With all the craziness of the past few months, my workout schedule has been erratic at best. Yet, despite that, I’ve continued to teach a couple of CrossFit classes each week.

There’s a CrossFit saying that ‘men will die for points’ – meaning that, given a bit of competition, people push themselves far, far harder than they would alone. I find that’s doubly true when leading a class, weighed down with the vague idea that whatever instructor street-cred I possess stems entirely from my ability to demonstrate exercises and blaze through workouts well enough to inspire the rest of the class.

Fortunately, years of competition with my younger brother instilled in me the ability to push myself far harder than wise, for the sake of shaming others. So, in class, regardless of my current overall fitness level, I put up more than my body weight in the Snatch or Clean & Jerk, do twenty-rep sets of handstand pushups or clapping pullups. (Yes, clapping pullups.)

When I’m working out regularly outside of class, that’s fine; the instructor days don’t really make a dent. But, at times like this, when lax workout schedules leave me sustaining in-class effort with nothing but grit and curse words, the day after, I’m inevitably a mess.

Today, for example, I could barely lift myself out of bed, started the day unable to squat down sufficiently to pick things up off the floor, unable to raise my arms above shoulder level.

But, perversely enough, that pain got me to the gym. First because, contrary to conventional wisdom, pushing through a workout when sore inevitably leaves me feeling far better by the end than when I started.

Second because, unless I get back onto a regular workout schedule, I’m going to feel like this after every class I teach. And I’m pretty sure I don’t have the Advil budget to make that work.

A little while back, I plugged CrossFit’s Workout-of-the-Day as the best approach I’d found for high-level athletic training. I still think it is. And I’m even more impressed that they put up their WotD for free. So, to support them, I recently subscribed to their monthly journal, which talks through some of the theoretical underpinnings of their approach.

The latest issue, which I received yesterday, is all about gymnastics, about how great gymnastics movements are for developing general fitness. And, in the journal, they suggest that CrossFitters add a gymnastics stunt to their warm-ups, to learn them one at a time. Looking over their list for one to add in, I noticed they included ‘skin the cat’, which I remember hating, hating, hating when I last did gymnastics, at seven or eight years old. So, naturally, ‘skin the cat’ was the first one I tried.

For those who’ve never seen it, skinning the cat looks like this. Basically, you start in a regular pullup position, lift yourself into an inverted pullup position (where your legs are pointed up at the ceiling – the first frame in the photo), then keep rotating through. If your shoulders are flexible enough, you can roll all the way forward to an eagle grip (the last frame in the photo); if your shoulders are strong enough, you can then reverse the movement from that eagle grip position and flip back through the motion in the opposite direction to end up in a regular pullup again.

And, in short: Holy crap, I can totally do it! I can do it repeatedly! I could totally kick seven-year old me’s ass!

If your New Years resolutions included ‘start going to the gym’, I’d suggest you instead take the cost of two month’s membership and pick up a kettlebell (along with an instructional DVD). Small enough to wedge away in even the tiniest New York studio, they give a remarkably effective strength and cardio workout in ten or fifteen minutes – less than the time it probably takes for you to get to the gym, much less start exercising.

And, for those of you who’ve been working out (more or less) consistently for the past year, head over to CrossFit and start following their Workout of the Day. Usually under a half hour in length, it will still convince you quickly that you’re nowhere near as fit as you thought.

Today, after fight practice, a bunch of the guys I train with crossed over to the other side of the gym to spar for a bit with the New York Russian Sambo Team – Sambo being the former USSR’s version of Judo.

I ended up paired with a guy named (I kid you not) Vlad, a large Russian who seemed to think it would be an easy couple of matches. Much to his (and his coach’s) surprise, however, I went 2-1 in the three rounds against him, tapping him out with a choke and then an armbar in the first two before getting sloppy and tired in the third and opening myself up to a an ankle lock that left me hobbling the rest of the way home.

Still, there’s nothing like testing your fight skills against a large and uncooperative opponent to see that your training is actually paying off. Vlad seemed impressed and vowed to drop in for a couple of our classes; if he does, I’m pretty sure I deserve a cut of his training fee.

Yesterday, I headed over to Paragon Sports, New York’s finest sporting goods store, to buy a new rock climbing harness. Which, in my mind, was money very well spent. Sure, in lots of sports, ailing equipment can limit the quality of your game – a dented bat, for example, can drop yards and yards from your best home run swing. But in climbing, as in very few other sports, equipment reaching the end of its life can rather quickly have you reaching the end of your own. Not relishing the idea of plummeting to my death, making sure my safety equipment is in prime form always strikes me as well worth the time and money.

Hence heading to Paragon to buy a new harness. Based on how and where I climb, with the help of the salesman I narrowed my choices down to two main contenders: the Petzl Calidris and the Black Diamond Focus. As both would cover the full range of situations where I hope to use the harness, the decision was mainly one of comfort. How would they feel after a day of wear? I strapped on both pairs in turns over my jeans trying to judge, but the fit of a harness when walking around is vastly different from the fit of that same harness after it stops a fifteen foot fall. The wedgie (or worse, ‘melvin’) potential is hard to explain to those who’ve never felt the effects of a bad harness first hand. In my case, let’s just say that a borrowed harness once left me hoping I’d still be able to have kids.

So, wanting to avoid purchasing such a harness myself, I asked the salesman if there was anywhere I could actually test out the fit by hanging. Indeed, it turned out, there was a rope attached to the store’s ceiling for just such a purpose, though, oddly, it was nowhere near the climbing department, nor even near hiking and mountaineering in general, but rather hidden in a distant section full of backpacks and book bags.

Clearly, few people had actually used this test rope, and for good reason, as it ended about six feet above the ground, making clipping on the crotch-level harness a rather onerous task. I had to climb the rope, arm over arm, then hold myself up with one hand while clipping in with the other. Unattaching to switch harnesses required the same process made even more difficult in reverse, and going back and forth several times between the two certainly provided my workout for the day. Waking up this morning, my back and biceps were sore to the point of painful.

Still, the effort was well worth it, as, when hanging in them, the Petzl turned out to be vastly more comfortable than the Black Diamond, making the choice easy. Plus, as an added bonus, it’s hard to overestimate the joy of swinging, Tarzan-like, over the heads of shocked and unsuspecting little kids shopping for backpacks.

In the last section, I explained why eating old-school, waaaay old-school makes sense: our bodies evolved for it, and function much better when we do. Paleothic eaters, like more modern hunter/gatherers, were lean, fit, and free of most of the chronic diseases that plague society. So what, exactly, did they eat?

Well, lots of different things. Obviously Paleolithic hunter/gatherers in the heart of Africa ate wildly differently from those living in the Swiss Alps or along the coast of Alaska. Fortunately for you, with the miracles of the modern food system, you likely have access to the vast majority of what any of them ate. Unfortunately for you, you also have access to all kinds of other items that almost certainly didn’t show up at Paleo dinnertime. What makes the cut? First, two rules of thumb:

• If you were stuck out in nature with nothing but some sharp sticks and rocks, would the food still be available to you?
• Could you eat it raw, unaltered and unprocessed, and still extract the nutrients from it without becoming sick?

If you can answer yes to both, the food fits. That doesn’t mean you have to actually procure the food yourself using rocks and sticks. Similarly, that doesn

Take a look at Fido: lying on your kitchen floor, fat and arthritic. Then take a look at dogs in the wild: lean, muscular, with healthy teeth, bones and joints. That, basically, is the problem.

Like your faithful companion’s, your body evolved to live, work and eat in the wild. For over 100,000 generations, your ancestors lived as hunters and gatherers. Then, only about 500 generations back, they domesticated themselves, completely changing the way they went about life. Problem is, in evolutionary time, 500 generations is chump change. Your genes are almost identical to your ancestors’ from tens of centuries back. Somewhere along the line, how you use and feed your body, and how your body evolved to be used and fed, got horribly out of whack.

“So what?” I hear you say. Well, for a moment, let’s take a look at the fossil record those way-back Paleolithic ancestors left behind. As Hobbes wrote, lives that were “poor, nasty, brutish and short,” right? Well, no. Certainly, the average life span was shorter. But almost entirely because, research shows, of infectious disease and other now easily curable problems, especially among infants and children. Those Paleo hunter/gatherers who did make it through the perils of childhood (and past the ever-present danger of ending up as a sabre-toothed tiger snack) were remarkably healthy. Many lived surprisingly long lives, and virtually all of them were free from heart disease, cancer and stroke, today’s three leading killers.

Medical records gathered at the turn of the century from the few remaining hunter/gatherer tribes show the same thing: lean, physically fit people almost entirely free from the chronic diseases that plague the civilized world. Interestingly, in every one of those tribes, as their people moved to a modern diet and lifestyle, the health advantages disappeared, the populations quickly rising to obesity, cancer, stroke and heart attack rates on par with any other group’s.

An increasing body of research bears out the obvious conclusion: eating and living the way our bodies were evolved to makes us leaner, fitter, and less susceptible to chronic disease. But what exactly were we evolved to eat and do? Check back for part two, “Eat Like a Caveman” for a look at the food end of the equation.

With the recent spate of warm weather, it feels as though spring is already upon us. Which means one thing: less clothing. And, with bathing suit season just a few months further, the likelihood of much less clothing in the near future.

Which, so far as I can tell, is the main motivation behind getting in shape: the desire to look good naked, or in some scantily clad approximation thereof. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons as well; living longer and healthier certainly spring to mind. Still, whatever your motivation, I hope you enjoy and benefit from this short series of ‘shape up’ posts about fitness.

Am I qualified to dispense advice on the topic? Probably not. But as there’s nothing like the specter of getting beat up in front of large crowds (the joy of competing in full-contact combat sports) to keep you motivated, over the past five years, I’ve methodically examined the science behind all kinds of fitness ideas. Then I’ve practiced what I’m about to preach, and I’ve been impressed by the results. With fairly minimal time and effort, I’ve managed to push myself into the best shape of my life, keeping my body fat at 6-8% year round, and ending up faster, stronger, more flexible and generally better feeling than I’ve ever been in the process.

While I’m hoping to flesh out ideas on training for athletes interested in high-end competition elsewhere, this series is a bit more narrow in scope. In short, it looks at the question, “what’s the very least I can do to get into excellent shape?” I hope you not only enjoy it, but put some of the ideas to work in your own life. I think you’ll be impressed by the results.

This morning, after several months off, I returned to Ronin Combat Athletics to resume mixed martial arts (i.e. “no holds barred”) training. I’d been working out regularly during my time away, so at least I was rarely left winded, but there’s no amount of throwing around weights that can prepare you for being actually thrown around yourself. I came home this afternoon with an assortment of cuts, bruises, aches and pains likely to stick with me for at least the next few days. By which time, I’ll head back in for another practice and start the cycle of suffering all over again.

No pain, no gain.

[Side note: oddly, though most of the people who train at Ronin are well over six feet and two hundred pounds, today was apparently the Lollipop Kid special. Aside from one really tall guy (who we nicknamed Gulliver for the day), the rest of the group was comprised of literally all the Ronin fighters under 5’8″. Which, while I would have though would be easier, was actually tougher, as we had apparently all developed the same dirty tricks and leverage-(rather than strength-)based techniques. That made squaring off against people my own size sort of like fighting fire with fire. Still, I can at least finally understand why the really big guys hate to spar with me; constantly keeping pace with fast-moving little pit-bull types really tires you out.]

While most people would let the tropical locale throw off their workout routine, I’ve managed to keep my nose to the grindstone, sticking to a strenuous circuit training program: beach, pool, hot tub, pina colada, repeat.