Posted: 1/6/2019 5:48:12 PM EDT
[#15]
Quote History Quoted:
There is no "reasonable strength standard".
Strength becomes a fallacy, in belief and practice and chasing strength as a goal.
You need to be as strong as you need for what you want to do in your life. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quote History Quoted:
There is no "reasonable strength standard".
Strength becomes a fallacy, in belief and practice and chasing strength as a goal.
You need to be as strong as you need for what you want to do in your life. And what if “what you want to do in your life” is to be as functional and capable as possible for as long as possible instead of weak and fragile? Establishing a solid foundation of strength when it is still possible to add lean muscle mass is the health savings account that keeps us from riding out our senior years in a Lark or falling off a curb and dying from complications from a broken hip. Barbell Training is Big Medicine
Aging is characterized by a loss of strength, flexibility, and adaptive physiologic reserve; by senescence of growth and repair systems, blunting of hormonal responses, and atrophy of muscle, nerve, tendon, ligament and bone. This physical atrophy is accompanied by an even more deadly psychological decline. Too often, the aging individual sees that he is getting weaker, and so lowers his expectations and his efforts—and thereby grows weaker still. This is analogous to the cell cutting up its own DNA. Once the psyche has surrendered to decline and death, it’s all over but the suffering. This is an increasingly prevalent phenotype of aging in America and other industrialized nations [27,28,29] : a living hell of progressive weakness, obesity, inactivity, shrinking horizons, sexual impotence, decreased expectations, mounting despair, a growing list of expensive drugs, learned helplessness, sickness, and pain. It’s being “All Done At Sixty”…or Fifty. It’s a life of waiting to die from a skin infection or a broken hip or a blot clot, of needing a stupid little fucking go-cart to get from here to there, of not being able to reach your own ass to wipe it, of narcotizing yourself with alcohol, cigarettes, American Idol and Doritos so you don’t have to face your own grim existence as a slowly rotting Jabba The Hut. I see it every day. We call it “old-itis.” A joke, I guess, but an obscene one. This gruesome avatar of aging offends the eye, the mind, and the spirit, and it cries out for both compassion and correction. And before you ask: at present there is absolutely no solid evidence that strength training—or any other exercise or dietary program—will substantially prolong our life spans. But the preponderance of the scientific evidence, flawed as it is, strongly indicates that we can change the trajectory of decline. We can recover functional years that would otherwise have been lost. There is much talk in the aging studies community about “compression of morbidity,” a shortening of the dysfunctional phase of the death process. Instead of slowly getting weaker and sicker and circling the drain in a protracted, painful descent that can take hellish years or even decades, we can squeeze our dying into a tiny sliver of our life cycle. Instead of slowly dwindling into an atrophic puddle of sick fat, our death can be like a failed last rep at the end of a final set of heavy squats. We can remain strong and vital well into our last years, before succumbing rapidly to whatever kills us. Strong to the end.
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