One thing you'll notice spilling forth from the brains of some of the smarter and more outspoken trainers around is a recommendation to do more 'hybrid' training: fast-paced lifting with little rest, combination workouts involving sprinting, sled drags, climbing, and so on. I'm seeing this kind of thing recommended so often, and recommending it myself, that I'd even venture to guess that it's sort of the Next Big Thing. It think gyms are going to start to spring up around this kind of training (CrossFit, anyone?); and that people will be doing more and more of it over the next decade or so.

This trend follows an emphasis in fitness writing on what the body was "intended" to do, or "designed" to do, or, in some cases, what we "evolved" to do, with a nod towards our ancient ancestors and the presumed ruggedness of their hunting, gathering, big-game confronting lifestyles. Workout routines seem to seek, on some level, to duplicate the circumstances in which we evolved for all those millions of years.

"Barefoot" training is part of this same trend: back to nature, back to our roots, back to something organic and connected to our roots.

Someday I'll write a book about fitness trends and how they reflect the values of the moment. I'm seeing this current trend, in Malcolm Gladwell fashion, as tied into our concerns about environmentalism, a resistance to over-technologization (if that's a word) and to corporate culture, and a desire to get back in touch with something elemental about ourselves as homo sapiens.

This kind of fitness is also cheap--all you need, really, is a little space--so it also dovetails well with the current economic climate.

If the '70's were all about long-distance running and its attendant skinniness, the '80's were all about excessive wealth and excessive muscle, we seem to be entering a phase of the body as animal, in touch with its surroundings and capable of taking on any reasonable challenge that might come up.