The Mystery Around Animal Exercises

 When you research Animal Movements or Animal Exercises, what pops up? Most likely you'll find ads, videos and various sequences of Animal Flow or Primal Movement. It's a popular trend and has tremendous benefits, hell I do them from time to time but what about the true and deep aspects of what animal movements are and how the came about. There isn't a whole lot written on them from that aspect.

It's a mystery on how we as humans really took to the animals and going from mimicking their behavior for hunting to becoming a recreational activity or purely for fitness. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm sure if you looked hard enough you'll find some cool stuff but it's still an enigma at times to why we have chosen animals as a fitness fad. One of the biggest known aspects of Animal Exercise or mirroring an animal is through ancient Kung Fu practices where men and women would mimic a wild animal and channel it to a fighting style and utilize it in a more graceful form of techniques and precise movement of jumps, kicks, punches and highly athletic counter techniques. 

Another outlook to Animal Movement is how we've taken certain animals and molded them to use warm up/punishment type exercises in athletics such as Football, Wrestling, Soccer and MMA. In and of themselves,. Animal Moves are more than just mere warmups and used as a punishment to keep an athlete in check. Now the idea of "Animal Movement" is not always just making up a name for a crawl, jump, hop and slither, there's something to mimicking an animal as humanly as we can without going overboard. It's true we can't exactly mirror an animal because the structure is different, the awareness is different and thinking we can be just as powerful as a wildcat, bear or a primate is way out of our league. 

Is there an answer to the mystery on why we love to mimic animals? It's very complicated but some might agree that as a species, we want to instinctively get back to nature but as far as evolution goes, some aspects of it has forced us to leave our animal like instincts and go through processes of becoming human in ways that is both good and bad. The cool thing is unlike other animals, we aren't just cut and dry to walk and have instincts of one specific animal, we have the ability to create and imitate many species to a certain extent. We'll never have their specific strengths and attributes but we can utilize what we can acquire to make the most of what is possible beyond other animals. 

The true kings and queens of exercise are the animals and it's important that we embrace the strength and conditioning of what is possible for a human to develop our bodies from a natural resource. You can lift the heaviest weights, do thousands of squats and pushups, do pull ups till the cows come home but nothing will take you down quicker and breathe hard like a madman like moving as a wild animal as humanly possible. Some people will argue that and think animal moves are just kid stuff, ok here's a test...What would be easier, 100 Squats or a 100 Yard Bear Crawl? After all, animal moves are just kid stuff right?