Do Today What You Want to Still be Able to Do Tomorrow
We monitor and record many things throughout our life for such things as maintaining or bettering work performance. It would probably help if we used the same approach in our exercise routine and other higher output activities in our life. As with most anything whether mental or physical, it takes maintenance to keep you at a certain level and increased conditioning to take you further.
Our body keeps a certain level of strength by a consistent routine and strengthens itself further based on increased demands our routine or activity level asks of it.
Example: walking up and down hills instead of a flat stretch, carrying a set of dumbbells up and down a flight of stairs instead of just your bodyweight.
A friend of mine was telling me about a house that he and his wife bought that they consider the last house they plan to purchase, (in other words they plan to grow old in it). He told me that a friend of his advised against a house with an upstairs saying it may not be good once the children leave because of having to go up and down stairs (this is where I stopped him) and said, “this is exactly what you need to have as you get older.” And that he should make so that something is upstairs that he and his wife need to go to almost daily, such as an office or something. This will consistently condition the muscles they need to get up and down the stairs. When a person quits doing an activity or certain activities, the muscles associated with these movements lose their size, tone, and strength.
One of the primary things that contribute to muscles atrophying (shrinking in size and strength) is lack of activity and lack of restricted activity such as in resistance training exercises. This is largely the reason a person gets so tired when they do something they haven’t done in a long time or something they haven’t been conditioning for through exercise.
Example: if my friend would quit going up and down the stairs and after a few months would decide to carry some boxes etc. up the stairs for storage, (besides potentially putting his back at risk for spinal compression and inflammation) it would be much more exhausting due to the muscles used having lost their tone.
The reason it’s so important to have physical things we do regularly (whether exercising in a gym or our own home routine) is to measure our current capabilities against our future needs. This includes upper body, core, and lower body conditioning.
Example: it’s really easy for us to keep tabs on our strength and fitness level by doing a few basic exercises. We primarily have (pushing and pulling muscles in our upper body and the muscles throughout our core and lower body that we use to do a squatting exercise) throughout our skeletal system and if we have a few exercises that hit these particular groups we can monitor our strength levels. We can also monitor our endurance level by going from one muscle group to the next.
Example home strength and endurance routine: do a set of pushups, next do a set of squats, next do a set of bent rows, next see how long you can do a floor plank, rest, and then repeat
Example gym strength and endurance routine: do a set of bench presses, next do a set of weighted bar squats, next do a set of cable rows or lat pull-downs, next see how long you can do a floor plank, rest, and repeat.
Record your performance: (resistance, speed, time etc.) then measure how many heartbeats per minute.
Whether it’s muscle strength, muscle tone, muscle size, or muscle and cardio endurance, our body prepares for tomorrow by what we subject it to today!
