Just received a plug for a new exercise system called the "Warrior Physique" by a couple of guys calling themselves "Lean Hybrid Muscle".  I think their program looks great--it's closer and closer to what I think fitness for the average person should be and look like:  lots of full-body movements based around strength training, sprinting, sled pulling, tire flipping (not 100% sold on that one yet, actually), some kettlebell work, functional core work, etc. etc., all jammed together in limited time so that it produces some serious exhaustion and CNS fatigue (that's Central Nervous System for the acronym-averse) and serious all-around fitness.

Their sales package has a whole dealio about Warrior Societies and how way back when guys were way more fit than they are now because they were expected to row across the ocean, jump out of their longboats in the middle of the night and ambush the enemy without so much as a catnap and a sip of protein shake.  They were, essentially, Navy SEALS, circa the first century BC. 

Frankly I'm a sucker for all that stuff.  I mean, who wants to work out so they can 'feel better, lower their cholesterol, and relieve stress'?  Noble goals, certainly, but the reason that all those books with guys who look like marble statues sell so well, and that the more understated ones don't is that the fantasy of more or less being Supermen and women fires us up and gets us into the gym, whereas the more technical and conservative stuff holds less appeal.  Once I pass 50, maybe I'll feel differently, but I doubt it.  Lou Schuler's past the half-century mark and I know for a fact that he still gets pretty fired up over working out.  He's even still helping crank out books for guys half his age to help them build mighty physiques to attract girls, so there's little doubt that the man still has an active hormone or two coursing through his veins.

Okay, to the point:  having started my fitness obsession wanting to look more or less like a smaller-scale version of a bodybuilder, I've now come around to the far more practical goal of wanting my body to more or less be able to do anything.  A completely unrealistic goal, I grant you, but so was getting huge.  The workouts that I do--and prescribe, and recommend to most people who just vaguely want to get fit--are designed to get me as close to that goal as is realistic in the handful of hours I have per week to exercise. 

Now, I can't speak to everyone, of course, but in my experience, training to get big and training for maximum all-around fitness are different endeavors.  Not totally different, but different enough so that I really have to choose one path or the other, both with myself and with clients.  It's worth noting that the physique of the average Navy SEAL looks nothing like a bodybuilder physique.  They're just not that big.

My one quibble with the Warrior Physique stuff as presented, then, is that the images they use to sell their product are bodybuilder-style physiques.  Now--the guys in the ads may be Warrior Physique enthusiasts.  Their program may have produced some big guys who look like bodybuilders (there's at least one guy in their online videos who looks pretty impressive.)  But it looks like the concept they're selling is all-around fitness:  a high level of functional strength, good size and leanness, excellent stamina.  It's akin to an MMA-style of fitness, and I'm convinced that, by and large, that style of training doesn't produce that kind of physique. 

Perhaps I'm just bemoaning what women have dealt with for decades--the notion of unrealistic standards of physical perfection.  But--now thinking outside the scope of the Hybrid Muscle guys' program, maybe there's another look that we could settle on that might be both more attainable and more in line with what all-around fitness produces.