Sometimes, watching TV can be a good thing, especially when it comes to true stories or documentaries. I'm a sucker for a good documentary if it's on Aliens, Baseball, Nature, Serial Killers or Ancient History. It fascinates me whether some of it is a little fabricated or twisted around but there's always some form of truth in there. Nature Docs are one of my favorites and have several in a collection from the Planet Earth Series, Dynasties, the study of Primates, Wolves and others.
If anything, they inspire me to train like an animal in the wild. Just getting up and crawling, jumping or flat out mimic an animal just for the hell of it. Certain streaming services these days are actually pretty cool especially with Nat Geo on Disney+ or the Nature Docs on Netflix because it's not just trash TV or movies or countless shows but being able to actually learn a thing or two and have some fun in the process. I've seen practically every Nat Geo show on Disney+ from The Wild Series to White Wolves, Primal Survivor and Docs on Animals in America. Every time I watch them, I want to get up and go play as a wild animal.
Animal Docs aren't just to teach the behaviors and seasonal rituals animals have but also showcase the landscapes and homes they build, the bonds they develop, the playful fighting amongst cubs, the way they battle each other and how powerful they can truly be. Would you ever get in the middle of a fight between big horns, tigers, bears, bison or elk? As humans, we're the only species that can take in very close quarters of a fight and live to talk about it most of the time, but if humans were even within 100 yards of a fight between testosterone fueled wild animals, you'd be lucky to even still be breathing. Imagine two fully grown bears that weigh up to 1500 lbs at best just whaling on each other, would you even be dumb enough to get within 50 feet of them? You would either have to have nerves of steel or just have some kind of Death Wish.
The closest I've seen to a fight between animals was wild deer outside my garage window and it wasn't even a full on battle, just messing with each other, if it got out of hand, glass shattering and walls broken would be inevitable. I've also seen a teenage moose strolling in the backyard once and it made a normal size horse look small. It's incredible what we are able to observe but even more incredible to develop our bodies using natural resources to build strength, athleticism, stamina, flexibility, explosiveness, conditioning and other major attributes using our own bodyweight, pushing/lifting rocks, carrying logs, taking down trees, dragging something heavy and anything else in between.
Crawling, Jumping, Balancing, Sprinting and other movement patterns create the natural order of what the human body is capable of. We crawl as babies, we jump onto things, we develop awareness that helps us balance and we become explosive and channel that flight or fight mode. As adults, we don't always crawl as much as we had to as little ones, jumping improperly has led to many injuries and/or fatalities and most of the time, sprint either for recreation or if we're being chased down. As we got older, being natural dwindles and we let age and our faults define us and consume us. Even if we utilize nature even a little bit, there's still some of that order left in the world. Learn to crawl again, play like an animal in the wild, have fun in your exercise and use your imagination.
We need to realize we're part of nature too and sure we'll always be far more advanced than a wild animal but that doesn't mean we can't learn from them and use nature as a way to strengthen ourselves physically and mentally. Their specific skill sets are extremely powerful and jaw dropping and if we even used a smidge of that to make ourselves stronger as a species, think about the good that can come out of that.
