Ashton Kutcher’s Apocalypse Workout [Ab-tastic Anarchy!]

Item the second: Ashton Kutcher has amazing muscles because he is a paranoid crazy… who makes a little too much sense to be entirely written off as a paranoid crazy.

Oddly neither of these facts are what initially drew me to his interview. It was his workout of choice – Krav Maga – that had me salivating over the mag. Muscles and mental health issues take a distant second to killing people in my world apparently.

Touted as “the Israeli close combat system developed for the sole purpose of keeping one safe from an attacker in real-life situations” Krav Maga has long intrigued me with its reputation of brutal effectiveness. Like I told Sensei Don during the Karate Experiment, “I’m way more interested in the ‘martial’ than the ‘art.'”

I’ve been dying to do it as a Great Fitness Experiment and would have by now save for one critical factor: I haven’t found a way to get it for free yet. (Lethal force, I imagine, is not something I’d want to be learning from a book and my quest for an instructor willing to teach me for blog publicity alone has not been fruitful.) In addition to being really useful for careers in espionage, body guarding and dark-alley walking, it’s also reputed to be a killer full body workout.

Ashton, however, is not doing his Krav Maga workout for fun, to get a good sweat, to lose weight or even to be healthy or look hot – all the usual reasons people name for working out. No, his motivation is one that I can honestly say I’ve never heard before: he’s preparing for the apocalypse. But hey, maybe I travel in boring circles?

In addition to honing his survival skills practicing Krav Maga, he is preparing for desert scenarios by doing Bikram Yoga, practicing bad-guy chases with hill runs and even acclimating his body to food scarcity by doing the Master Cleanse. And yes, since I know you’re wondering, Demi is also participating.

He explains,

“It will not take much for people to hit the panic button. The amount of convenience that people rely based on electricity alone. […] And people are going to go, ‘That land’s not yours, prove that it’s yours,’ and the only thing you have to prove it’s yours is on an electric file. Then it’s like, ‘What’s the value of currency, and whose food is whose?’ People’s alarm systems at their homes will no longer work. Neither will our heating, our garbage disposals, hot-water heaters that run on gas but depend on electricity — what happens when all our modern conveniences fail? I’m going to be ready to take myself and my family to a safe place where they don’t have to worry.”

Well when you put it like that, he makes a reasonable point. With all the blizzarding going on here in the frozen wasteland that used to be Minnesota, my husband and I have talked about the need for a generator in case the power goes out. You do not want to be stuck in -30 without heat is all I’m saying. And watching all the people stacking sandbags during last summer’s massive flooding makes our Sandbag Experiment look like child’s play. They were not hefting the ‘bags to better work their core with an unstable weight but rather to save their homes, families and livelihoods. When it comes down to it, what better reason to work out than something so imperative as survival? Talk about functional fitness!

Ashton sums it up saying, “All of my physical fitness regimen is completely tailored around the end of day. I stay fit for no other reason than to save the people I care about.” It certainly exposes bikini bodies and 8-pack abs for the frivolity they are.

What do you think about Ashton’s unconventional workouts – crazy or crazy like a fox? Have you ever tried Krav Maga? Have you taken any steps to prepare for anarchy?