Target/ ध्येयम्

General expressions

  • Ability to tolerate extremes (like youth) is the goal.

  • Stay at the lighter end of your body’s frame

    • Over-muscled, fueled by constantly eating, is not healthy

  • Keep strong (for your size)

  • regularly work your heart rate (inc. max HR)

Physical Standards

  • Exercise your full range of motion (including twists).
  • Progressive overload to increase strength.
    • Can be done even without equipment - pushup variations up to handstand finger pushups.
  • Progressive movement complexity

Via Guru Anaerobic:

Strength

The general misconception about strength is this, “my friend isn’t as strong as ‘X’ but he’s a better runner/baseball player/soccer player…therefore strength isn’t important”. That’s not the point; getting stronger makes you better at what you can already do - it enhances your ability. If you are not cut out for sprinting, it won’t turn you into Usain Bolt.

Age and intesity

Physical decline: The ‘extremes’ go first, then the normal gets harder.

The less physically vibrant your life, the more uncomfortable occasional challenges become – until you stop doing them entirely. That’s a sign that your physical deterioration is taking hold.

Fight it. Don’t accept it. Be bloody minded in refusing to succumb. Your ability to run deteriorates before your ability to walk. Then your ability to walk goes. Walking speed is an indicator of risk of functional decline and mortality in older adults.[31] This is a general way all physical abilities degrade – the extremes’ go first, then the normal gets harder.

In aging we want to maintain our physical variability (beta-blockers are designed to clip the heart rate to protect the patient; variation may kill them).

Two things happen over time if you don’t push your heart rate (HR); max HR decreases and resting HR increases. Endurance training lowers the resting HR but doesn’t work the top end; a reason to keep up high intensity work, to ‘push’ the high HR, which also has the effect of lowering the resting HR.

“As you get older you should dedicate a greater proportion of your diminishing exercise capacity to hard and robust exercise - yet you’re told to take it easy. If all you do is “take it easy”, eventually all you’ll be able to do is take it easy - your body will have lost its capacity to generate and tolerate force, a high heart rate, acidosis, shocks or running for the bus - until eventually, even the normal task of walking up a flight of stairs is an effort and leaves you breathless. Senescence means decreasing variation."

“If you argue, “why do I need to train so hard that I induce the burning sensation of acidosis? How does it benefit me?” My response would be that you used to be able to do it, and cope with it - there’s the reason. It recreates what you could do when you were younger, and if you can do what you could do when you were younger, you are younger.”

“A study found that lactic acid (as sodium lactate, injected into the blood stream) in mice, keeps them young by assisting in the production of mitochondria, the power generators in every cell. "

  • 1 Rate of muscle mass decrease is 0.5% to 1% per year after 60, loss of strength 2 or 3x’s that, and loss of power 3x’s strength.
  • 2 Endurance training converts type 2 fibres to type 1; makes u weaker & less powerful (“frail healthy”)
  • 3 The atrophy of fast twitch fibres is almost exclusively the problem with aging and muscles.

Leeway for youth

  • 1 Young athletes (teens/20’s) can be lean & fit, even with a bad diet
  • 2 They can progress even with a bad training program

Flexibile intensity

The idea is that you train how you feel on the day, and use your program as a guide not as an absolute. This meant that when you were fresh you might do more; when tired you do less. Aka intuitive/ agile training. Intuitive training isn’t an excuse to slack, it’s an attempt to work with the body.

Quickness vs power

  • 1 Power is the fast application of strength
  • 2 Fast movement without strength is quickness - reflexivity; like a cat trying to catch a butterfly with it’s paw
  • 3 The outcome of fast application of strength (power) on an external object isn’t necessarily high speed
  • 4 Reflexivity is verrry stubborn to trainingसौवीरे च विशेषः
  • 5 Strength can be improved immensely
  • 6 Power is improved by increasing strength
  • 7 Power is hardly improved by moving lighter weights faster

There’s a saying that, ‘You can’t fire a cannonball from a canoe” - you need a battleship…. To increase your power you need to increase your “rate of force development” (RFD) - emphasis on the force component. No amount of throwing a golf-ball fast will make me throw a baseball faster, and it degrades further (if it were possible) as the weight of the implement you’re throwing increases. To throw a baseball faster I need a ‘stronger throwing arm’ and most likely a stronger upper and lower body, making sure not to negatively impact the whip, elasticity and efficient movement pattern of my arm/shoulder.

If you to make a Jet faster, everything else the same, you need to increase the thrust.

  • GA

Wildness and scarcity

Essentially, the way to get (or remain) lean is to create a ’lean’ environment. This is deeper than a diet or exercise programme; more, changing your lifestyle to a more primal one. This is the meaning of ‘rewilding’ your life.

Undomesticating yourself is not just about the physical - but a total overhaul of how you live & earn money. You become the modern day hunter-gatherer, living in the city or the country, or a foot in both. Health isn’t about being stuck in a domesticated life and going to the gym. - GA

Chronic long endurence exercise

“If you insist on doing chronic long endurance exercise when you’re older swap from weight-bearing (running) to non-weight bearing exercise (swimming, cycling, rowing, etc). Only excepting is normal walking. … Chronic running when you’re older is a disaster - injuries, joint probs, etc..” Exception to non-weight bearing clause: “Intense/robust exercise, HIIT, intervals, RT - it is essential to do weight-bearing exercise, but you can add non weight-bearing as well.”

Areas

Legs

Legs are oft ignored in favor of arm exercises (photo-op reasons).

Vince Gironda advanced in his “Balanced Arms” pamphlet. He said you could gain 15% more size in your arms by performing leg work before your arm training.
The old-school “squats and milk routine”, where you do loads of squats and drink loads of milk, was proven to add mass across the entire body and not just to the legs.