‘If God had intended us to be nud­ists, we would

have been born with no clothes on.’ – Leonard Lyons

by Phillip Day

Most peo­ple don’t — exer­cise, I mean. Per­haps the com­bined abuse of the last three icons has caused the great­est anguish and ill­ness in mod­ern soci­ety: Rub­bish food cou­pled with indo­lent, acidic lifestyles punc­tu­ated by unhealthy stress all seem a far cry from the farm-fresh pro­duce and yomps on the Downs enjoyed by our fore­bears. The fact is, though times have moved on, the body’s needs for nour­ish­ment and exer­cise have not. If we don’t meet them, let us expect trou­ble. Here are the exer­cise basics:

 Con­sult a doc­tor before any exer­cise regimen(!)

Warm­ing up: If you are new to exer­cise, work up to walk­ing 10,000 brisk steps a day. For a cou­ple of quid you can get a plas­tic pedome­ter from a sports store to clip onto your belt. Doing noth­ing all day but shuf­fling around in your pyja­mas will clock up 3,800 steps (In the name of research, I mea­sured it three days in a row). 10,000 steps places a pro­gres­sive load onto your mus­cle and car­dio sys­tems and ensures you stay well-oiled and piped. (see also: Climb Stairs When­ever You Can and Own a Pet). Next…

Move! Once you’re walk­ing eas­iliy, exer­cise 40–60 min­utes a day, some of which with your heart rate up around 65% — 70% of your max­i­mum (max rate = 220 minus your age for females, 226 minus your age for males). Prac­tise short bursts of all-out effort for a minute at a time, then relax. Swim­ming, cycling, row­ing, stair-climbing and hill-climbing are all good for this – start slowly and work into it. The right level of exer­tion is when you’re slightly out of breath while talk­ing! Also:

Load-bearing exer­cise: The dreaded weight-training, push-ups, knee bends, squats and stair-climbing are all resis­tance moves that pre­vent the mus­cles and skele­ton from atro­phy. These move­ments pump the lymph sys­tem and help clean you out. Weight-training can be done by all ages, though kids under ten are bet­ter off with the usual chores, slav­ery and play until the body matures in its mid­dle teens. Seri­ous mus­cle builders, it’s all about inten­sity and rest. Log onto www.precisiontraining.com. Don’t for­get:

60–90 min­utes a day spent out­side. The body requires sun­light and fresh air to man­u­fac­ture Vit­a­min D and catal­yse other reac­tions. Solar radi­a­tion pen­e­trates even that lead blan­ket over Kent, so don’t think of using weather as an excuse for indo­lence, unless you live in Sunderland.

Moti­va­tion

Exer­cise is hard for many because exer­cise equals pain and the brain moves away from pain toward plea­sure as part of the sur­vival response. ‘No pain, no gain’ results in thou­sands of gym mem­ber­ships being paid for and never used. Nike’s famous slo­gan ‘Just Do It!’, frankly, for most peo­ple didn’t. Why? ‘No pain, no gain.’ We like the idea of what exer­cise can do for us, it’s just the grunt­ing and heavy-breathing part most of us have a prob­lem with.

Shift Your Focus

Don’t call it exer­cise – play! Re-label and shift your focus. Get involved in a hobby that com­bines exer­cise with fun: walk­ing, gar­den­ing, cycling, swim­ming. I like explor­ing bat­tle­fields and his­tor­i­cal sites, so climb­ing mottes and nod­ding at bai­leys gets me all hot and both­ered. Ori­en­teer­ing, rollerblad­ing and fell-walking are great but if you’re get­ting on a bit, gar­den­ing, spon­sored walks, swim­ming, cycling and invad­ing France were all enjoyed by your forebears.

• Exer­cis­ing is easy if you’re hav­ing fun (play)

• Remem­ber: You are the sum total of every­thing you’ve ever done to yourself

• Don’t over­look exercise

Fur­ther Resource:

The Essen­tial Guide to Exer­cise by Phillip Day

TWENTY YEARS OF EXPERIENCE BOILED DOWN TO ONE BLOG POST

by Pete Sisco

The first time I lifted weights with any seri­ous inten­tion what­so­ever was in 1992 at the age of 33. Before that I did what most peo­ple do and just wan­dered blindly from one machine to the next and banged out enough reps to get the tar­get mus­cles tired. I never truly exerted myself. I’m sure we’ve all seen this in the gym, just look at 99% of the peo­ple exer­cis­ing and none of them is treat­ing it like a life or death strug­gle to reach a new peak of exer­tion. They work out like they wash their car or drink a cup of cof­fee – casu­ally and with zero pas­sion or purpose.

The ‘ah-ha moment’ for me came when I learned about the role of inten­sity in caus­ing mus­cle growth. It’s one of those things that makes per­fect sense. A skinny guy can lift 100 pounds one time, a guy with bulging mus­cles can lift 400 pounds one time. Fine. We under­stand that big mus­cles can lift more. But the skinny guy can rest a bit and lift 100 pounds four times. So he also lifted a total of 400 pounds. Why isn’t he as strong? Why aren’t his mus­cles as big? It’s obvi­ous. He took more time to lift 400 pounds than the big guy took. So mus­cle build­ing isn’t just about what you can lift, it’s equally about how much time it takes you to lift it. And that, my friends, is the def­i­n­i­tion of inten­sity. Yet every­body – and I mean every­body – in the gym was com­pletely ignor­ing the time side of the equa­tion. So what if you did three sets of twelve reps with 265 – how long did it take you, Pal? With­out know­ing the time there is no way to know how intense it was com­pared to the last work­out or the next workout.

Once I saw that with total clar­ity the next twenty years were about mea­sur­ing inten­sity. The Power Fac­tor mea­sure­ment came first. It mea­sured pounds per minute. Sim­ple. Bench press a total of 6,200 pounds in two min­utes and your bench press Power Fac­tor was 3,100 pounds per minute. That was the inten­sity of your out­put. The skinny guy always has a lower Power Fac­tor num­ber than the guy with huge mus­cles. Makes per­fect sense. But the more impor­tant thing is always the next work­out. If you want to force your body to make big­ger, stronger mus­cles you have to increase your inten­sity. So next time you bench press you need to have a Power Fac­tor inten­sity of 3,150 or 3,300 or 4,000 lbs/min or what­ever you can muster. In this uni­verse there is no room to debate this issue, it’s well estab­lished; it always takes more mus­cle power to lift 8,000 pounds in two min­utes than it does to lift 7,500 pounds in two min­utes. Always. (Yes, assum­ing the dis­tance is the same. Which it always is with the Power Fac­tor workout.)

Next came the knowl­edge that very, very brief exer­cise could still trig­ger mus­cle growth. That was the birth of  Sta­tic Con­trac­tion train­ing that mea­sured inten­sity in sec­onds rather than min­utes. We started with 30-second holds. They worked. So we did 20-second holds. They worked. So we did 10-second holds. They worked too. Finally, we tested 5-second holds and, not sur­pris­ingly, they gen­er­ated the high­est inten­sity per sec­ond because you can always hold a heav­ier weight for five sec­onds than you can for ten sec­onds. The absolute high­est inten­sity we could reli­ably mea­sure with bar­bells and stop­watches was 5-second sta­tic holds. And boy, did that build mus­cle! It also absolutely min­i­mized the wear and tear on the body that older peo­ple like me have to take into con­sid­er­a­tion. There has never been a more effi­cient way to build mus­cle and reduce the repet­i­tive wear and tear of weightlift­ing. The only thing that will improve Sta­tic Con­trac­tion train­ing will be the machine that mea­sures out­put to the mil­lisec­ond to deter­mine every indi­vid­u­als opti­mum rep dura­tion. That’s in the works.

And by the way, when you are shoot­ing for a clear goal that – by def­i­n­i­tion – you have never hit before, you can’t do it with­out pas­sion. You have to psy­che your­self up before the lift. You have to exert your­self with every scrap of con­cen­tra­tion and deter­mi­na­tion. That isn’t bor­ing. That isn’t like sip­ping cof­fee and day­dream­ing. It is clas­sic ‘man against him­self’ and it makes you feel the power of per­sonal vic­tory and tri­umph. And you get the cer­tainty of math­e­mat­ics to prove you are a bet­ter man today than you were last week. That is an aston­ish­ingly pow­er­ful feel­ing and I believe it’s also it’s own vac­cine against com­mon depres­sion. But that’s another blog post.

Speak­ing per­son­ally, my ‘overnight suc­cess’ is yet to come in this realm. Power Fac­tor and Sta­tic Con­trac­tion train­ing are not house­hold words. When that day does come, and it even­tu­ally must, it will be like every other ‘overnight suc­cess’ in that many years of quiet exper­i­men­ta­tion, trial and err and not a lit­tle ridicule laid the foun­da­tion for the inevitable wide­spread recog­ni­tion of the bloody obvi­ous. It was ever thus. Peo­ple always resist new knowl­edge. But math and physics are never dis­obeyed for long and any hon­est attempt to max­i­mize the inten­sity of weightlift­ing always leads down the inevitable path of mea­sur­ing weight lifted per unit of time. You can mea­sure in troy ounces per fort­night or grains per mil­lisec­ond but what­ever answer you get you always have the chal­lenge of best­ing it the next time you’re in the gym. And that will take every­thing you have. If you suc­ceed, you trig­ger new mus­cle growth. If you fail, you won’t grow. Period.

You can still choose to train in a blind, hap­haz­ard way, never know­ing your mus­cu­lar inten­sity. But, know­ing the facts of how inten­sity is objec­tively mea­sured, why the hell would you? Seri­ously. What is to be gained by never know­ing your all-important inten­sity of output?

“It never ceases to sur­prise me at the infi­nite capac­ity of the human mind to resist the intro­duc­tion of use­ful knowl­edge.” Thomas Ray­nes­ford Lounsbury