Welcome to Wild Fitness

Welcome to the Wild Fitness Blog.

It is my hope that this blog will arm you with some of the knowledge and skills to look at health differently.

My interest in health has evolved from a niggling feeling that conventional wisdom seemed not to quite hit the mark. The endless drudgery of exercise sessions left me bored, sore, and with little of the desired effect I was after. Sticking to a ‘healthy’ diet made me feel miserable, obsessive about when I needed to eat, and ultimately feel like a failure when I fell off the wagon (usually after an epic gym session).

My profession at this time was as a survival instructor specialising in primitive skills and foraging. It was this interest in paleoanthropology, and ethnobotany (the study of plant use by humans) that really piqued my interest in our ancestral health. How was it that our ancestors (and contemporary hunter-gatherer societies) were able to survive on relatively low calorific diets yet maintain  naturally athletic physiques, achieve feats of dynamic athleticism without formal structured ‘training’, and seemingly have an absence of the various metabolic and lifestyle related diseases of the modern age?

This interest lead me to look at what foods were available to our hunter-gatherer ancestors within the natural environment, and at what movements were required to obtain these foods.

Along the way I discovered others who were leading the way in popularising this approach to looking at the diets and lifestyles that we are optimally evolved eat and live.

Loren Cordain’s ‘Paleo Diet‘ was the first piece of information that seemed to make sense to about how we were meant to eat. Then came Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint, which for me did well to marry paleo/primial principles with a modern lifestyles. Diet was just one aspect to the Primal Blueprint, with exercise/movement being another. This in turn lead me onto commentators such as Erwin Le Corre and his wonderfully complete MovNat system of human movement; Ido Portal’s Movement Culture; and Darryl Edwards aka The Fitness Explorer, and his excellent take on Movement and Play.

From the readings of these great commentators, there was suddenly a open door to a wide, varied and infinitely fascinating world of ancestral/evolutionary health and fitness for me to delve into. This world has allowed me to learn from a remarkable community of individuals and groups, devoted to understanding how we are designed to eat, to move, to live.

It will be a lifelong study for me to just scratch the surface. The more you learn, the more you realise there is yet to learn. And this excites me.

The aim of this blog is to pass along the information and practices that work for me, to question the information that we are told, and to share in the fun of finding your place within our natural world.

Be a part of Nature.

Glenn