Wednesday, March 24, 2010

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.

2 comments:

  1. Another possible reason for a left forefoot strike and a right heel strike could be leg length discrepancy. Even a small discrepancy can make the body compensate is a multitude of ways.

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  2. I thought it was totally interesting that they went for the bull with the heavy horns because he would tire the fastest. Perhaps this is the reason why most hunters today are attracted to animals with big horns?

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