I saw this posted on Maggie’s Farm today.
The deadlift may be the simplest and easiest exercise to learn in all of barbell training. You pick up a loaded barbell and set it back down, keeping the bar in contact with your legs the whole way. There are a few subtle complications — the bar should move up and down the legs in a vertical line over the middle of the foot, the bar should start from a position directly over the mid-foot, and you should keep your back flat when you pull. But that’s really about all there is to it. The deadlift is one of the basic movements of which strength training is composed.
Pulling things off the ground is a part of your human heritage, and bending down to pick them up is what your knees and hips are for. With the bar in your hands and your feet against the floor, your whole body is completely involved in the exercise, which means the deadlift makes the whole body strong. It would be very difficult to invent a more natural exercise for the body than picking up a progressively heavier barbell.
In America, a lot of time and energy is spent lecturing people about their weight, their diet and their lack of exercise. Health clubs, it seems to me, largely exist on people who feel guilty about not exercising. Around the holidays they resolve to get in better shape and join a gym. By March they have stopped going.
The thing that has always puzzled me is why weight training is not offered up as the low-cost and sensible way for people to stay in shape. It’s cheap. A decent setup for at home is a few hundred bucks if you’re sensible. For the typical person, an hour, three nights per week, is enough to stay fit, as long as you’re sensible about the diet.
Instead, it is one exotic exercise regime and fad after another. Weight training, in the minds of most people, is for steroidal meathheads with the IQ of a goldfish. At least that’s how it is presented. The truth is most of those meatheads are pretty smart. They’ve spent years learning biochemistry and physiology. The public perception, however, is that weight training is for morons.
You don’t even need the weights. Simple bodyweight exercises will do the trick. Push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, deep knee bends. If you can do 25 of each, you are in better shape than most 20-year olds.
When you’re really old with spinal stenosis and arthritis, you can’t do the exercises you describe. At least I can’t. Hence, with the advice of the rehab people, I’ve taken on a regimen of loosening movements (I won’t even call them exercises) and resistance exercises – something pulling or pushing the other way when I pull or push. None of it is strenuous, although at 84 I’m a little tired when I finish.
The weights are too heavy
If you’re being serious, you can get weights as light as 1 lb. In a whole bunch of forms, strap-on being the most comfortable in my experience.
If you’re being sarcastic, I agree.
You want it ALL?
Become a farmer.
I used to lift a lot but got bored.
An octogenarian with moderate spinal stenosis and an arthritic hip, the rehab people put me on a regimen consisting mostly of strap-on weights and elastic bands. They use some fairly fancy machines at their clinic, but they said the strap-on weights and bands at home do pretty much the same thing. Whatever I’m doing, I’m holding steady. So far.
Weight training seems to have huge benefits to older men. The science is fuzzy, but the working theory is it kick starts hormonal response that counter act some of the effects of aging. It could all be psychological too. You feel better when you exercise. I know men in their 70’s who look 20 years younger and they swear it is the weight training.