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Disclaimer: chopping wood with an axe can be dangerous. If you have not done it before, please seek professional advice before trying it.
Sometimes you just want to get out of the gym and let rip with an unstructured, non-technical workout. One of my favourites is chopping wood with an axe. No rep counting, strict rest periods, changing barbell plates, or worrying about whether you’ve worked the whole body or not. I like to call these sessions ‘deconstructed’ workouts and they’re a real tonic to a gym-frazzled brain. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love lifting weights but, by honoring the principle of variety (by more than simply changing exercises or transitioning to a different phase) my enthusiasm for hitting the gym again is completely rekindled by getting out of the gym for a couple of workouts and enjoying a ‘deconstructed’ exercise session or two. When my next training day comes around, I’m totally refreshed, excited about getting back into the gym and my performance always improves, across the board.
Chopping wood isn’t just a great physical workout, there are a whole host of powerful, health boosting benefits associated with getting out into nature and, in particular, forests and woodland settings. Simply spending time in wooded areas can have a positive impact on your health. Throwing in a couple of sessions of chopping logs with an axe will take it to a whole new level, as I’ll explain below.
Real World Fitness: Chopping Wood from Olly Hermon-Taylor on Vimeo.
Forest Therapy
Thanks to Mark Sisson (Marksdailyapple.com) for his recent post on Forest Bathing for bringing these added benefits of being in the forest to my attention. Rather than just my own, empirical evidence, extensive research conducted in Japan now confirms the health benefits of spending time in forests and natural settings, particularly wooded areas. Based on the research into, what the Japanese call Shinrin-yoku (forest/wood air bathing) exposure to ‘green spaces’ can improve your health in the following ways:
- Protection against depression and anxiety
- Encourages people to be more relaxed and calm
- Lowers salivary cortisol levels, pulse rate, blood pressure (stress reduction)
- Decreases Sympathetic nerve activity and increases Parasympathetic nerve activity (stress reduction)
- Boosts the immune system, in particular increasing the activity of particular lymphocytes known as ‘Natural Killer’ cells, which have anti-tumor and cancer fighting implications. Apparently this is due to phytoncides (wood’s essential oils) and throws a whole new light on tree-hugging.
Not only can you benefit from all of these health boosting effects from just hanging out in the woods, it seems that the benefits also last for up to 30 days after the forest bathing session.
Integrated Exercise
Chopping wood with an axe is hard work. You are using your whole body, in an integrated fashion (not just isolating certain target muscle groups) to overcome the resistance offered by the log (which sometimes, due to knots and twisted grain is significant). This real world wood chop is a compound movement, a combination of the following Primal Patterns® (Movement That Matters, Chek, Paul W., C.H.E.K Institute, 2000) : squat, pull, twist, bend and push (depending on how hard you are hitting the log, you could argue that the squat and twist are not involved with easy chops but, ramp up the power for a hard-to-split log and you definitely need to initiate the movement with a partial squat and wind up through the obliques with a twist on the back swing and oblique wood-chop on the way down, prior to the push extension through the arms). Movement and force are generated from the ground up and I’d argue that most of your 640-850 muscles are on the job with a real world wood-chop.
Explosive Exercise
You have to hit the log explosively if you are going to do any damage to it. A slower tempo may be ok if you are splitting something with a perfectly straight grain but the first couple of strikes into a big round (log) need to be highly explosive to be effective. Force is generated from the ground up and I find that my movement pattern is similar to the explosive, triple extension of an Olympic lift, when I am hitting a particularly tough log, with my feet leaving the ground at the top of the upswing.
Functional / Real World Fitness
I hesitate to use the term functional, due to the strongly differing opinions on what constitutes a functional exercise. Let me just say that, if you chop logs regularly, like I do, then this is a functional exercise. If you never need to chop logs, then it is not particularly functional for you. It is what I like to call a Real World exercise though. By this I mean that you are not just simulating something in the gym but you are performing an activity that is useful in the real world, productive and gives you a tangible return for your effort, beyond aesthetic or performance based improvements.
Carbon Neutral
My family and I are trying to wean our selves off oil. We haven’t gone completely fossil fuel free yet – far from it – but we do try and burn as much wood fuel as possible for heating, instead of using oil fired central heating.
As a fuel source, wood (if locally sourced as ours is) is carbon neutral. This means that, when it is burnt, the wood will release as much CO2 as it absorbed during its lifetime. When you burn wood, you are effectively burning stored solar energy. This means that we can meet the majority of our heating needs without adding to atmospheric CO2 levels. We hope to go fully wood powered in the future but this is still a fair way off.
The Perfect Workout?
A deconstructed workout, such as chopping wood, is incredibly good for you. As well as providing much needed variety to a conventional training programme and refreshing your enthusiasm for hitting the gym, it can get you into great shape, help you lose weight, dramatically improve your health and is good for the planet to boot. Sounds like the perfect workout. Of course, if chopping logs is not practical, then you could just ad lib a quick bodyweight workout, or run, climb trees, pick up logs; let your imagination run wild, just have fun and don’t think about it too much.
I encourage you to spend time in nature as often as possible, everyday if you can. Even if it is only a brief walk, Tai Chi or Qi Gong session in the park, or the woods, the benefits are far greater than you could imagine.
Please note: beards are optional and not required to chop wood effectively.
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