Are You Strong Enough For The Life You Want?

How strong do you actually need to be?

Everybody seems to have strength standards that can give you an answer, and we could even look at age and body weight and come up with numbers for your squat, deadlift, bench press, or pull-ups. While those numbers can be useful, especially if getting stronger in the gym is one of your goals, for most parents I work with, I’m interested in different standards.

For me, I want to know whether you’re strong enough for the life you want to live.

If you’re a parent, I want to know if you’re able to pick up your kids, work around your house, or play a sport. If you’re a grandparent, I want to see you picking up your grandkids and running around the yard with them.

Thirty years from now, your activities may change, but the underlying question doesn’t. That is: does your physical ability allow you to participate in your life the way you want to?

This brings us to strength training.

The Game Is Your Life

Last week, I wrote about one of my favorite ways to think about training: Cardio keeps the game going. Strength keeps you in the game.

The game is your life. You know that. We talked about that.

But if you missed it, you can read it HERE.

It’s not a mystery to anybody at this point that cardiovascular fitness is an important part of long-term health, but strength training addresses another huge part of the equation: whether your body remains physically capable enough to take advantage of those years.

To reiterate last week, this is the difference between lifespan and healthspan. Lifespan is how long we live. Healthspan, on the other hand, refers more broadly to the portion of those years we spend in good health and with a meaningful level of function and independence.

If I’m fortunate enough to live to 95, 100 years old, I want the gap between those two to be as small as possible. I still want to be doing the things that I enjoy doing, like training and practicing jiu-jitsu, spending time with my family, and other hobbies and activities with grandkids and maybe, at that point, great-grandkids.

And while we don’t control every part of that equation, physical capacity is something we can work on, and strength training is one of the tools we have available to do it.

One side note: disease, injury, genetics, and bad luck exist, but you’re raising the baseline if you can be cardiovascularly fit and strong.

So when I say “strength keeps you in the game,” this is what I mean.

Muscle Is Something You Want to Keep

“Time is undefeated.” I heard that somewhere. I don’t remember where I heard it.

But one of the realities of aging is that maintaining muscle becomes increasingly important. You probably know by now that muscle strength, power, and all that tend to decline as you get older. This is especially true if you’re not doing anything that gives your body a reason to maintain them.

Strength training provides you with that reason.

Now, I don’t mean you need to train like a bodybuilder and spend 6 days a week in the gym. If you’re a busy professional and if you have kids, that is just not a realistic way to approach it.

Not for most people, anyway.

If you are that busy person and you want to remain strong and capable, a relatively simple program built around large movements done consistently can accomplish a lot.

A squat develops strength through movement we use every day, where we sit down and stand back up (even on the toilet). A hinge prepares you to pick something up off the ground. Upper body pushing and pulling movements and carrying movements help you with the ability to show up normally throughout life.

The value in these movements is not necessarily because they’re gym exercises. They’re valuable because they allow you to train physical qualities that exist outside of the gym.

That’s the entire point.

Strength Training Isn’t Just About Muscle

It turns out that your muscles aren’t the only tissues responding to strength training.

Since your body always wants to adapt to what you’re doing to it, you can also maintain bone density as you get older.

Strength training is particularly important when we’re thinking about osteopenia, osteoporosis, and the consequences of becoming much more physically fragile later in life. I like to think of it this way…

Nobody’s going to guarantee that you won’t fall when you’re 75 or 85. We also can’t guarantee that strength training will prevent an injury if you do. What we can do is spend the previous years and decades building and maintaining muscle, strength, bone health, and physical durability, rather than waiting until these qualities have already deteriorated to start thinking about them.

I’d rather raise the bar before something like that happens.

And one thing to note: while we can’t guarantee you won’t fall, there are some things we can do to help decrease that likelihood.

Strength Can Help Preserve Usable Movement

While strength training is not stretching, necessarily, consistently working through a full squat, for example, takes your ankles, knees, and hips through their full ranges of motion. Ranges of motion that perhaps running does not.

In keeping with the same idea of being able to lift more than what you need to in day-to-day, you also want to have the ability to move through more range of motion than you need in a day (not just down to a chair or a toilet, but getting lower than what you need to).

That’s useful because mobility without the strength to control or use a position has limitations of its own. I don’t just want you to have access to that range of motion. I want you to have enough physical capacity to do something with it.

How Strong Is Strong Enough?

This brings us back to the question we started with: how strong is strong enough?

A quick Google search can give you strength standards based on your body weight, age, sex, and training experience. You can certainly use those numbers and find use for them to tell you what constitutes a “beginner,” “intermediate,” or “advanced” lifter. For most people, though, there’s another useful way to look at it:

You should have more strength available than your normal life requires.

If you are landscaping and you’re putting rock out, how about a 50-pound bag of rock from the ground? If you have grandkids and your grandkids weigh 40 pounds, can you pick up that 40-pound child?

This is what I want for you: I want you to be capable of safely lifting considerably more than what you have to in your day-to-day, and in the gym, we’re doing it in as controlled an environment as we can get.

How much in reserve do you need? It really depends on what you do and what your hobbies are. Someone who wants to continue hiking difficult trails when they get older has completely different physical demands than someone whose hobbies are less physical.

That being said, you need to have a level of strength. Regardless, this doesn’t necessarily mean the exact same program to get there, but you need to have that level of strength.

What is the thing that you need to have the strength for in your life?

Cardio, Yoga, and Walking Don’t Replace Strength Training

I like running.

I enjoy yoga.

They’re both challenging in their own respect, but when someone tells me that they run regularly, they practice yoga, and they do something else or walk every day, they say they don’t need to strength train…

My first thought is “you’re wrong,” followed immediately by “How can I help you see that?”

These are all very useful and beneficial forms of physical activity, but they aren’t really interchangeable.

Cardio provides a stimulus that strength training does not, just like strength training provides a stimulus that cardio does not. Yoga and Pilates, on the other hand, can provide their own benefits related to movement, but they are not cardio or strength training.

And while there’s only so much time in a day or a given week, I do want these qualities working together.

Real life isn’t always cooperative (you know this). The bag of mulch you’re moving in the backyard isn’t designed to be easily picked up. It’s designed to give you a vehicle to bring mulch to your landscaping. Your child isn’t going to evenly distribute their body weight and hold steady in a way to help you lift them off the floor. In fact, they think it’s funnier when they don’t.

Training gives us a controlled place to prepare for a world that isn’t controlled.

What Does This Look Like for a Busy Parent?

Strength training isn’t the hobby in and of itself, and you don’t have to make it that way, but for a lot of people that I coach, I think the impression is that, “I don’t have enough time to do that.”

I always recommend three strength training sessions per week, lasting somewhere between 45 minutes and 1 hour. Your general physical activity recommendations commonly suggest strengthening the major muscle groups at least twice per week, so three days isn’t something I call a universal thing. It’s simply a rhythm that I think works very well for a lot of people.

Moreover, the sessions don’t have to be complicated, and in fact are better when they’re not, both from the perspective of keeping them consistent and from the perspective of enjoyment as well.

Here are some patterns that you should have in your routine:

• Squatting
• Hinging
• Upper body pushing
• Upper body pulling
• Carrying

The exact exercises, loads, and progressions really depend on who we’re talking about.

I’m not trying to see how much you can fit into your life before you explode. I just want to find out what the amount is that you can sustain on a consistent basis for a long period of time, because this is a perishable thing.

What Are You Trying to Stay Strong Enough to Do?

My goal: I want to pick up my kids no matter how big they get. Even better, I want to be able to pick both of them up at the same time no matter how big they get.

This gives my training some context beyond whatever numbers happened to be on the bar that day, and it just happens to be one of those goals of mine, out of many.

Your reasons may or may not be different, but what matters is that you think about what you want later, how you want it to look, and what physical qualities those years are going to require from you to get there.

The ability to stand up off the toilet, get off the floor, carry something heavy, or spend your day doing something physical is easy to take for granted when you’re younger and sometimes gets thrust in front of your face when you’re older. The point is to keep training so that you can stay ahead of that curve.

If you get more years, I want those years to be useful to you. I want you to be able to participate rather than just observe, and I want your health span to follow your lifespan as closely as it can.

This is why strength training matters.

Cardio keeps the game going. Strength training keeps you in the game.