Natural health and natural training sound amazing, but so do many things. What does natural health mean? And what is natural training? This blog explains both, and lets you know why and how to get started.
What is training naturally?
Put simply, natural training is exercise that promotes natural health. More than just bringing benefits or using natural processes, natural training should make your body more capable and your mind healthier while connecting you with nature and heeding your evolution.
An overview of the key principles paints a fuller picture. Training naturally means being…


Primal
Moving how you’ve evolved to move, so you don’t lose your body's remarkable capabilities. For thousands of years humans walked, ran, squatted, jumped and clambered on the daily. As the saying goes: use it or lose it!


Functional
Focusing on moving well overlooking good. This means training your whole body with full range of motion, not just pumping out ab and bicep reps. This builds a body better suited to the random rigours of everyday life beyond controlled gyms (and probably a better, more natural-looking body).


Varied
Moving in many ways. As a human, you can move with more diversity than any other animal. But a healthy, functional body needs to move. Running, jumping, crawling like a baby and clambering like a monkey are all legitimate techniques in natural training, which is often super playful and surprising.


Long-term
Planning for lifelong health, not short-term success. Training naturally is amazing for high-level (and injury-free) athletic performance; it just doesn’t sacrifice wider wellbeing. Natural health might sound backward-looking, but it only looks back - to our ancestors, and how we moved freely as children - to ensure a more mobile future.


Regular
Treating movement as a daily practice, not an occasional chore. This means natural training can work well with a ‘little and often’ approach.


Holistic
Thinking beyond your physical body. Training naturally often involves being in nature, breathwork, meditation and other factors that marry physical exercise with mental health.
So what does natural training look like?
Given the number of principles in play, natural training takes many forms. Some adapt one or two of the principles above, others display most of them. Three popular examples right now are…
It's time to train natural
The comfy modern world makes it easy to forget how you’ve evolved, and this can lead to health problems. Natural health approaches pre-empt these issues by heeding your body’s evolutionary needs, and natural training is a powerful example. Regular natural training that is functional, varied and holistic is a fantastic way to increase your performance and feel great while also protecting your long-term health.

