The 'as nature intended' trend in health & fitness

Here we dig into the ‘as nature intended’ trend currently prevalent in the health & fitness industry, specifically as it applies to moving, eating and running.

It is one of the fitness trends featured in the free PDF in Module 1 of our “Four Steps to Opening a Successful Gym or Fitness studio” e-course in which we cover market research, product definition, financials & the pre-opening process.

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as nature intended trend in health & fitness

This trend is really fundamental not just to the formation of Biofit but on a personal level, of my entire lifestyle really, so even labelling it a ‘trend’ feels awkward, as if it ever went anywhere - it didn’t, we just lost our way somehow!

This is a whole value system of nature-first beliefs, placing renewed value on simpler, natural ways of doing things that have stood the test of time. Implicitly then we start to look at the contemporary world with, if not a critical eye, at least some skepticism - new and modern may not necessarily be best in other words.

Eating as nature intended

Take the food industry for example. While we’ve had agriculture for between 5000-10,000 years, it is only much more recently that food has been sold to us in packages, having been prepared elsewhere by people we all never meet.

Now we have access to unlimited supplies of calories whenever we want them.. but demand for convenience and a global population boom has also given rise to ‘food products’, not just mass produced ingredients.

Our DNA is largely as it was before the advent of agriculture however, meaning we are far better equipped to eating moderate amounts of whole foods, plants and the occasional piece of animal meat or fish, depending on where your ancestors were from.

Everything else, some would even include grains in this category, are a relatively new phenomenon for our digestive systems and therefore not as ‘natural’ for us to eat.

Cold-pressed juices are another spinoff from here — a modern day convenience product, yes, but inspired by the simplicity of the past and with its heart in the right place.

Can’t get to the field today to pluck a carrot from the ground? A reassuringly expensive green juice beats a sugary snack any day, at least for well heeled city dwellers.

Then there are the Paleo, Keto and Atkins low-carb diets based on natural, non-processed foods with single ingredients: vegetables, optional fruit, nuts, seeds, fish, meat but avoiding dairy and grains.

Paleo received a massive boost from the boom in CrossFit over the past decade or so as many of those athletes adopted it or something similar as their preferred meal plan.

More recently we’ve seen a counter-trend to that in vegan-based endurance athletes promoting an entirely plant-based diet.

Either way, nobody wants you eating processed foods from the central aisles of the supermarket any more, in fact, just stick to the local farmer’s market and you’re done!

Running as nature intended

A corollary to this return to nature in our diet has been in footwear - minimalist, primal lifestyle inspired shoe brands have been promoting a ‘back to basics’ approach for a while now, whether that be in five-finger formation or wide-toe shapes.

Minimal running shoes generally have ‘zero drop’ in the sole from front to back, a thin sole to give improved ‘ground feel’ and a wider toe to prevent the toes being compressed unnecessarily, check out Vibram and Vivo Barefoot in particular.

By the time NIKE introduced their ‘Free’ range as a mass market free running shoe and Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman was writing about the dangers of heel strikes in endurance running (http://barefootrunning.fas.harvard.edu/), the Born To Run phenomenon had well and truly taken hold.

It turns out that we managed pretty well as endurance hunters for thousands of millennia without much in the way of air-padded soles and there are still Mexican tribes who regularly knock out ultra-marathon distances in little more than a slab of animal skin tied to the soles of their feet. Who knew?!

Moving as nature intended

Well, running is but one form of natural movement, we have also seen a boom in ‘moving as nature intended’ alongside the running and diets. This is where Biofit’s own training style comes in.

In some instances, such as Paul Chek’s Primal Patterns, that equates to resistance work focusing on the fundamental movements of pushing, pulling, squatting, bending, lunging and twisting. As well as running.

Then we have ‘real world fitness’ proponents such as Erwan Le Corre and the MovNat phenomenon incorporating crawling, jumping, throwing, climbing, striking, defending, balancing, lifting and swimming in natural contexts, where it is less about reps and sets, instead they’re trying to get as close as possible to a real life scenario. So less ‘fitness’, more ‘capability’.

Over in the US, a parallel movement around ancestral health and fitness has been steadily growing for a long while now, arguably representing the forefront of the industry.

Have a look at Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint and Primal Kitchen products based on keto diet principles as an example.

All of this has of course been heavily influential on how we put together our own Biofit training method that is now available as an online course for coaches and trainers.

We hope to have added our own unique twist on it from a natural fitness perspective, bridging the gap between mainstream fitness and natural movement, we’ll let you be the judge of how successfully we achieved that…!

In the end though, all of the businesses mentioned here are singing from the same hymn sheet, maybe at slightly different pitches but it’s the same song - “nature first, above all else”.