We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Is weight training to muscle failure a good idea? It depends.
With smaller muscle groups, we all commonly train to failure, or close to it, but more often just to the point of excess pain. I'm thinking of examples like curls, forearm exercises, pushups, pullups, cable pull downs and push downs, rows. In fact, many gym machines (which I rarely use) isolate smaller muscle groups in ways that lend themselves to high-rep muscle endurance work (ie 15-20 reps).
With the powerlifts, we do not recommend lifting to failure very often. Just occasionally, to beat the heck out of yourself, and with a spotter. Rule of thumb with powerlifts is mostly to do the number of reps you can manage to accomplish 4-8 times in a row. If you can, for example, deadlift a weight 12 times, raise the weight right away to get down to 6-8 reps for each set.
These are one-rep maxes. My one-rep max is around 300 lbs, no prob with 3 reps at 275. Not impressive because I know a gal who does that. OK, she's 35 but whatever. With the age-adjustment on that site, though, it's "Advanced." What? Me? No way am I advanced. I have much further to go...
My one-rep max is hard and slowwwww. As it should be. People rarely go for their one-rep maxes except for amusement and ego. Well, also as one index of progress. Every 3 months maybe. 5X5 is a good powerlift program for twice/week but I only do each powerlift once/week. Not enough time to be a serious gym rat lifter.
Body architecture is not factored in, but of course heavier people are presumed to have more strength and power.
I have warned about people who make New year resolutions to exercise but, in case you are one of those who do so, do me a favor and get a Stress Echo first if you are a male over 40 or in bad shape over 30, a post-menopausal woman, or anybody who fatigues with either extended activity or exertion.
A Stress Echo not only can identify heart issues before they appear in daily life, but can give you a metabolic physical stress tolerance baseline. Most Stress Echo protocols push you to your max unless you have prior identified cardio-pulmonary disease, so the attending cardiologist will be able to give you a thorough cardio fitness assessment and a numerical metabolic fitness level. (This test is required regularly for firemen, pilots, athletes, etc.) Serious fitness trainers also want an OK before pushing their clients hard.
If you do, you are statistically almost certain to fail in an exercise program. If serious about it, you will begin today. Of course, January is when gyms make all their money and when they are busiest. By March, they have collected all those fees and are right back to their usual daily volume of people.
As they say, "Someday" is not one of the seven days of the week.
I want to say a few words about exercise goals because it only makes sense to define, or re-define, exercise goals. I don't mean specific goals, like being able to bench press 300 lbs, or to run 10 miles at a 7.5 mph pace. I mean general goals. Your goals will determine your program.
For examples:
- Specific goals, like the two I mentioned above, require very specific training approaches designed by experts.
- Weight loss: Forget exercise. Eat right and body fat will melt away. Some cardio might help prime the pump, but not necessary.
- Psychological goals. Any form of daily exertion (not walking) is excellent for mental attitude.
- Body-building. This requires a specific sort of program to look buff. Focus a lot on isolated muscles. It's not functional so much as an aesthetic. I think it's silly, but to each his or her own.
- Strength training. This entails 4 days/week of heavy weights, powerlifts, with some accessory weight exercises.
- General conditioning for out of shape people. This is the bread and butter of professional trainers, and in some ways the most rewarding for them because these people, if dedicated, can make the most dramatic progress because they have so far to go. I have seen schlubby people make remarkable changes in one or two years. Including grandmas.
- "Functional fitness". This is the goal for most people aged 30-80, and why Crossfit is so popular. This is about building or even just maintaining strength, agility, balance, power, appearance, endurance, speed, athleticism, etc. for a vigorous life. All that is a lot to ask for, which is why we feel it takes 6-7 hours/week. It won't make you a marathoner or an impressive lifter, but should make you ready for anything life offers - especially sports and recreation.
The Maggie's Fitness For Life (where is that TM thing?) is for Functional Fitness. We sometimes have good ideas for conditioning, but once basic conditioning is achieved (ie fat control, ability to participate in exercise classes, ability to jog a mile, basic hand weights and cables) is where our ideas come into play. Calisthenics, Heavy weights, HIIT and Endurance Cardio.
Whatever "anti-aging" is, it sounds good to me. So fit those things into your program. What we feel is important, at least to us, is "Fitness for Life" which means Strength, Endurance, and Athleticism. So, without neglecting your telomeres, it's good to get balanced fitness so as to be as fully in life as possible.
No exercise can extend your life to any important degree (for life extension, try not being heavy, and getting full medical check-ups every few years) but a balanced fitness program can keep you active as long as you do not do too much road running. That destroys joints and cripples many people.
I change my daily workout program somewhat, about every four months, while still keeping within the basic Maggie's Fitness For Life format of roughly 1/3 weights, 1/3 calis, 1/3 cardio. Change is to keep my physical adaptation off balance and fresh, and also to address perceived weaknesses and imbalances in my program (with my genius trainer's advice, of course). It's a good idea to change routines sometimes. The only basic rule is to move without comfort for an hour or so daily.
Remember, I am not a spring chicken but I'll be damned if I ever want to feel, or act, old. I will not retire either because that sounds like a kind of preliminary death to me. When something strikes me down, as it will all of us, then OK because I will have gone the distance.
The main change now is to work on cardio endurance, running in particular.
My changes are below the fold. Remember, we're interested in hearing about your workout programs too, and your progress -
The great thing about the "lower body" powerlifts is that they are complex movements which train your entire body, not just legs.
I am talking about squats (barbell squats especially) and deadlifts. Here's 8 Reasons to Do Squat Exercises. Did I forget to mention that squats are hard? With weights, they are f-ing miserable. Body-weight squats are good fitness calis, but the weights are a bitch.
Lunges and step-ups are more purely leg focused, and in the calisthenic category even when done with dumbells. And the stair machines are great stressors, but mostly cardio and endurance.
I have found that doing five tough sets of barbell squats and 5 of deads (different days), plus, on different days, a set of goblet squats, of dumbell lunges, and a set of dumbell high step-ups, have improved my energy and ease of movement remarkably. Serious lifters would do those things twice weekly, but that's not me.
I can't credit at all to those, though, because I do other sorts of workouts each week too. Still, when you see progress with the weights you know it's all working.
I suspect this is correct, and has to do with the intensity of the demand on the heart. Many things are thrown into the "cardio" category which use the heart, of course, but make no constructive demands on it. Walking, hiking, speed walking, swimming, and jogging are like that.
HIIT exercises, on the other hand, do stress the heart because of the intensity of all kinds of sprints. 30-60 second maximum sprints of any form are good stressors. So is moving heavy weights. Heavy, not light weights. Sets of deadlifts reaching up to 70% of your max is a serious stressor on the heart. When you finish each set, you feel it in your heart. And you feel a bit dizzy from that stress.
What true cardiac training does is to stress the heart to the point that it is forced to build its muscle and to grow new arteries. Those new arteries can save your life when others get blocked up with gunk. If your breath can keep up with your exertion, it's not real cardiac training: it is endurance training.
What most people term "cardio" is endurance maintenance and endurance training. These are important in life, but have little or no heart consequences for the otherwise healthy.
Our Maggie'sFitness for Life program (heavy powerlifts, endurance cardio, HIIT cardio, calisthenics) incorporates all fitness aspects: Muscle and Bone strength, Endurance, True cardio, and Athleticism. We are convinced that's a balanced program for vigor for all ages.
We had a sub for my Friday morning 60-minute calis/physical conditioning class this morning. The sub was a beautiful blonde Amazon with a martinet's style, an ex-Crossfitter whose classes I had flunked a year or two ago after several tries. I noticed that about a third of the Friday morning regulars were absent. I think they noticed online that this particular gal was subbing, and declined because intimidated. I was tempted to wimp out but I hate to act like a wimp.
When I wimp out on things, act lazy, or make excuses for myself, I despise myself. Self-hatred sucks, so I try to avoid it as much as possible. Never entirely. As my sis always says about most things in life, ignore your feelings, "Girl Up" (or Man Up as the case may be) and "Do it." She is in the mental health field, so she knows that a lazy or fearful life is no life at all. Most of all, she has contempt for excuses so she is a good role model. She has given me shit many times. Almost drowned in a mile lake swim race on Cape Cod that she bullied me into. Sheesh. I had not swum a mile race in 30 years, maybe. A mile in a pool, sure, but not a mile race with waves. Yankee gals expect a lot of the men in their lives because they demand so much from themselves.
Squats, lunges, mountain-climbers, crunches, dumbell deads, jumping jacks, dumbell snatches, supermans, curtsy lunges - all of those sorts of things. I survived. It was a cool class with an interesting structure: two exercises with 25-50 reps each, then 10 pushups, then on to a different two exercises, then ten pushups, etc. Fast-paced and varied. No rest time. Fun, if you like to move. I doubt that I completed all 1000, but I did my best within the time allowed. Yes, I am no longer age 30 either.
As I have said before, one or two conditioning classes/wk have a place in a 6 or 7 day/wk fitness program. After an hour of rest and coffee, you feel amazingly well mentally and physically even if you began just after crawling out of bed with a foggy head at 5:00 am.
"Go-Go-Hi-Ho" was the life motto of an elderly hunting pal of mine. Taught me that life can be rich, adventurous, and exciting at 80. Appreciated Viagra when it came out as he confided to me on a Maine hunting trip. Determined to leave no meat left on the barbecued rib of life. I will want to be like him. He was still working, too, and fully-engaged with his church, his clubs, and his charities.
In the fitness post yesterday, we mentioned getting up from a chair. Indeed, for a variety of reasons (arthritis, poor posture, overweight, lack of strength or mobility) this can become difficult for some.
Another common, basic maneuver which can become difficult without fitness is getting up from the floor without assistance. If you need to sit on the floor to do a task, or to read a book to a grandkid, you do not want to get up like a cripple.
The basic powerlifts are Deadlift, Overhead Press, Barbell Squat, Bench Press, Rows of all sorts - and maybe accessory things like curls and tricep push-downs. Maybe Pull-ups should be on the list but I consider pull-ups and push-ups to be technically calisthenics because they are body-weight.
Of course, your body weight is plenty of weight...
You rise from a chair maybe 100 times daily, but how often do you do it with 150 lbs on your back? Never. But if you do it with 100 lbs on your back now, odds are that getting out of a chair at age 85 won't be a chore. Powerlifting is not Body-Building.
There are plenty of heavy accessory lifts with which to fill an hour, but the powerlifts are the core for strength conditioning.
So the powerlifts are not functional so much in themselves as they are designed for total body power, and muscle and bone strength. Total body strength feeds indirectly into everything you do in life except, perhaps, endurance activities. Your fitness for mostly everything, energy level, general appearance, and posture. Men and women of all ages include powerlifts in their workout programs.
Can you lose weight by hiking? Not walking - hiking.
Sure can, and I am proof. 10 days of hiking - urban and rural, mostly hills and many of them steep because it was Tuscany - for 6 hours/day left me with a 7 lb. weight loss. That's with my usual modest but tasty meals in Italy, never hungry at all. Some daily beers or wine: good food requires it. This loss was entirely unintentional. I was shocked when I got on my scale at home (cuz my pants were falling down). Not good or healthy, really.
Also perturbed because that too-fast (1 lb/wk is normal for weight-losers, and I do not want that) loss clearly reduced my deadlifting power this morning.
We have asserted here that you can't lose weight with exercise alone, but that refers to, say, a reasonable and realistic one hour/day biking, swimming, lifting, walking, and the like.
I did a little lazy research. Jogging at 5 mph burns around 550 calories/hour, about the same as energetic hill hiking. Comfortable walking is around 250, speed walking around 300. That ain't enough burn to make measurable difference. One donut or bagel has 300 calories, a slice of pizza around 350-400. But if you multiply that hourly hill-hiking number by 6, you are getting to real daily numbers and getting into real fat-burning.
It's said that 6 hr/day hill-hikers on The Long Trail (Appalachian trail) need about 5000 calories/day to prevent weight loss over days or weeks of hiking.
It is true that all calories are not physiologically equal, but you can come up with rough numbers: the average sedentary adult female needs around 2500 calories daily, male 3000, to maintain weight. Those numbers are average and perhaps high for trim fit people.
(Sedentary - a modern sin - is often defined as daily exercise equal to or less than a 3 mile walk daily at a 3-4 mph pace. Just above that is "Lightly Active", etc. My one hour daily sched of weights, cardio, and calisthenics gets me just into the "Moderately Active" category by most measures because of the high levels of intensity with HIIT, calisthenics classes, and heavy weights. Intensity can try to compensate for duration. I'd put our hiking guide last year in the Hebrides in the "Highly-Active" category. Craig MacDonald was not only Highly-Active and highly-fit, but highly humorous and sarcastic in the Scots way. Always happy to tease you for a half hour if you bought him a dram or two ofHighland Parkat the end of the day. That is his beverage.)
Readers know that one of the rewards of my fairly-demanding work-out regimen is to be able to do things like hill-hike all day without fatigue, until I grow old. What's my point? I dunno. Maybe that fat loss is dietary, except when it isn't. Just facts to consider.
Very few exercises are pure forms of those four categories, but there are differences in emphasis which is why we recommend balanced programs of resistance, calisthenics, and cardio training to maintain or improve fitness.
Strength is the ability to move things which resist moving. Power is the ability to move things (including yourself) with speed and force. For example, bench press and rows are mostly strength exercises. Powerlifts are power exercises: deadlifts, squats, military press, etc. in which bursts of speedy intensity are required.
Where would we categorize pull-ups? I'd say Strength.
We have discussed cardio training at length. The main muscle it trains is the heart muscle. While any difficult exercise stresses the heart, only pure cardio training (HIIT via HIIT calisthenics/ aerobics class or sprinting intervals) gives the heart a specifically strength-building stress.
So what about endurance? If you are somebody who "gets too tired" from non-resistance activities, you have an endurance issue. It is not rare for very strong people to have poor endurance or for high-endurance people to be relatively-weak. We want both strength and endurance. Anything that is high-rep builds endurance but not strength or power: long-slow "cardio", high-rep (10-20) resistance work, calisthenics.
One caveat: Do not ever do high-rep (over 10) deadlift sets. The human body is made for low-rep heavy floor lifting (8 or fewer). If you can do over 8 deads, you need to increase the weight and reduce the reps.
If you buy into the Maggie's Farm approach to "Balanced Fitness for Life", the issue of scheduling comes up (altho not if you do Crossfit, which has a good stew of everything, varying every day, so most Crossfitters go 4-6 days/wk).
Our approach (with expert consultation) is to do your calisthenics classes or calisthenic routines on the day after a weights and powerlifting day. That sort-of counts as an "active recovery" day. If you do a tough calisthenic athletic cross-training hour the day before lifting, most people over 35 will not be at 100% for their weights day.
So that's 4 days right there, assuming you do weight sequences twice weekly. On days before weights, there is no problem with cardio like HIIT or even "long, slow" as a recovery day. (I do "long slow" - elliptical, stairmaster, treadmill - on Sunday mornings before church if there is no big hike planned. Day of rest.) Important to move with intention every day to remain functional.
Every three months it's not a bad idea to take a complete week off from a tough exercise regimen. A week off means away from the gym, and just doing recreational things like hiking, jogging, and swimming. That's a "recovery week." Just bear in mind that, after ten days without hard exercise, fitness measurably declines after age 40.
The Maggie's Balanced Fitness Program for adults of all ages and for all gender identifications.
Weekly Program:
- 2 sessions calis classes (or 1 class and 1 hr of do-it-yourself calis). Most gyms have classes in varying levels of challenge.
- 2 one hr sessions powerlifts and related heavy wts and cables (including 10 mins warm-up time)
- 2 twenty to 25- min sessions of HIIT (running sprints, jump rope, ski erg, rower sprints) combined with 2 half hrs of accessory weights (eg curls, dips, pullups, pushups, farmer walks, heavy ball games, Roman Chair, etc etc)
- 1 hr mixed medium intensity "cardio" - rower, stair machine, bike, treadmill, swim, elliptical - as an "active recovery" day. Or a longish (2 1/2 hr+) hill hike/rock climb.
I think the logic in this is clear: it is "balanced" because it covers bone and muscle strength/maintenance, general endurance, athleticism, and improved cardiac function. My three years of this program has revised my body, my ability, and my energy to an extent that keeps surprising me. Surprises Mrs. BD too. No bulging muscles though. That has to do with your genetics.
A program with this regularity requires decent sleep habits and rational nutrition. Can you lose fat with this program? Minimally.
What about Crossfit instead? Fine. Try it. I have friends who swear by it. No, it's not a cult. It's congenial and upbeat while they kick your ass.
One caveat: About every 3 weeks I experience my (trademarked) "Double Gravity" when I get up at my usual farmer's 4 am. It means I can get up to pee, but an overwhelming force flops me back onto bed for an hour. I take that as a signal that my body wants a day off from intense exertion so I will usually just do the mixed cardio a little later that day.
Sedentary lives increase appetite. What is "sedentary"? Less than 7 hrs/week of exertion. Not activity - exertion.
Why might it not matter? Because, as I have asserted in the past, in our world of abundance and temptation appetite has little correlation with nutritional needs in adults. In the world of nutritional scarcity in which our distant ancestors lives, it certainly did. Today, we have recreational feeding. It is fun.
There are many reasons why daily exercise is useless for weight loss. Among them is the fact that a daily hour of "cardio" or calisthenics does not require additional nutrition from one's normal habit. People who lift heavy two or three days/week probably can use 60-90 gms of protein daily for muscle repair.
People in serious training for physical competition are another category. A 2-3 -hour daily workout has different nutritional needs. Two hours daily of physical training sounds wonderful to me at this point in life. One hour in the gym and one hour of sports practice. Only college kids and the retired have that luxury.
With nutrition, best thing to do is to set goals for your desired fitness and functionality levels and to pursue those in a disciplined way. Same as everything else in life.
I would have guessed that there would be a Gaussian distribution, but now I wonder about Pareto instead. The math of it is challenging for me, though. It's been a long time since I have used Functions.
Anyway, adult people do vary enormously in their energy levels, ambition, and physical determination. We all know that because it is obvious in the modern world wherein many people have choices of activity levels.
One thing that I am comfortable asserting is that a one hour workout daily (especially something like the Maggie's Routine) will increase your energy and drive to exert yourself. It works. Try it, if you disapprove of your slothfulness or lack of strength and physical endurance.
Of all three delights, right now hunting partridge and woodcock in the North Woods of New Hampshire (around Pittsfield) and Maine is my favorite.
You need to be in good shape to do that, and you need a good dog too. I remember one October when we worried that a somewhat overweight cousin would drop dead busting brush in a Maine swamp. Turned pale, could not go on after 7 hours. Forget roads or trails. Wilderness. Hated to let him rest but we figured that to get his corpse out of there we'd have to quarter him like a moose and pack his remains 4 miles out to a dirt road.
He survived, but never re-upped. I love tramping through the swamps and brush and hills of northern Maine. Damn good workout. If you fire three shots in 7 hours, it's good. If you down a bird or two, even better. It's not shopping.
Like Michigan and Minnesota, our North Woods in New England are wonderfully wild.
For fall and winter outdoor fun, first get rid of that fat. It holds you back to a depressing extent. Anybody can easily lose 10 lbs/month by eating rationally and sparingly. If you have excess fat, remember the rule: Whenever you feel hungry, it means that you are beginning to burn fat - not that you need food. Three meals/day is crazy for people with fat. 3 snacks is plenty.
For grouse hunting, mountain hiking, and skiing, you need to work the heck out of your lower body if you want to keep up with the others. Focus on deads and squats, and lower body endurance exercises. Lots of wall-sits for skiers, because that is half of skiing.
We have friends who ski all winter in their 80s. They keep themselves in great shape for it. Working out and eating sparingly year-round. I want to end up like them. Vigorous, wiry, and energetic.
Fitness people often refer to "metcon" workouts. These fall into our Calisthenics category, provided the Calisthenics hours are high intensity with only several seconds of rest time.
Why term it "metabolic conditioning"? It sounds cool and technical, and it does stress and thus ramp up all metabolic systems and puts every muscle in the body to work including the heart.
Most typical calisthenics classes (Cross-train cardio classes, Athletic Conditioning classes, HIIT, HICT aka High-intensity circuit training, AMRAP, TABITA, Crossfit, etc) have goals of building energy and cardio endurance instead of pure strength, with agility, speed, muscle-toning, and general athleticism as side benefits.
If a newbie wanted to "get back in shape" with a simple program, I would recommend 4- 6 of such classes/week before doing anything else if they could handle it. For 99% of people, classes will push you harder than anything you do on your own. For the first few months you will struggle and perform terribly. Endurance builds gradually. If you begin a bit chubby, the classes will be a strong motivator for nutritional rationality because extra fat makes all calisthenics more difficult than they already are.
Although we are believers in weight training twice-weekly for a number of reasons, we see many people in excellent shape whose only fitness work is a near- daily high-intensity calisthenics/metcon class.
For newbies who can not handle a 50-60 minute calisthenics class, spend a couple of months doing ordinary "cardio" to get moving. Then add in the calisthenics, and finally the powerlifts because at that point your body will be prepared to face them.
Yes, to a degree, but it's an uphill battle. Sarcopenia is an effect of ageing. Combined with a non-vigorous life, muscle and bone loss is natural decline.
Over 50 or 60, many trainers would make a goal of simply maintaining what you have, but more aggressive trainers like to find out how far "mature" individuals can take their strength efforts.
As with all aspects of fitness, "use it or lose it" applies. I would be in the category of those who advise people not to give up on strength-building in later adulthood. Advancement is much slower than when 30, and you will not build much visible muscle, but you can be stronger anyway.
The trick is heavy weights and low reps (ie 8 or less). We're talking men and women. High reps are better than doing nothing, but they are not strength-building.
One piece of advice: Over 50 or 60, two days/week of powerlifting is enough.
... because proper strength training doesn't apply stress directly to joints, it is ideal for people with arthritis; indeed, rheumatologists often recommend it. Although it cannot reverse arthritic changes, lifting weights helps alleviate symptoms by strengthening the muscles, tendons, and ligaments that surround joints.
Is giving up on fitness a sign of giving up on a vigorous life? I don't know. Could be.
Last year we had a 100 push-up/day challenge which many readers found illuminating and even inspiring.
Readers know we love calisthenics as a way of bringing together your gains from other exercises into physical activities that require some strength, plenty of endurance, athleticism, and a good share of cardio fitness.
Jumping is one darn good calisthenic. Done right, jump rope is close to zero impact. Jacks are slightly more impact, but minimal. All toes. Harmless to joints.
This morning I watched a bit of a fitness class which I was glad I didn't take today. The warm-up was 5 minutes jump rope - free-style. After a 10-second rest, 20 push-ups. 10-second rest, then 3 minutes of jacks. Sheesh. Then one more time around. All ages and all genders in there including a 75 year-old lawyer I sort-of know.
That was the warm-up. I've taken that class (it's outdoors mostly) plenty of times, but I've never seen the boss push the crowd so hard in a warm-up. About 1/3 of the folks needed little breaks to complete these things.
So here's the fitness challenge:
In one month, can you get to 5 minutes of jump rope or 3 minutes of jacks? Continuous.
If you are in good condition, this is not difficult but for most of us civilians it is highly challenging. I noticed a guy the other day who did 20 minutes of jump rope, mixing up all the variations to avoid boredom, seemingly effortlessly. Wonderful. My jump rope routines are only 1 minute each. I do variations. I want to up my duration and call it calis or cardio, whatever.
How to approach that goal if it is beyond you (and me)? Do the thing 10X/day for as long as you can. Remember, calis require no rest days. Gradually reduce the number of times/day while increasing the duration of each event. Stick with singles on the rope unless you can do variations. Singles are the least stressful. Same with jumping jacks: if you can mix in star jumps, go for it.
Want to see some impressive jumping? This guy is fit.
Can you lose weight by hiking? Not walking - hiking.
Cross Training shoes are designed for minimal cushioning, good floor-feel, light weight and as close to barefoot as possible.
The Maggie's Balanced Fitness Program for adults of all ages and for all gender identifications.
Of all three delights, right now hunting partridge and woodcock in the North Woods of New Hampshire (around Pittsfield) and Maine is my favorite. 
Yes, to a degree, but it's an uphill battle.