The Exercise of the Future

 The great advantage weight training has over most other forms of exercise is NOT that one can adjust the resistance up (as is their preoccupation) but that it can be adjusted DOWN — to almost an infinite extent, which is not even possible with exercises using just bodyweight — because that CANNOT be adjusted. Most people assume that bodyweight is ZERO — when in fact, it is often the barrier to entry for even such innocent activities as walking and jogging — let alone chin ups, or even push ups.

But with weights, one can first envision the movement that requires the change in muscular state from fullest relaxation to fullest contraction — which is made prohibitive by using TOO MUCH weight. While many muscle heads will insist that one can never use TOO MUCH weight, the limiting factor in full range movement from 0–100% contraction, is that when the weight is too heavy, the muscle is not allowed to relax fully at any the point — or for example in the bench press, the weight will crush their chest. And that was the whole reason for the argument for varying the resistance through the full range of movement — that it went to nearly zero at the beginning, while maximizing at the other extreme of that movement.

Otherwise, one could just do an isometric contraction for as long as possible — which tended to elevate the blood pressure levels and heart rate well past the hypothetical safe maximums of 220 - (one’s age) — which greatly accounts for the dangerous condition of enlarged, weakened hearts in strength athletes in particularly, and those who exclusively work the heart muscle over every other. A much more sensible approach, would be to recruit all the other muscles of the body in enhancing the circulatory effect — which invariably happens whether people realize it or not in any muscular activity. However, if we’re going to be scientific about it, it can be done deliberately and primarily to achieve that effect — to maintain one’s fitness on a space shuttle or even a cross country bus ride.

Under those circumstances, it is conventionally presumed that one cannot “exercise” productively — resulting in circulation problems for those most vulnerable — when in fact, there are many precedents for exercise with minimal movement, sweat, increase in heart rate and respiration in the examples of yoga and ballet, people actually well-known for their greater range of movement than the average. The distinguishing characteristic of older people is their decreasing range of movement rather than persistence in a limited and constrained range — that progresses until there is virtually no movement — particularly at the head, hands and feet which are obvious indicators of expression and animation (vitality).

The efficacy of that is that muscles contract from the most distal (distant) axis of joint movement back towards the proximal (center) — and those contractions produce the compressions that move fluid (waste products) back to the heart and other purifying/recycling organs of the body — to obviate the inflammation resulting if that process is not enhanced in this manner. Exercising primarily to enhance these processes should be paramount in the exercise of older people and not for achieving personal records, and lifting heavier weights, or even getting bigger — which merely increases the downside risks of doing so.

That is the reason older people often abandon exercise entirely — recognizing the risks greatly outweigh the rewards, rather than rethinking healthy exercise entirely from scratch to accentuate only the positives and eliminate the negatives. But in the usual backwards thinking, the experts may even advocate accentuating the negatives to make movement harder, more difficult, and more dangerous. It doesn’t have to be that way. That is the exercise of the future.