Thoughts on Training
Strength Training for Adults, Part 1
Exercise is mostly promoted and glamorized as an activity for athletes and the young. And while everyone can benefit from proper exercise, mature adults and the elderly have the most to gain, simply because they have the most to lose if their physical capacity deteriorates.
For all of its benefits, serious adults looking for legitimate evidence-based information on exercise find themselves in a blizzard of conflicting information: What they read or hear this month contradicts what they were told last month. Programs are tried and discarded as they jump from one to the other before finally quitting.
The word “exercise” is seldom defined, and so consequently, everything from gardening to walking to pole dancing has been prescribed as exercise. If gardening is exercise, why hire a gardener and a personal trainer? You can fire both of them, do the gardening yourself, and save money. Most of the confusion about exercise and the poor results come from a lack of understanding of exercise versus recreation. We define exercise as a purposeful and meaningful overload that creates a stress that can then be systematically progressed as the body adapts. By this definition, most of what people think of as exercise is not exercise: It is recreation. Such things as walking, dancing, and tennis may seem like exercise, but the overload is not meaningful. That is, these types of activities are not of high enough intensity to stimulate much of a change in the body. The overload is not purposeful either, but is rather general and locomotive in nature. Furthermore, there is almost no progression, and what progression does occur is random and accidental. This does not mean recreational activity is not of value -- it is. And if you enjoy these activities and can do them safely, you should continue to do so.
Understand, however, that with recreation, you can create exercise effects without getting exercise results. That is, you can sweat, breathe hard, and ache and be sore for days from activities that do not stimulate meaningful changes in your body. We sometimes joke that we should bring a dump truck full of pea gravel into our exercise facility, give everyone a shovel, and have them shovel out the rocks for an hour. We could even call it “functional training.” Certainly, at the end of that hour everyone will “feel” as if they had exercised. But there is no amount of such activity that will create meaningful results. In fact, for those who are muscular and strong to begin with, a steady diet of shoveling labor will actually cause them to lose muscle and get weaker.
A suntan is analogous to exercise results: Both are the body’s protective response to stress -- a stress high enough to be perceived as a threat. A suntan is sometimes thought of as being a result of exposure to sunlight, but it is actually a response to a specific band of light -- ultra violet radiation. The type of light used in heat lamps, such as those used by restaurants to keep food warm, is infrared radiation. You can lay exposed under a heat lamp for hours and get all of the effects of sun tanning, such as sweating and heat discomfort, but get none of the results of sun tanning because the precise stress that nature demands is not being applied. Francis Bacon said, "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." In our next installment, we will look at what nature demands the stress of exercise should be in order to get results.
