Calisthenics Guide MARK LUNDEGREN FOUNDER HUMANANATURA ALWAYS CONSULT WITH YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDER BEFORE BEGINNING THIS OR ANY FITNESS PROGRAM HUMANANATURA, INC. COPYRIGHT 2002-2018. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. HumanaNatura Calisthenics Guide Version 3.6 Copyright 2002-2018 HumanaNatura, Inc. Visit us online at www.HumanaNatura.com Contents Introduction 2 Principles of Natural Exercise 3 Calisthenics Overview 6 Calisthenics Guidelines 13 Calisthenics Workout 18 Program Terms of Use 99 HumanaNatura Calisthenics Guide 1 Introduction Welcome to HumanaNatura’s calisthenics guide. HumanaNatura is a cooperative organization, supporting a global network of practitioner- advocates who use and promote HumanaNatura’s revolutionary natural health system in communities around the world. The HumanaNatura system integrates four science-based techniques to create an optimally healthy, naturally fulfilling, and more adaptive approach to life in our time. HumanaNatura’s four techniques combine to foster greatly increased health awareness and our breakthrough to a new natural state we call progressive health-centered life. HumanaNatura offers two natural health programs – our Personal Health Program and our Community Health Program – which together span our four health techniques. The techniques are: 1) Natural Eating, 2) Natural Exercise, 3) Natural Living, and 4) Natural Communities. Our calisthenics exercises are part of the Natural Exercise section of our overall health system. This guide to our calisthenics exercises is intended for people wishing to focus on the calisthenics portion of our Personal Health Program. To enable this focus, the calisthenics guide omits significant portions of the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program. Please see our website to review the full program and for more information on HumanaNatura’s overall natural health system. In addition to the calisthenics guide, HumanaNatura offers a free calisthenics workout poster, containing all of the exercise photos from this guide. Please see the Resources section of the HumanaNatura website for information on downloading a free workout poster, or ordering a professional-quality version of the poster through the HumanaNatura Marketplace. Please feel free to contact HumanaNatura anytime with questions or comments on this guide. Simply use the Contact Us page on our website. Good luck with the calisthenics exercises! Important Note: Before beginning HumanaNatura’s calisthenics exercises, please carefully review HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program, and be sure to consult with and get approval from your health care provider. HumanaNatura Calisthenics Guide 2 Principles of Natural Exercise The HumanaNatura technique of Natural Exercise is based on six principles of applied health science. Since our overall program aim is to promote lifelong and lifewide states of progressive natural health and quality of life, you will see that our focus in selecting these principles and developing the technique was to encourage exercise that enables modern natural living, rather than modern life unnaturally dominated by exercise. Let’s take a moment to highlight these important exercise principles and then discuss how our Natural Exercise technique naturally and optimally fulfills these ideals, allowing us to achieve complete natural conditioning and promoting progressively healthier life today: 1. When engaged in a natural or naturally evolved range of physical activities, human beings and other animals will naturally tend to maintain themselves at high levels of physical fitness and psychological health through evolved physiological mechanisms (see Wikipedia Physical Exercise, NCBI Physical Activity, Sedentary Behavior, and Health, and Bouchard et al. Physical Activity and Health). As discussed already, HumanaNatura calls this process of integral fitness assurance natural conditioning. 2. A well-designed exercise program can and should efficiently and pleasurably ensure natural conditioning and a sustained interest in healthy life. By this, we mean that exercise should promote and encourage natural physical and mental health, be enjoyable to the practitioner, ideally require only a modest amount of time each day, and motivate and enable other health- centered learning and action. 3. A natural exercise program should use modern health science to ensure that it is complete, balanced, and fulfills at least four complementary physical fitness goals (aerobic conditioning, strengthening, improved flexibility, increased agility or coordination), and at least three psychological well- being goals (stress reduction, enhanced cognition, and a natural or adaptive predominance of positive emotions). 4. Exercises that emphasize whole-body movements are generally the most efficient and effective forms of physical exercise, since they promote natural conditioning across large areas of our bodies simultaneously, while often requiring and thus promoting increased physical coordination and cognitive HumanaNatura Calisthenics Guide 3 attentiveness (see Wikipedia Kinesiology and Exercise Physiology, and Contreras Bodyweight Strength Training). 5. A comprehensive exercise program should be adaptable to each individual, allowing for increased or decreased duration and intensity based on our overall physical and personal readiness for exercise, both on a day-to-day basis and over the course of our lives. 6. Other factors being equal, exercise programs encouraging outdoor activity, exposure to wild nature, and novel experiences are preferable, since they are likely to better replicate essential activities of natural life, foster key dimensions of our natural health, and prove more naturally enjoyable, health motivating, and psychologically nurturing and enriching (see Wikipedia Nature Connectedness, Self-Knowledge (Psychology), and Self- Actualization). HumanaNatura Exercise Components Utilizing these principles and keeping in mind HumanaNatura’s larger progressive life and health goals, our Natural Exercise technique has been designed around two core components: • Daily Walking – 30 minutes or more of walking or hiking each day • Regular Calisthenics – 10+ minutes of calisthenics, 3-5 days per week As you will soon experience and validate in your own natural health practice, daily walking and regular calisthenics are simple, natural, powerful, and highly complementary forms of exercise. Together, they allow us to achieve complete and efficient natural conditioning, promoting extremely high levels of health and fitness throughout our lives. In keeping with our Natural Exercise goals, daily walking and regular calisthenics combine to greatly and optimally improve our physical conditioning and stamina. They foster new awareness and mastery of our natural physiological and psychological health. They expand our interaction and connection with our surroundings and the larger natural world. And they enrich and even create new space and motivation for other essential activities of healthy human life. Walking and calisthenics involve natural human movement and are consistent with the Natural Exercise principles we have introduced. They are highly flexible forms of exercise too, ones that most of us can perform throughout our lives and at many levels of duration and intensity. Because of their strong link to our natural human activity patterns and HumanaNatura Calisthenics Guide 4 “whole-body movement” efficiency, the regular practice of walking and calisthenics allows us to spend as little as an average of about forty minutes a day in exercise, while still achieving essential natural conditioning and enhancement of our lifelong health and fitness. Detailed overviews of HumanaNatura’s walking and calisthenics practices are provided in the next two parts of the program, including step-by-step instructions and photos for all of our calisthenics exercises. Support as You Explore Natural Exercise If you have questions on Natural Exercise, now or in the future, please contact HumanaNatura’s support staff via the Contact Us link on our website anytime. We encourage you to explore HumanaNatura’s Natural Exercise technique for yourself and to see how easily and naturally our exercise practices can become an integral and enriching part of your daily life. You will quickly appreciate the power of our approach to ensure essential natural conditioning – enhancing our health and fitness, promoting new health perspectives and well-being, and increasing our personal connection to others and the world around us. Once you have begun Natural Eating, bringing Natural Exercise to your life is the next essential step in the HumanaNatura natural health system for transforming your personal health amid modern life. As we have suggested, Natural Exercise can help to foster a remarkable new and open-ended lifelong movement toward progressive personal health, vitality, and quality of life. The technique of Natural Exercise is designed to complement and build on our first foundational technique of Natural Eating, augmenting it and greatly enhancing our health. Natural Exercise is also intended to help us develop the needed momentum, and personal strength and fortitude, to approach the more far-reaching challenge of restoring and then progressively increasing our natural health across the totality of our lives. This important and wide-ranging modern challenge is embodied in the third HumanaNatura technique of Natural Living. HumanaNatura Calisthenics Guide 5 Calisthenics Overview When we observe animals in nature, we can see that most are physically