Brachiate; because it's your birth right, you ape!

Alright, what the hell is brachiation? Basically it's to move about by swinging from hand to hand. This is a very rare mode of locomotion on this planet, apes being about the only family of animals capable of true brachiation. But guess what! We are capable of this amazing feat too because we're apes! Now, there is reason to believe that in our evolutionary past we gave up some of our brachiating prowess in order to run around better (long legs), and throw stuff better (wider shoulder girdle, shorter forearms, more stable wrists), but the ability remains, so lets put it to good use. Besides, there are some people (myself included) that believe you can't have truly healthy shoulders without doing some brachiating now and then (I think I heard Kelly Starret PT talk about this once on CrossFit Radio). After all it's what our shoulders were originally designed for.

The first video is of a couple of white-cheeked gibbons showing the extreme of what is possible for brachiators. The second shows a bit of what is possible for us humans. We might not be able to swing around quite as well, but check out what our long, and strong, legs make possible.

A Reason for Endurance

This being my first blog post, I want to start off with something cool. As I'm sure many of you know I'm very interested in the skills of our collective hunter-gatherer past and present. My hope is that I'll be able to share some of that information, as well as information relating to CrossFit specifically and health, fitness, and nutrition more generally, with the readers of this blog. I'll also use this blog as a platform for highlighting activities and accomplishments at CrossFit Works.
Those of you familiar with CrossFit probably understand why we don't spend a lot of time training mono structural (running, rowing, biking etc...) endurance activities, but if you don't, talk to me or one of the other trainers for the reasoning behind this. Now this isn't to say that cardiovascular endurance is useless, in fact it is quite useful and one of the aspects of our fitness we are constantly trying to improve.
The following video is an example of the persistence hunt, perhaps the oldest hunting method in the world, and culminates in the killing of a kudu by the San bushman. So, in case you can't think of a good reason to run and keep running, then here is one use for endurance...



I hope you'll notice the hunters running technique. Despite the fact that he is wearing pretty thick soled shoes, he is running with a forefoot strike for the most part. However when they show a close-up he only forefoot strikes on the left, while heel striking on the right. It makes me wonder whether something he is carrying is throwing off his stride, or if he was just filmed at an inopportune moment.