I am no expert, so take with two grains of salt - it is just what I have learned. This is regarding maintaining recreational fitness, ie "Ordinary Fitness for Life" - not serious athletic training or serious muscle-building.
Below average = "weak." Nobody, male or female, wants to be weak or below average. Average is good for a starting target or even an endpoint (Average fitness is my personal endpoint). This isn't about body-building but just about maintaining good, versatile functionality in youth, or later despite aging. These things are not a complete fitness program by any means, just a few rough indices of average American decent fitness because they involve so much of one's physicality.
- Fitness entails, requires, not being fat. Nobody needs a silly BMI to know when they have unpleasant and unnecessary flab. You can feel it with your hands. Lard slows us down with everything in life because our hearts are forced to pump blood though it when we have other things to do. It's dietary.
- An average fit woman can expect to deadlift 100 percent of her body weight. Average fit males can deadlift roughly 150 percent of their body weight.
- Barbell squats for leg and core strength are roughly the same as above. (For me now, three sets of 25 deep squats without weights is challenging, and torture with plain kettlebells or clasping a heavy ball. I like to do squats combined with light dumbbell military lifts. A full-body engagement but not stressful enough for my fitness trainer who considers it an exercise for nursing homes. I doubt that I will ever get to dumbell squats, but who knows? I may die first.)
- The average fit male should eventually be able to bench press 1 x body weight for a solid set - or at least once. Average fit female can press around 80-100 lbs. They say it's good for boob-fitness too.
- For push-ups, the average fit male can do 25-40. The average fit female can do 20-25 knee-push-ups. (Many exercise trainers feel knee pushups for women are worthless). Push-ups are about muscle endurance, not so much strength. Lots of people do them as part of their morning or bedtime rituals. (I have trouble doing them due to an old right shoulder injury - once body surfing, and again skiing, and then I totally destroyed it for good doing flies. Every middle-aged person has a handicap or two if they have lived life off the chair or sofa, but it's no reason to give up on vigor)
- An average fit person can run a mile in ten minutes or less without dying.
- Elbow Planks - A core exercise. Fit men and women can do 2 minutes or more. My boss puts weight plates on my back to save time. Sheesh. More weight, dude. I can do it. Why not just jump on my back? Sweat drips. I alternate with push-up-style planks and sometimes with one-handed planks.
Physical conditioning is humbling for the middle-aged. Age, joint issues, and body type alter things, eg short people with short arms have shorter and thus larger muscles and can naturally bench more than lanky people - and often average people over 55 need lowered expectations.
In the end, I guess you use good form, do what you can do, and build up from there without obsessing about the numbers as long as they improve. As I said, conditioning is not all resistance, but without rigorous muscle work you can't do all of the other exercises to the max, or all of life as vigorously as one might like. The goal is to maximize ordinary life and your ordinary recreational sports. I assume most of our interested readers do some sports, but perhaps not. Exercise is for life utility. If your day job is physical, lucky you. All of our day jobs were physical a generation or two or three ago, females included.
Your views and opinions welcome -
