summarize "I think of strength training as a form of retirement saving. Just as we want to
retire with enough money saved up to sustain us for the rest of our lives, we
want to reach older age with enough of a “reserve” of muscle (and bone
density) to protect us from injury and allow us to continue to pursue the
activities that we enjoy. It is much better to save and invest and plan ahead,
letting your wealth build gradually over decades, than to scramble to try to
scrape together an individual retirement account in your late fifties and hope
and pray that the stock market gods help you out. Like investing, strength
training is also cumulative, its benefits compounding. The more of a reserve
you build up, early on, the better off you will be over the long term.
Yet unlike some guys in the gym, I’m less concerned with how big my
biceps are or how much I can bench press. Those might matter if you’re a
bodybuilder or a powerlifter, but I’d argue they matter less in the Centenarian
Decathlon (or in real life). A far more important measure of strength, I’ve
concluded, is how much heavy stuff you can carry. I say this on the basis of
my intuition but also research into hunter-gatherers and human evolution.
Carrying is our superpower as a species. It’s one reason why we have thumbs,
as well as long legs (and arms). No other animal is capable of carrying large
objects from one place to another with any efficiency. (And the ones that can,
like horses and other livestock, do so only because we bred and trained and
harnessed them.) This frames how I view strength training in general. It’s
largely about improving your ability to carry things.
I’ve always been a fan of carrying heavy objects with my hands. As a
teenager working on a construction site over the summers, I always
volunteered to haul tools and materials across the site, and today I still
incorporate some kind of carrying, typically with dumbbells, kettlebells, or
sandbags, into most of my workouts. I’ve also become semiobsessed with an
activity called rucking, which basically means hiking or walking at a fast pace
with a loaded pack on your back. Three or four days a week, I’ll spend an
hour rucking around my neighborhood, up and down hills, typically climbing
and descending several hundred feet over the course of three or four miles.
The fifty- to sixty-pound pack on my back makes it quite challenging, so I’m
strengthening my legs and my trunk while also getting in a solid
cardiovascular session. The best part is that I never take my phone on these
outings; it’s just me, in nature, or maybe with a friend or a family member or
a houseguest (for whom rucking is mandatory; I keep two extra rucksacks in
the garage).
I was introduced to this pastime by Michael Easter in his eye-opening
book The Comfort Crisis. His intriguing thesis is that because we have
removed all discomfort of any kind from modern life, we have lost touch with
the fundamental skills (not to mention the frequent suffering) that once
defined what it meant to be human. Carrying stuff over long distances is one
of these skills; our ancestors likely had to range far and wide to hunt food for
their families and then carry their kills back to camp to feed everyone. But it’s
so effective that the military has incorporated it into their training.
“Carrying shaped our species,” he says. “Our ancestors carried often. It
gave them robust functional strength and endurance that was likely very
protective. But we’ve engineered carrying out of our lives, just as we have
many other forms of discomfort. Rucking is a practical way to add carrying
back into our lives.”
The main difference is that instead of carrying sixty pounds of antelope
meat in my pack, I’m typically hauling heavy metal weights, which are
admittedly less appetizing. One thing I specifically focus on when rucking is
the hills. Going uphill gives me a chance to push my VO2
 max energy system;
first-time ruckers are amazed at how taxing it is to walk up a 15 percent grade
with even twenty pounds on your back—and then walk back down. (A good
goal is to be able to carry one-quarter to one-third of your body weight once
you develop enough strength and stamina. My daughter and wife routinely
carry this much when they join me.)
As great as rucking is, it’s not the only thing I rely on to build my
strength. Fundamentally I structure my training around exercises that improve
the following:
1. Grip strength, how hard you can grip with your hands, which involves
everything from your hands to your lats (the large muscles on your back).
Almost all actions begin with the grip.
2. Attention to both concentric and eccentric loading for all movements,
meaning when our muscles are shortening (concentric) and when they
are lengthening (eccentric). In other words, we need to be able to lift the
weight up and put it back down, slowly and with control. Rucking down
hills is a great way to work on eccentric strength, because it forces you to
put on the “brakes.”
3. Pulling motions, at all angles from overhead to in front of you, which also
requires grip strength (e.g., pull-ups and rows).
4. Hip-hinging movements, such as the deadlift and squat, but also step-ups,
hip-thrusters, and countless single-leg variants of exercises that
strengthen the legs, glutes, and lower back.
I focus on these four foundational elements of strength because they are
the most relevant to our Centenarian Decathlon—and also to living a fulfilling
and active life in our later decades. If you can grip strongly, you can open a
jar with ease. If you can pull, you can carry groceries and lift heavy objects.
If you can do a hip-hinge correctly, you can get up out of a chair with no
problem. You’re setting yourself up to age well. It’s not about how much
weight you can deadlift now, but how well you will function in twenty or
thirty or forty years.
I put grip strength first because it’s something that most people don’t
really think about. Even I was surprised to discover that there is an enormous
body of literature linking better grip strength in midlife and beyond to
decreased risk of overall mortality.
[*5] The data are as robust as for VO2
 max
and muscle mass, in fact. Many studies suggest that grip strength—literally,
how hard you can squeeze something with one hand—predicts how long you
are likely to live, while low grip strength in the elderly is considered to be a
symptom of sarcopenia, the age-related muscle atrophy we just discussed. In
these studies, grip strength is likely acting as a proxy for overall muscle
strength, but it is also a broader indicator of general robustness and the ability
to protect yourself if you slip or lose balance. If you have the strength to grab
a railing, or a branch, and hold on, you might avoid a fall.
Surprisingly, given the extent to which fitness and gym-going have
become so commonplace in our culture in the last few decades, American
adults actually seem to have far weaker grip strength—and thus less muscle
mass—than they did even a generation ago. In 1985, men ages twenty to
twenty-four had an average right-handed grip strength of 121 pounds, while
in 2015, men of the same age averaged just 101 pounds. This suggests that
people now in their thirties are entering midlife with much less strength than
their parents, which could lead to problems as they get older.
Grip strength is important at all ages. Every interaction that we have
begins with our hands (or feet, as we’ll discuss later). Our grip is our primary
point of contact in almost any physical task, from swinging a golf club to
chopping wood; it is our interface with the world. If our grip is weak, then
everything else is compromised.
Training grip strength is not overly complicated. One of my favorite ways
to do it is the classic farmer’s carry, where you walk for a minute or so with a
loaded hex bar or a dumbbell or kettlebell in each hand. (Bonus points: Hold
the kettlebell up vertically, keeping your wrist perfectly straight and elbow
cocked at ninety degrees, as though you were carrying it through a crowded
room.) One of the standards we ask of our male patients is that they can carry
half their body weight in each hand (so full body weight in total) for at least
one minute, and for our female patients we push for 75 percent of that
weight. This is, obviously, a lofty goal—please don’t try to do it on your next
visit to the gym. Some of our patients need as much as a year of training
before they can even attempt this test.
In general, we urge our new patients to begin with far less weight than
they have lifted in the past, sometimes even dropping down to body weight
exercises at first. As we will see in the next chapter, on stability, it is far more
important to learn and practice ideal movement patterns than to be pounding
heavy weights all the time. That said, a farmer’s carry is pretty
straightforward (weight in each hand, arms at sides, walk). The most
important tip is to keep your shoulder blades down and back, not pulled up or
hunched forward. If you are new to strength training, start with light weights,
even as low as ten to fifteen pounds, and work up from there.
Another way to test your grip is by dead-hanging from a pull-up bar for as
long as you can. (This is not an everyday exercise; rather, it’s a once-in-awhile test set.) You grab the bar and just hang there, supporting your body
weight. This is a simple but sneakily difficult exercise that also helps
strengthen the critically important scapular (shoulder) stabilizer muscles,
which we will talk about in the next chapter. Here we like to see men hang
for at least two minutes and women for at least ninety seconds at the age of
forty. (We reduce the goal slightly for each decade past forty.)
No discussion of strength is complete without mentioning concentric and
especially eccentric loading. Again, eccentric loading means loading the
muscle as it is lengthening, such as when you lower a bicep curl. It’s more
intuitive when lifting something to focus on the concentric phase, such as
curling the dumbbell with your biceps. This is the strength of a muscle getting
shorter. One of the tests we have our patients perform is stepping onto and
off an eighteen-inch block and taking three full seconds to reach the ground
(a forward step down, like descending a very tall step). The stepping up part
is comparatively easy, but most people initially struggle with a controlled
three-second descent. That requires eccentric strength and control. (I’ll talk
about step-ups and step-downs in detail at the end of chapter 13.)
In life, especially as we age, eccentric strength is where many people
falter. Eccentric strength in the quads is what gives us the control we need
when we are moving down an incline or walking down a set of stairs. It’s
really important to keep us safe from falls and from orthopedic injuries.
When we can eccentrically load our muscles, it also prevents our joints from
taking excess stress, especially our knees. Think about creeping slowly down
a very steep hill versus running down in an uncontrolled manner. The
difference in force transmission to your knees is dramatic (as is the difference
in likely outcomes—safe descent versus faceplant and likely knee injury).
Training eccentric strength is relatively simple. Big picture, it means
focusing on the “down” phase of lifts ranging from pull-ups or pull-downs to
deadlifts to rows; rucking downhill, carrying a weighted pack, is a great way
to build both eccentric strength as well as spatial awareness and control,
which are important parts of stability training (next chapter). It also helps
protect against knee pain. You don’t need to do this for every rep of every set.
Sometimes you just want to focus on moving the weight quickly or moving a
heavier load, but make sure at some point in each workout that you are taking
the time to cue the eccentric phase of your lifts.
Next is pulling, which is closely related to grip strength. Pulling motions
are how we exert our will on the world, whether we are hoisting a bag of
groceries out of the car trunk or climbing El Capitan. It is an anchor
movement. In the gym, it typically takes the form of rows, where you’re
pulling the weight toward your body, or pull-ups. A rowing machine,
something I love to use for VO2 max training, is another simple and effective
way to work on pulling strength.
The final foundational element of strength is hip-hinging, which is what it
sounds like: You bend at the hips—not the spine—to harness your body’s
largest muscles, the gluteus maximus and the hamstrings. (I repeat: Do not
bend your spine.) It is a very powerful move that is essential to life. Whether
you are launching off an Olympic ski jump, picking up a lucky penny off the
sidewalk, or simply getting up out of a chair, you are hip-hinging.
Hip-hinging under high axial load, as with a heavy deadlift or squat,
should be approached with care because of the risk of injury to the spine.
This is why we have our patients work up to weighted hip-hinging very
slowly, typically beginning with single-leg step-ups (see description below)
and split-stance Romanian deadlift, either without weights or with only very
light weights held in the hands.
Normally, this would be the section where I would write a lengthy treatise
on the finer points of how to do pull-ups and hip-hinges. I’ve come to the
conclusion that they can’t actually be done right without dozens of pictures
and thousands of words, in a book that is already too long. There are two
reasons why I have decided not to give the details. One, I believe that this
type of content is best learned in person, from someone who knows how to
cue the movements. For example, the “hard” part about teaching a proper
hip-hinge is not illustrating the correct position of the spine relative to the
femur and lower leg, or the angle of the hips, in a diagram. The hard part is
knowing how to eccentrically load the glutes and hamstrings before you
hinge, and how to feel your feet pushing into the floor evenly across the full
surface of your foot.
If this is hard to follow, you see exactly why I’ve come to the conclusion
that the best way to communicate this information to you, in a way that is
actionable, is to show you, as opposed to telling you. And the best way I can
show you, shy of working out with you, is having you watch me do these
exercises over video, with my colleague Beth Lewis cuing me. (I’ve placed a
link to these videos, and a brief description, at the end of the next chapter.)
The second reason I’ve opted not to describe all these exercises in detail is
that when new patients come to us, we typically have them stop strength
training, at least with heavy weights. Our first step is to put them through a
series of strength and movement tests designed to assess not only their
physical condition but also their degree of stability. So before you do anything
in the gym, I would urge you to read the next chapter, to begin to understand
the crucial and complex concept of stability."