There's a move afoot to have more of your gym exercises more closely resembling natural human movements. And quite frankly, it's not such a bad way to get a quick, effective and all-over workout.
I mean, hands up here who has just gotten in after a long day tilling the soil? Or who has erected a barn in, oh say, even the last week? Or who hunted and gathered their family foods for the last week (and no, taking the Land Rover to Coles to rummage around the cold meats section is not included here)?
We don't tend to live as overall an active life as we used to. And hey look, that's not such a bad thing. Pretty much the main driver of technology like steam engines, electricity and computers was to cut down physical labour so we could spend more quality time with loved ones and leisure. Whether we avail ourselves of all this "free, extra time" is another story.
No, the human body was designed to produce a whole range of basic movements. Walk, run, jump, throw, hop, squat, push, pull, lunge, kick - these are all elements of movement that we traditionally combined regularly over a day just in the course of staying alive. Now we're more ruled by "sit", "push (mouse)" and "type".
It's a world with less effort - which is nice. But we can't deny what we were actually made to do. An unworked muscle is an unhappy muscle, and it's something that shows up years down the track after it's gone into hiding, producing toxic buildup from underusage and neglect. Diabetes, cardiovascular and inflammatory diseases all spring from disuse or misuse of tissues in the body.
So why not keep muscles happy? If they are meant to produce certain movements, and disuse leads to metabolic problems, why not just do what comes naturally?
This is a relatively new concept in making whole-body exercise more time efficient.
If I had you training every muscle used in a single throw, individually and using traditional body building isolation exercises, it would take me at least 45 minutes to successfully cover everything. Yet we learnt throwing way back in childhood. If we got to practice a few times with increasing resistance, we'd get to hit all of those muscles (and build up co-ordination) much faster and with less instruction.
Cutting down exercise time to more easily fit in with our busy schedules can come from adding one or two movements in a sequence, against resistance like bodyweight, rubber tubing or weights.
A dumbbell squat-press for example, will hit shoulders, chest, triceps, core, back, lower back, glutes, quads, hamstrings and calves all in one movement. A burpee combines a squat, a jump, a reach, a bend and a press - what better way to hit vast amounts of metabolically yearning muscle than that??
Getting your body to do what it was designed for, regularly, keeps your muscles primed and ready for whatever life throws at you. The more variety of moves you can do weekly - push, pull, squat, jump, throw... whatever - the more muscles you'll target and the better your metabolism will fare!
If you're thinking about cutting out your exercise session to fit more work time in your week - think again. Like your ancestors remember to get some full body, functional moves in each week and you can at least keep those muscles ticking over til when you've next got the time to do some more comprehensive exercise programs.
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