On Weight Lifting And Health

I read this article with vague concern:

After college, after Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted. Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, “You are going to die young because of this.”

Trump said he was not following any special diet or exercise regimen for the campaign. ‘‘All my friends who work out all the time, they’re going for knee replacements, hip replacements — they’re a disaster,’’ he said. He exerts himself fully by standing in front of an audience for an hour, as he just did.

It is the fake news, so I don’t worry too much. But in the event others here, like myself are trying to follow in Donald Trump’s intellectual footstep where you can to improve yourselves, as I am, I would like to offer some advice I have gained over the years which directly contradicts what this article states. I believe this is an important topic, so this will be a long post. But it will also be dense. Every piece of it is a vital piece of data you will need to fully understand this subject. By the end of it you should have as much necessary knowledge as you would get from a small book on the subject.

I do beg you, whether man or woman, if you do not exercise take this article to heart, and I promise it will change your life more than anything else I will ever put on this site. Men need weightlifting, partly because we tend to always overestimate what we can do, and thus need a physical reserve for when we take on a little too much, and partly because it will maximize our strength and vitality to accomplish the mammoth tasks we are driven to take on.

Women need the increased bone density that comes from weight-loading bones, for when they get older and begin the inevitable process of demineralization that can turn into osteoporosis. This will be written for older people who have not exercised before, so if you already lift, feel free to skip the article. You won’t learn much, it will bore you, and I will advocate for less than an active athlete may want to perform to optimize gains.

First, President Trump is criticizing aggressive competitive exercise. I agree that can be difficult for most people to maintain as they get older, and it does tap your energy immensely, especially if you are competitive. It also tends to wear on your body because it involves very high repetitions of specific movements, often involving force. A knee may perform several thousand quadriceps extensions, each punctuated by an impact, when playing a single game of soccer. And of course the big difficulty as you age is your body is not as capable of producing energy and repairing damage, so when pushed beyond its limits by the psychological competitive drive, those aggressive, competitive athletic endeavors do come with a cost.

But I do, emphatically recommend all individuals do eight exercises, in about 15 minutes of weightlifting, ideally two out of every three or four days, with one day devoted to upper body exercises, one devoted to lower body exercises, and one or two days off interspersed between those workouts. So either it would be an upper body workout on day one, and lower body workout on day two, and a day off before repeating the cycle, or an upper body workout, a day off, a lower body workout, a day off, and then repeat the cycle.

The workout I will explain here is not designed to be exhausting, but is almost more like a warm-up for your day. It will not impact your abilities throughout the day. But your body will detect the exercise, and respond by developing its muscles in a comprehensive way that will strengthen the body, and after a few weeks give you even more energy to pursue what you do for the rest of your day.

The weight lifting should be done a specific way, and there will be videos below. It should consist of one set of 10-15 movements (repetitions) of an exercise for each respective muscle group. Each exercise should consist of contracting the relevant muscle, through a full range of motion against resistance, for ten to fifteen repetitions using a weight you could lift for one to three repetitions more. This will be far less stressful and tiring than it sounds when you see the program I’d recommend.

Now a word on physiology for those to whom all of this is new. Your bones move along prescribed movements guided by the joint structure, by being pulled by muscles. So when your elbow bends, it is because the muscle on the inside of it, the bicep, is contracting, pulling its one end, attached by the top of the upper arm at the shoulder, closer to its other end, on the inside of the forearm near the elbow. The result of this contraction pulling the bones around the elbow joint is that the elbow bends. You can see this very example in the first video below, where a young girl demonstrates a bicep curl. You can actually see her bicep stretch out like a rubber band getting thinner as the arm relaxes and the weight lowers, and watch the bicep contract into a tightened knot, as it is pulling the elbow bent as she lifts the weight.

Each joint will have opposing muscles, which produce opposite, opposing movements along those pathways of movement that are determined by the joint structure. So when your elbow straightens out against a force, it is because the muscle on the back of your upper arm, the tricep, is contracting, and pulling on a tendon which attaches on the outside of the forearm, by the elbow. If you feel it with your fingers, you can feel as it pulls that back-point of the elbow/forearm-bone toward the back of the upper arm as it contracts. So the tricep straightens the elbow by contracting, and then the bicep bends it by contracting. All your articulating joints have opposing muscle groups which work like that, contracting and pulling parts of the skeletal structure towards each other to produce movement along joint-defined pathways.

The brain, in an amazing feat of processing power, has developed to seamlessly integrate all of these individual movements by individual muscles into a seamless symphony of movement, in which we do not even notice the individual movements at play. We simply look, feel, and go.

But I have found that symphony in competitive sports is exhausting to perform, and works as Trump describes – it exhausts your energy. Try running, jumping, fighting, playing football, riding a bike, and so on, and it will drain energy, and probably lower your general productivity. Moving all the muscles at once, and coordinating it in the brain is physically exhausting, both in the muscles, the cardiovascular system, and even in the brain where it is all coordinated. It can take a lot out of you mentally and physically.

But there is a way to exercise which is not exhausting, and it is the method I describe. Isolate each muscle (there are not that many), use it for ten to fifteen repetitions of each exercise, and move on to the next exercise quickly. (I will detail the best program I have found later) There are actually not that many major muscles, so you can easily work out all of them very quickly. Your upper body workout would consist of eight simple exercises that work every muscle through a full range of motion, and your lower body workout will consist of eight primary exercises that do the same. I’ve pulled good youtube videos showing these exercises below.

The benefits of this are legion. As you age, the hormones which produce muscle growth diminish, and as they do the body will begin to shift its focus to maintaining certain muscles which are used often, and other muscles will actually be broken down to fuel the support of those muscles. This is bad for many reasons.

First, as an example, there are muscles on the outside of the hip and inside of the thigh which move each straightened leg from side to side (as opposed to front and back). These muscles are not used often since you primarily move your feet front to back using muscles on the front of your hip and the back by your butt, and do not walk sideways often. So as you age the body will begin to shift protein and muscle-building-blocks from these side-to-side muscles, to maintain the muscles you use on the front and back of your hips. As the body does this, you will begin starting to walk in such a way as to avoid putting stress on the now weakened side-to-side muscles. Now they will be used even less, and atrophy even more. We have all seen older people cautiously shuffling with their feet wide, afraid they are about to fall. That is where this leads.

Unfortunately, those side-to-side muscles are critical to balance and if you turn the wrong way as you get older and need to quickly move your leg to the side to brace yourself, you will fall. You will feel less steady on your feet. You will enjoy walking less and do it less, and now your other muscles start to atrophy. It quickly feeds off itself.

It may not seem important to you now, but when you get older, exercising those side-to-side muscles will be vitally important to maximizing your happiness and minimizing your risk of injury. Especially when you are older, a fall can change your life by requiring bedrest to recover, and triggering a rapid physical deterioration you will not recover from. You can avoid that now with your entire body with a simple exercise program, and stay incredibly vital into your later years, even as all your contemporaries become feeble.

With respect to joints, exercise is critical to avoiding arthritis. In rats, one of the single best ways to produce arthritis is to immobilize a joint. That will literally starve the cartilage bed of nutrients. The reason has to do with joint structure.

Joints are where two bones meet at a mobile structure. Coating each end of each bone is a sheet of cartilage, which is designed to cushion the ends of the bones where they meet to minimize damage to the structure on any impacts, and provide a smooth, slippery articulating surface, so the joint will move smoothly and easily. The joint is encased in a sheet of fascia, which is like tendon, only in a sheet-like structure. This sheet is basically a cylinder, surrounding the joint. It melds seamlessly into the bone on each side of the joint sealing all around each bone on each side the joint. The result is that the joint is sealed from the rest of the body inside this capsule made of an impermeable tendinous sheet. It literally forms a sealed bubble around the joint, called the joint capsule.

On the inside of the sheet, melded to it, is a membrane called the synovial membrane. This membrane is like a sheet of thin sponge. Inside it are cells which produce synovial fluid, and the sponge-like membrane holds it like a sponge. When you use the joint, you stretch and twist the joint capsule membrane back and forth as the joint moves, and this synovial fluid is wrung out of the membrane. It enters the intra-articular space, or the area inside the capsule. It coats the cartilage, and everything else, and floats around initially, before being soaked up by the cartilage.

This synovial fluid does several things. First it is slippery and lubricates the joint. Second, it contains the nutrients the cartilage needs to grow, repair itself, and thrive. It is how the cartilage is fed. Cartilage is not fed by blood. There is no capillary bed infusing it, probably because the forces it is exposed to, especially compression forces in weight bearing structures like the knees during jumping, would constantly bruise it. They would break the vascular structures and let blood seep out, inflaming the joint. Instead, synovial fluid is released into the joint on use, and it soaks into the cartilage and feeds it.

So when you lift weights through a full range of motion with each joint, you fill those joint capsules with synovial fluid, it lubricates the cartilage beds, preventing abrasion injuries and physical wear, and the cartilage will then soak up the synovial fluid, and use it’s nutrients to maintain a thick, healthy cartilage bed. When rat joints are immobilized, they rapidly go arthritic because it is like cutting off the blood flow to a tissue. The cartilage starves, and wastes away.

There is another advantage to a complete workout of all opposing muscle groups as well. The joint is designed to be held in position by a slight contraction of all the opposing muscle groups around it. When loaded with stress, the joint is protected by this uniform pulling all around, and forces are kept distributed over the cartilage bed evenly, by the opposing muscle groups pulling just enough to keep the joint held together tightly and the two heads of the bones (or epicondyles) in the appropriate relative positions relative to each other.

If you have well developed quadriceps on the front of your thigh for straightening your knee, but your hamstrings on the back of the upper leg which bend the knee are atrophied because you do not use them often, then if you stumble and suddenly load the knee with strain your quadriceps will flex strongly pulling the joints structures one way, but there will not be an appropriate countermanding pull by the hamstrings to even out the forces evenly and stabilize the joint in all directions. The result can be a knee injury, because one muscle group was too strong compared to another, and pulled too hard on one side, actually destabilizing the joint in a stress position. When chronic over time, this unnatural joint positioning produced by such a condition can also create bad posturing and uneven wear issues in the knee cartilage, and result in arthritis itself. Sports, ironically can do this if they do not exercise all muscles evenly, and the player doesn’t make an effort in the weight room to even out his opposing muscle group development. So you want all the opposing muscle groups to have a base level of development, to stabilize the joints. Full workouts that hit all opposing muscle groups evenly do this.

Also when you lift you flush the blood through the muscles and the rest of the body, removing waste products and bringing oxygen and nutrients in higher than normal quantities. This is good for all the tissues, including the brain. When I lift, I feel as if I increase fifteen or twenty IQ points for that period. Problems I have been thinking about drift through my amped-up, highly oxygenated mind, and often solutions just magically appear. It even alters hormone levels, increasing growth hormone and testosterone production, which itself increases muscle mass and physical fitness, and rejuvenates the body.

And finally, all the systems of the body are anti-fragile, so draining the energy of the muscles in some small amount will cause the body to strengthen the microscopic energy-producing mechanisms that produce energy molecules. Done in moderation, this will actually increase vitality and energy overall, because your body will develop to have an excess of reserves for the workout at all time. They key is not to do it to the point you feel exhausted. Two to three minutes after a workout you should feel energized, charged with oxygen, and ready to really get into a heavy workout. At that moment, go about your day.

So what exercises are good for such a program? For an upper body workout I would do one exercise from each of the following sets of exercises:

Bicep curl

Tricep pressdown (but don’t use a straight bar like she says, as the pronation of the forearm can strain elbow ligaments if you are older – use and angle bar, so your plams slightly point at each other.

Bench press (or pushup, or chest fly or dumbbell flys)

Lat pull downs

Shoulder flys

Seated Rowing

Military press or dumbbell shoulder press

Shoulder Shrugs with barbell or dumbells (Straight bar may give better range of motion and more development)

Picking one of each of those exercises will give you eight exercises that will hit every major muscle group and take every upper body joint through a full range of motion – and each set of ten to fifteen reps should only take about fifteen seconds. Take a minute rest between each exercise, and in nine minutes you will have taken every major muscle group through a full range of motion, against resistance. Want to really rest between sets and the workout should take about fifteen minutes. Your muscles will all grow stronger, your joints will grow more stable, your ranges of motion in all directions will improve, the energy producing mechanisms will grow stronger, your joints will all be nourished, and it will not exhaust your energy reserves in any meaningful way. Within ten minutes it will be as if you never did it, and you may even find it invigorating. I have seen several older people I turned onto this say that after the workout they feel energized. They key is you are not exhausting yourself.

The lower body exercise regimen I would do is similar. It consists of these exercises:

Standing single knee lifts (No embed, link here) or hanging knee lifts (I would not go as high as she does if you are older due to spine stress – stop when the upper part of the leg is parallel to the floor)

Deadlifts or cable kickbacks (2nd half of the last video)

Cable Hip Abduction

Cable Hip Adduction

Quad extensions, making sure to focus on the last fifteen to twenty degrees of extension (that last straightening of the leg focuses on a part of the quad called the Vastus Medialis which stabilizes the knee particularly effectively when developed).

leg curls (prone on a bench doing both legs together for time efficiency, or standing facing a low pulley with resistance from an angle band attaching the ankle to the low pulley)

Calf raises (rising up on your toes, from the ground, or ideally with heels hanging over the edge of a step)

Toe lifts (lifting your toes upward, either on the ground, or done on a step with your toes hanging off the step, using a hand to steady yourself).

If you are older and just starting, “full weight” for you will be doing the exercises with a weight you could lift fifteen times before exhaustion, but you will only lift it twelve to fourteen times. If you are over 45 and just starting, your goal is not to exhaust the structures, but to move the muscle through a full range of motion against a strong resistance, to maintain the full range of motion, as well as stimulate joint lubrication, and tissue nourishment, and muscle growth. When you are done with the workout, after three or four minutes you should feel invigorated. If you want to push your development once you are comfortable with the program, you can lift with a weight that exhausts your muscles completely, but 90% of the gains for an older individual who does not exercise will be acquired with two or three reps still left in their muscle.

Now, if I were older and I began this program without having done it previously, I would avoid muscle soreness by doing the full workout with almost no resistance, or exceptionally light resistance for two to four workouts, depending on how I felt a day after each workout. Then I would do the workout with half weights for two workouts and see how I felt. Then, if I had not experienced any soreness, 3/4 weights for one workout, and depending on how I felt (you should feel no soreness before moving on) then full weights from then on. If you begin with full weights, you will have muscle soreness, simply because your muscles have not acclimated to resistance through their full range of motion. But if you start this way, with almost no resistance, you should never feel muscle soreness. I have seen it several times with people I have gotten to do this.

Try to watch yourself in a mirror when you do the exercises, whenever possible. It sounds like a small thing, but it radically changes the workout in two ways. As you become familiar with the muscles you are exercising and you grow them, you will begin to see them contracting under the skin. Actually seeing the muscular contractions producing the movements in a mirror will let you make small adjustments to better take the muscle from its fully extended state, to its fully contracted state. Without a mirror, you may subconsciously begin slumping, leaning, and doing other things which make the exercise easier and reduce the load on the muscle by reducing the degree to which that muscle goes from a fully extended state, to a fully contracted state, against resistance. In the videos above you see the girl tell you about things like that which she sees people doing, and which are bad form that make the exercises less effective. Watching your muscle in a mirror will help prevent that.

Having a mirror also has a hypnotic effect. When you lift without a mirror, your focus is internal, on the feeling in the muscle, and you are acutely aware of a small burn in the muscle as you get to the end of the set. When you are focused on the muscle in the mirror, it distracts you. It is almost as if that burn is in the muscle in the mirror, and not in your body. As you develop that mental ability to visualize the sensations of exercise as happening in the body in the mirror, your workout will feel easier. You may even enjoy feeling the burn, because you are seeing it in the mirror, and you are viewing it as a sign of muscle growth to come.

As you develop, begin to use oxygen. When you breathe, you charge the muscle’s battery. Start with one deep breathe before an exercise, and over workouts, begin adding deep breaths before starting the set, up to five to ten before each set. Don’t let yourself get light-headed, but charge your blood with oxygen before starting a set, to maximize the nerve impulses to the muscles, and give the muscles the oxygen they need to contract. It will add to your gains.

Don’t use the Valsalva maneuver, where you hold a breath, press your stomach as if constipated, and make your veins pop out. That will cause a lot more problems with your cardiovascular system than it will solve. I always suspected Schwarzenegger’s heart valve problems could have come from a heart pumping against a venous system that was blocking the blood from flowing easily and creating a stress that would produce valve regurgitation, either when he was lifting or when he was posing. Let the blood flow easily, the way it was designed to when performing natural actions like running.

Don’t work out when you feel sick or exhausted. That is your body telling you it needs that energy for something else, so listen to it, and let it deal with whatever the other problem is before taxing yourself with a workout.

When you lift, you strain the muscles microscopically, and the muscle then regrows stronger while you rest for 48 hours minimum afterward. Never do these lifting exercises every day, as the muscle needs at least 48 hours to rebuild fully, and if you are older I recommend 72-96 hours. Workout any sooner, and you will not get the full benefit, because you will be breaking the muscle down again before it rebuilds. If you are older, recovery can take longer, and I have seen older people I know take three or four days between working a muscle group. The upper body, day off, lower body, day off program seems to work quite well for them.

Some more caveats. I have known older people who have started this program, and been enthused by their gains. They all very quickly came to associate the feeling of strain with future strength, power, growth, gains, and a feeling of control over their body and their future health. Some have then tried to get even more gains by making the exercises more stressful. They increased weights, did multiple sets of repetitions, tried explosive (plyometric)lifting, high intensity interval training mixing the lifting with low level cardio during rests, pushed their ranges of motion by stretching deeper into the lifts, did complex and more stressful motions that twisted joints as they moved, and so on. And they have injured themselves and had to stop working out to recover. One had a young personal trainer who worked out with them, and tried to push them harder every workout, and did so until they injured a joint. Don’t do that, and don’t let yourself become overly greedy. And be careful of young, superfit trainers who want to push you. They don’t really understand how age weakens the structures because they have never seen or felt it first hand.

You should see improvements in your function quickly, even doing the workout with no weights. There are specific parts of your range of motion of each muscle which are undeveloped because you never use the structures in that position. Not many people lift out of a deep squat often, or do things with their arms over their heads, or while bent over touching their toes. Each of those involves muscles in ranges of motion which have completely atrophied in most people. So even though you don’t think the no-weight workout is doing anything, it is providing resistance over those atrophied parts of your ranges of motion in each muscle group. That is triggering muscle growth in the parts of the muscles that handle that part of the range of motion, and those biochemical signals to trigger growth will produce additional growth in the whole muscle. The older people I turned onto this type of workout reported that after two workouts, in the shower they found they could reach around to their back in ways they hadn’t been able to in decades and things they were barely able to do in life became vastly easier. And it gets better from there. You are really taking control of your body’s destiny, and its functionality.

I describe workouts that use a bench, leg extension station, leg curl station, high pulley and low pulley because that makes the exercises easier, faster, and safer. You can join a gym, but such machines can be very economically purchased for home use. One example of a brand new machine is here, though I just found this off a two-second search, so shop around, and maybe even try machines in a sports store near you. Although that machine is not exceptionally high quality, for a senior who would use it lightly and take care of it, it could give as much as a decade of service. And if you search [bench high pulley] at ebay, and organize the search from lowest price to highest price, you can see an example of the range of equipment available.

If you are wealthy, get a personal trainer and some high quality equipment and try this. It will change the course of your life. Sports you enjoy such as golf will become easier, you will get better at them, and you will be doing them for a decade longer than you would be able to do them otherwise. You will carry yourself more aggressively, and feel more invigorated. People detect when guys are working out, because they move differently, using full ranges of motion, and always maintaining a well based control of their body’s movements.

Your family may get to enjoy being with you for a decade or more longer than they would have enjoyed your company otherwise, and as those who care about you enjoy your company that much longer, you are able to look out for them. There is no cost to try this workout for a few weeks, and you have everything to gain – just by trying it for fifteen minutes every other day.

As you pursue this discipline, you may want to study it deeper, and experiment with all the various options you find. There are an endless myriad of different ways to work out each muscle. There are different opinions on how many sets of an exercise to do, as well as strategies to organize those sets, such as doing three repetitions (lifts) with a heavy weight, resting, doing 24 repetitions with a light weight, resting, and then doing a third set of 12 repetitions with a moderately heavy weight. Some say you should spend one day exhausting a single muscle with a ton of sets and then give it a week of rest, spending the intervening days working other muscles similarly. That program will often involve chest one day, quads the next, then arms, then back, then hamstrings and calves, then shoulders, then a day off, before repeating the cycle.

There are different exercises, such as pressing a bar attached to a high cable down, against resistance, to straighten the elbow. Or holding weights above your head, letting the weights ride down behind your head, and then straightening the elbow upward against the weight’s resistance until the weights are above your head again. Weightlifting magazines thrive off these controversies, with every issue advertising “the best” tricep exercise, or most effective way to blast your chest.

The truth is, there is no “best anything” for everyone. One person may get incredibly strong quadriceps off squats, another may find squats do nothing for them, and they need leg lunges to get similar results. One person may get the best gains working the muscles moderately every other day, another may need to blast the muscle one day and take seven days rest. Everybody seems to be different, which is why all these controversies and different strategies exist. So if you eventually want to subscribe to Muscle Fitness or a similar magazine and experiment, do it and know there will probably be a better program for you out there than what is presented here – but you will have to find it by trial and error.

But this program is, in my opinion, the best way to start a workout regimen to turn back the clock and keep your body younger, it is highly time-efficient and safe to perform, and it will be more than enough to accomplish what you want, in a minimum amount of time and effort.

Finally the usual disclaimers. You might have a medical condition which is not amenable to exercise, or your medications may be bad for exercise, so consult with a doctor before beginning any weight lifting program. This information is presented merely as information to interest you and start your own exploration of these topics with professionals, and you should always consult with a professional before beginning any exercise program. You may have unique injuries or physiological constraints which make these exercises harmful for you, so consult with a professional trainer and a doctor before trying these exercises. Finally listen to your body – it knows best.

But I urge everyone to consult with a doctor to get approval and then try a quick workout program to begin to get their bodies apocalypse ready, and extend their healthy lives on this planet. Because whatever is coming, you will need that physical fitness to make this world a better place and take care of your loved ones for as long as possible. I would never have spent all the time I spent writing this if I didn’t think it vitally important for your benefit to look into this subject.

It will yield benefits into your golden years that will change the course of your life. It will give you more time on this earth, and the physical ability to enjoy that time more.

If you take nothing else from this site, do what you have to, in order to begin exercising each muscle group – for yourself, and the people who love you.

Spread r/k Theory, because the body is temple, and you need to spend time worshipping it