#1

It’s good to get slapped in the face by reality every once in a while. This last weekend I spent 12 hours each day moving my amazing volume of useless crap to my new home. As I sit in my old chair in my new home, I notice my BP is low (95/60), my RHR is low (42bpm), and every muscle that I haven’t used for 12 hours at a time in years (all of them) are screaming for a break.

My gym work is what allowed me to survive the effort but did not prepare me for it. That’s okay. But it has me thinking about the muscles / movements that I don’t train at all in my time efficient training regiment.

I should do better I think. My 10 minutes of mobility work every morning just isn’t cutting it. And why do I do the same resistance training workout 3x/week…I could have more varied less frequent workouts (ex.: 2 workouts done 2x/week each). I’ve been lazy.

Still, I’m glad I resisted hiring younger men to do it for me. If I can’t move my own stuff with my friends help I have too much stuff. (I tossed / donated a ton of “prized possessions” I haven’t used in years or even remembered I owned). And, if I can’t move my own stuff, I’m no longer myself. Who would I become?

I suppose “healthspan” is in the eye of the beholder. For me, not being sick isn’t nearly good enough. Not being fragile isn’t good enough.

Thoughts?

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#2

Your reflections after the move is a reminder that life’s demands often crash into us. But when we choose sweat over convenience—it is a testament of who we are.

No amount of training can fully armor us against every real-world challenge. Gym work builds a foundation, but life loves to test the weak spots we didn’t know existed.

It is easy to get stuck in one efficient gym routine. Until realizing that my body had become a specialist in a world that rewards generalists, I was stuck to a specific gym routine. Now, I expose my body to surprises in the gym. I have the basics for strength covered by Squats, bench press and I add dips and pull ups. Then I use the rest of the time in the gym for a varation of exercises: Plyometric, isometric, weight-bearing and non-weigthbearing.

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#3

@Curious Yes. This is good. The other thing is that cardio training is not the same as endurance. My 1 hour spin class does not prepare me for a 12 hour workout (even a low intensity 12 hour workout). I don’t think there is anyway to fake endurance training. I have to do the endurance work once in a while to stay in the game.

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#4

I love your story!!! I mostly love that at our age you still have friends who will help you move!!

I think it’s great you did this on your own because it in itself was a great workout and something you enjoyed doing, but I personally feel there is no shame in hiring people when we can’t do as much as we used to… I still feel we are ourselves and just the older version. But you feeling the way you do about it is probably why you can still do it!!

My husband is very much like you. He is out in the yard doing work almost daily, not to mention up on ladders picking olives and then falling on his head! I tell him, it would be cheaper to hire to people than to send you to PT to fix this :). He says that is not the point!!

And yes yes yes on a gym routine not being enough. I am fortunate enough to workout with Gage 2x per week and he rarely moves me in the same way twice (well, there are basic things like squats/dead lifts that are obviously the same, so I guess I lied). I’m still discovering new muscles that I have probably never worked! I am not smart enough nor do I have a good enough memory to figure out how to do this on my own, so I’d be lost in a gym trying to figure this all out!!! So, that is all to say, how to we create our own routines that are not actually routine?

Hmmm, he has no time so this is most likely a moot point, but I wonder if Gage could create workouts for people, even if remotely?

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#5

I like him already!!

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#6

HA! But of course! 20 characters

#7

Hi Joseph,

While it has lots of flaws, consider CrossFit or a variation of it.

Random selection of workouts that can range across any combination of aerobics, metabolic, gymnastics, power lifting, plyometrics, Olympic lifting, and.or flexibility with the intention of “fitness” across any and all modalities.

One doesn’t need to join a CrossFit gym (box), one can find a randomly selected WoD (Workouts of the Day) on line. Most WoDs take 20 minutes. A lot of them you can do at home with a few bits of equipment.

Scale the intensity to challenge yourself rather than “killing” ourself and you get to something that can make sense for optimal healthspan with the broadest possible range of functionality.

A

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#8

@Alpha Thank you. Excellent idea.

#9

I despair at the utter exhaustion that comes soon with the spring: I begin foraging, preparing garden soil with hand tilling, climbing/trimming fruit trees, pushing a wheel barrel incessantly up and downhill like Sisyphus, and baked like the sun as if I was in Mexico. My fingers ache, my calluses bleed, and that is the start of the revolt my body is messaging me after a long day. Anyways I feel your pain and obviously no way to prepare for it. Just endure and adapt.

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#10

You asked for thoughts, Joe, and we all have our own, that’s the beauty of it. I liked your wise thoughts and observations. You are doing what you enjoy, what you believe in and exercise is foundational to your pursuit of health and longevity.

I too do what I believe in, and even though our beliefs might differ on some points, we all pursue health and longevity in our own way.

I’m with the original pre-slapped Joe. The heck with doing more at the gym. Like the original Joe, I say “I’m doing enough, and if it’s not enough it will have to do anyway”.

Because we all have our beliefs based on our interpretation of evidence. My belief is that if you do moderate amount of exercise you have extracted all the health and longevity benefits, based on all those graphs. Any additional exercise barely separates the curves, and even then only in further tiny asymptotic miniscule decrements in premature mortality. And so, doing “enough”, is enough, where enough is not that much at all. That’s what the evidence tells me. But the heck with that, because we live life to enjoy it, not just for the sake of living itself - a life filled with pain and misery is not worth it. I don’t enjoy exercise, so I only do enough to get the benefits as I understand them. You enjoy exercise, so you are happy to do more. And that’s as it should be, life is to be enjoyed.

Exercise is not foundational to my conception of health and longevity. Sure, exercising more might allow me to move furniture for two hours more (here insert: any physical challenge), but so what? It won’t make me healthier or live longer, I’d rather trade that extra gym time for time with my wife at the movies, ballet, walking in nature or at the museum or simply at home - but surely not at the gym sh|tting myself (I stole that “sh|tting yourself” from a moderate-exercise-only advocate on yt, whose motto is DSY - Don’t Sh|t Yourself).

And you know what? Health and longevity is enough for me. I don’t need to move stuff easily for 12 hours instead of just eight or two. That’s not my goal. Because guess what, you will never be prepared for all of life’s challenges. As soon as you beat your brains out to easily do the 12 hour move, along will come some 14 hour challenge and you’ll have to deal with that by hiring people anyway. So why sweat it, (or sh|t it, lol)? My motto is not “be prepared for absolutely everything”, but “be prepared enough”. Exercise, meh, I don’t obsess, I do “enough” and look to pharmaceuticals for the “more than enough”, and to whatever comes next, maybe genetic engineering.

And so, I do my sets and leave the gym asap, walking past the guy sh|tting himself on some exotic machine exercising a muscle he didn’t even know he had a week ago. While he develops a bulge in an odd part of the body, I limit myself to keeping fit the functional muscles I use in everyday life, and have zero ambition to develop a muscle that’s really useful if you want to make that weird lift on that weird machine over there, twisted into a pretzel. I leave the gym and join my wife for coffee at that place where musicians play their new stuff - that way I cannot hear the guy groaning heroically at the gym five miles away as he sh|ts himself. To each his own. But truth be told, I don’t see the guys who live at the gym much anymore these days. That’s because I have all the exercise equipment (not much) I need at home, and spare myself wasting time travelling to the gym and back. I don’t miss the gym, seeing the permanent furniture - I mean gym bros who live at that address - which changes only when one of them moves residence to the morgue on account of a heart attack, where they can perform an autopsy and admire the overdeveloped muscles in strange places.

My thoughts, as requested, Joe! I’m happy when you’re happy regardless of whether my happy is the same as your happy😁.

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#11

I agree. And thanks. We each have our goals. I don’t work out so I can be healthy. I workout because I love it. I also identify as an active, vigorous person who CAN do adventurous activities. When I cannot be that person anymore I can …and have already….rationalized and compromised to fit into my new self but I hate it. I will fight back. I will not die in an old folks home.

As I lose myself I won’t miss the movies, ballet, walking in nature, the museum or relaxing at home. I will miss exerting myself fully and bravely to accomplish a hard won goal, and some of the time barely getting home alive. Life feels the most precious when you believe you might lose it.

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#12

Thank you Joe, you are exactly right and you put it better in two paragraphs than I’d manage in a whole book. Some exercise to live, others live to exercise, both are happy, and that’s key.

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#13

Farmers are familiar with this concept :slight_smile:

Work strength is much different than gym strength. I’ve experienced that many years ago as a teen on the farm and when I was 29 to 32. For those 4 years I had a very physically demanding job.

I was in the med device business and the device was a rental. I moved these devices in and out of hospitals and nursing homes on a daily basis. They weighted 2,000lbs and they were on heavy duty castors so you could push them in and out. I weight 165 at the time and after the first year I could push one while pulling a second one down the hall.

At that time I was also working out at the gym 4 days a week with another hard working guy (another Steve) who was a beast and had a construction company. We used to do demo work on the weekend, swing the sledgehammers, jack hammering into walls, shoveling the debris etc.

One time there was a tug of war contest and we entered the 2 on 2. We cleaned up on all the gym rats who had no idea how to apply their strength through mental toughness. Plus their gym muscles were not up to the task.

Feats of strength are as much mental as they are physical and my father taught me that. He inspired me to worker harder than I ever thought possible through his example.

Sometimes we don’t know what is possible until we see it done.

Vasily Alekseyev was an amazing Olympic lifter who broke every record and showed what was humanly possible. No one thought it was possible to clean and jerk 500lbs until he did.

While he was probably on PED’s at that time, he lifted the load regardless.

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#14

I know pull-ups are difficult for many people for a variety of reasons (strength and injuries/pain in shoulders and arms), but if you become really good at them, I think they are a superpower. I start every back workout with 3 sets of 20.

I definitely think exercises like this translate positively to normal life

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#15

Agree on the pull-ups… I do two sets of 20… one set mid-way… one set at the very end… every other day during my full-body workout.

Slowly build up a few more each time… worth it.

It is the last thing I do at very end of workout to realign the body from any changes during workout.

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#16

The wimp over here is sharing a tip for those who can’t do pull ups…

You create a ‘swing’ with resistance bands that hang from the bar. The bands give you enough support to pull yourself up.

My personal issue is I have equally wimpy hands, so I have to give up due to my hands hurting before my muscles give out! When I do a hang to test my grip strength it’s absolute torture!

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#17

Excellent… you work your way up… from bands…to one pull-up.

Then two… after a week… 3… etc.

At my heaviest… was doing none… and even after losing the weight was too weak to do more than 2. Slow progress… and TRT. Lol.

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#18

You could try the assisted pull-up machine if your gym has one. Pull-ups are much harder for women than men. I know some really fit women who can barely do one of them.

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#19

I feel better about myself now, bless you :slight_smile:

I could do a couple back in the day (said while sitting in my rocker and adjusting my shawl), but then I stopped doing everything after getting a whiplash…it took many years to find someone who could fix me so I could workout again… but I’m back baby and feeling as strong as ever, even though I’m definitely not and can’t lift what I used to, but I feel great!

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#20

ha! how ironic. as I was walking through my home today I realized (ok, ok, I already knew) that I have entirely too much stuff. It’s everywhere. on top of the kitchen cabinets, in corners in the entry hallway (tools that need to go back in the garage along with all that’s in the garage, but no room for my cars). stuffed into closets…
Problem is every time I go to get rid of some of it I say: there’s nothing wrong with this and it cost me good money to buy. So I end up keeping it. sigh.

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