Last weekend I attended a performance by the Peking Acrobats, and good GOD those people are amazing (here's one of their stunts; here's another, but on video much of the effect is lost--presumably because we see super-folks defying gravity on film all the time.  Live, rIght before your eyes, and no net to catch them?  Not so much.) The feats of physical control, balance, coordination, agility, strength and courage on display were absolutely unbelievable.  And the 16 performers went on for two hours.  So their stamina amazes me too.

I remember watching gymnasts and acrobats like them (though perhaps not quite so incredible) when I was young and thinking, "I'd love to be as strong as that," and going home and pounding out bench-presses and chinups on my home gym in hopes of someday acheiving that kind of physical mastery. 

What no one told me, however, is that muscular strength was only part of the equation, and a relatively small one at that.  

The foundation of that kind of athleticism, of course, is coordination.  There's no guarantee that a guy who can overhead press his bodyweight and then some can also do a handstand, for instance.  The overhead-pressing gym stud certainly has the raw strength to support his bodyweight, but he may well lack the core stability, spacial awareness and full-body orientational sense to pull it off. 

Surely everyone's tired of my Gray Cook quotes, but here's another one:  an acrobat--or dancer, or pole vaulter, or one of those jumpy-twisty-flippy martial arts guys--doesn't fire a few muscles at 100% when he does those impressive feats of balance and coordination that leave us mortals agape; he's firing all his muscles at 15%.  He--or she, see below--is coordinated as hell. 

And these acrobats looked amazing:  not huge, of course, but enviably ripped and muscular, Bruce-Lee style.  Most gym-goers would be pleased as punch to look that good on their best day.

Am I saying that everyone should go out and train like an acrobat?  No--though, you know, you could do worse?--I'm just saying that the current, widely popular, bodybuilding-based workout model short-shrifts a huge piece of the athleticism pie.  This is especially true of machine-based exercise programs, but I'd argue is also true of free-weight workouts as well:  even a program based around the big movements won't begin to express or challenge the full range of your movement capabilities, even if you, like me, are a fairly earth-bound creature.  

I think fitness training is moving in that direction:  towards workouts that include some element of randomness, agility training, gymnastic-type work and other activities that you can't really replicate on a gym floor jammed with cumbersome machines. 

CrossFit, which is still unfairly maligned in some circles, is one model for this kind of workout, but I think there are plenty more out there:  workout modalities that challenge not just the muscles but the nervous system as well--the way your brain talks to your muscles, which, as Chad Waterbury has noted, has been virtually ignored by fitness pros during the bodybuilding boom years (though not always!  Before you were born, handstands and balancing and flips and jumps and sprints and climbing drills were all standard parts of the fitness geeks vocabulary.)

Thanks to its founder, chiropractor Eric Cobb, I've been exploring Z-Health lately, a fascinating system of sometimes almost imperceptible movements which seem to have an instantaneous 'rebooting' effect on your nervous system.  After his 20-minute basic warmup, all movement is easier, more graceful and athletic.  It reminds me of some of the actor-movement work I did in graduate school, designed to enhance body awareness and control, which I'd always thought of as completely separate from my fitness-training.  Shocker--it's all part of the vast universe of physical education.