Conditioning Research

Always strive to add another rep, or a pound to the bar or another second to the length of the set!!! You will have heard similar things.  The gurus shout at us and encourage us to try harder to push more to seek improvement and growth at every opportunity.  Nietzsche is invoked as we strive ever harder to get better, stronger, bigger.  I've probably done the same thing myself - urged you to push for that extra rep that next rung on the ladder. Well I am tired of it.  Maybe it is my age or other things going on in my life, but at the moment I am tired with trying to improve.  I just want to keep where I am. Maintenance is progress I was thinking about training and exercise today in the context of the rest of life.  "Life" as the big stuff - lifetimes, relationships, death, decline and age.  With that in the background I was struck with the idea that as we get older, simply staying where we are is progress. Whatever we do we are getting older...

I just wanted to point to this interesting study which I saw a couple of weeks ago, r eported in Runners World by Alex Hutchison . Maximal step-up height as a simple and relevant health indicator: a study of leg muscle strength and the associations to age, anthropometric variables, aerobic fitness and physical function. Really interesting in the light of the stuff I've had up before about floor living and another test for function - simply getting up off the floor . All these things are tests - not exercises.  But they are interesting toys to play with.  If you can step up high, get down to and up from the floor then you are doing OK.  If your training is retaining and promoting such function then you are going in the right direciton