Fight or Flight Fitness

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.