or your decisions. Grow a beard, quit being metrosexual, end this nonsense of “leadership” (you too are trivial and insignificant), walk to work, open-water swim, play with fire, throw caution to the wind, or spit straight into it. Don’t settle for someone else’s lessons or their experiences. Write your own story, even if it’s in hieroglyphics.

Thanks Chuckie for sharing your thoughts with us.

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‘Survival of the fittest‘ goes the famous saying.

But what type of fitness will increase your survival? Just by flipping this famous and apt saying, the most useful fitness is one that will increase your chance of surviving. That seems an obvious point, once you think about it.

There is the general health fitness that will reduce your chances of dying of the epidemic world wide rise of insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and obesity which all contribute to cardiovascular disease, among a host of other diseases. Any fitness plan that improves the above condition would contribute to better survival in our modern world – and fight or flight fitness will accomplish this (I will explain in future articles).

What are the other situations/conditions that fitness will have an effect on surviving? In the past you needed it everyday of your life just to survive the day. You needed to out-fight attackers and outrun predators (defined by something or somebody you would lose a fight to) – fight or flight. You also probably needed to throw various weapons (stones, spears, etc) for the same past two reasons.

Now humans society developed first at the kin level, but grew to include tribe, village, town, city, nation, etc and arguably our level of individual fighting decreased (though I am sure there could be competing arguments). What is accepted that our modern developed world physical fighting is limited. However, there can still be the situation when you might need the skill and ability to defend yourself.

Fight or Flight choice:

Now in a modern day situation of a confrontation – be it you are being mugged, or just got yourself in the wrong situation – you have two options; fight or flight. You must make an educated decision of what is the best choice. But if you think you are less skilled, size disadvantaged, out gunned, or out numbered – you best choice might be flight – and you better be quick about it.

Flight:

You are not going to be able to stretch, limber up, or warm-up before you have to bust your butt out of your current predicament. Hence one of the most important aspect of fight or flight fitness is sprinting at the drop of a hat (should trademark this). We will be talking about sprint training as well as doing extensive sprint training (if you follow along with the training posts). Of course there will be a gradual buildup to sprinting at a drop of a hat (but once you get there you will have it when you need it).

When was the last time you really sprinted in your life?

So without babbling anymore today I will offer my suggestion for today’s exercise routine (with all the disclaimers of you should see a doctor before starting a new exercise program, you should gradually build up both distance and intensity, etc, etc).

Try sprinting (does not have to be all out – judge based on your current fitness and the last time you actually sprinted in your life) with limited to no warm-up (but don’t go full out if you are not use to this new form of exercise). I would suggest sprinting up a slight incline for 2 reasons: one sprinting up hill will reduce impact (and hence reduce chance of injury) and two by sprinting uphill you will also get more a strenght workout.

Tomorrow, I will tell you how I made out with my sprints and continue detailing the ideas and implementation of fight or flight fitness.