This is partial a distillation of what I've learned about strength and mobility in the past fifty years. I'm in my 60s and I'm not super-fit, so this isn't written for people who want to get super-fit. It's written for people who want to get fitter than they are without a huge amount of work.
Strength and mobility are fundamental to healthspan: the number of years we live without too many health issues weighting us down.
I live in the rurals, which means I have a fairly high-effort lifestyle with fairly high risks of physical injury. I spent an hour or so yesterday chopping wood with an axe and an eight-pound maul, and am up and down ladders fairly frequently to do things like clean the gutters. Falls and other physical mishaps are a constant risk, and I want to make sure I don't break too easily. I also want to keep on chopping wood and whatnot for another decade or so, at least.
There are two basic components to my fitness routine: walking, and lifting, where "lifting" covers everything from body weight to dumbells and whatnot. In what follows I'll generally break down how various ideas apply to walking vs lifting.
I also do a bunch of other stuff--like chopping wood--that I don't do for the purpose of staying fit, but which doesn't hurt. I skipped my lifting today because I got a good workout from chopping wood yesterday.
Fitness takes time and effort, and my goal is to minimize those, because fitness is something I do at least a little bit on every single day. If you want to be fit for life, building fitness habits is what it's all about. It's not episodic, and it's not a big deal. Fitness work shouldn't be any different than having breakfast: just something you do every day, no matter that you have toast some days, cereal others, and a fancy omelette sometimes.
There are several important ways to keep fitness work commonplace, minimal, and easy.
I can distill a lot of stuff down to three basic rules, which I'll state in their most cryptic form and then unpack a bit:
1) Something is better than nothing.
2) Direction is more important than rate.
3) Always be starting.
I call the first of these "The Ontological Argument", which was some goofy Medieval philosopher's argument that God had to exist because things that exist are better than things that aren't and God is the best thing ever. It doesn't work as a proof of the existence of God, but I've always had a soft spot for the basic idea that things that exist are superior to things that don't. An imaginary ideal isn't worth much beside a real fact.
When it comes to fitness, this is backed up by a lot of actual data. People imagine--and the fitness industry encourages--the idea that if we could just do exactly the right thing we'd see amazing fitness gains. They think there's a sharp peak we need to find so we can stand on top of it.
In reality, some of the biggest gains come from the first little bit of work. "Volume"--the amount of exercise you do--is important, but the gains from the first bit are relatively large compared to the rest. So instead of a sharp peak what we have is a staircase where the first step is a big one, and then they get smaller and smaller as we go up.
My goal here is to describe how I climb the first few steps, which is where there are some big gains to be had. From there, there are plenty of people who can advise you on how to go further, if you want. If not, you've gotten some big gains from relatively little work. That's a good thing!
The second law--direction is more important than rate--is about managing expectations. Fitness is a life-long pursuit, and we never actually catch it. There's a story about a famous musician who was asked why he was still practising in his 80s, and he said, "Because I think I'm getting better."
How much better? Well, he was already one of the best in the world, but who knows how much further he could go?
So I don't set big goals or deadlines for myself, beyond, "I'd like to get better." I'd like to be lifting more next year than this year, or doing more reps at my current maximum weight, or whatever." Just a little bit better over time, compared to where I am now. And even then, I know I'm not always going to make it, which brings me to the last rule.
Always be starting. Where I am now is the starting point. Always. Every day.
As I discuss at more length below, as you get older and life happens, there will be times when you get knocked all the way back. Making every day your starting day makes those a lot easier to cope with, and makes it easier to do the job that's in front of you.
Which should be as easy as possible.
This covers a lot of ground, from motivation to convenience.
With regard to walking, I'm fortunate to have a good friend--Ray--who likes to walk as well, so three days a week we do about 4 k together first thing in the morning. I'm very much a "first thing in the morning" guy when it comes to exercise, although I'm also definitely not a "morning person".
Walking with someone else is motivating, but Ray and his wife travel a fair bit, so when he's off gallivanting around the world I modify my routine to maintain my motivation, or at least my momentum. Normally I get up about a half an hour before we meet to walk, and do various odds and ends in that time, but when I'm on my own I get up, get dressed, put my boots on, and walk: that way there's nothing in between me and walking.
No distractions, no side quests, no excuses. Not because I'm making a big effort to avoid them, but because I'm arranging my routine so that nothing much is standing in between me and the right thing to do, which is to get out for a walk. In the absence of someone to talk with, I have a podcast cued up on my phone, ready to go as I step out the door. Audiobooks work too, or just quiet contemplation of the sounds of nature and the ringing in my ears.
Convenience plays a big role in lifting as well. I've got a fairly small house, so my dumb-bells live in a kind of back hall area at the bottom of the stairs where I come down to the main floor in the morning. This makes it easy to pick up the weights and do the things, which I usually do first thing in the morning on days I'm not walking or doing other things that require strength. But some days I wake up feeling like crap, thanks to the long-lasting consequences of the Virus That Shall Not Be Named, and on those days I may wait 'til I'm feeling more human to lift. But the weights are always there, ready to go. So is my body, which I also lift in various ways.
I often lift just two days a week, but here's big secret: two days a week is enough to maintain your strength, which in a busy world is definitely better than the alternative.
I haven't had a gym membership for about five years now, and have found working out at home with body weight and dumb-bells extremely easy to maintain. I've been knocked back twice in that time by covid, which means I've had fairly recent experience in the hardest part of this whole business, which is...
As I think it says in the Bible, time and chance are right bastards, which means most of us are going to go through periods when our lives are disrupted by family, career, travel, illness, accident, or just, well... life. Fitness routines are one of the first things to go when that happens, which means no matter how hard we work, we're going to eventually find ourselves starting out again at a much lower level than we previously had achieved.
So it's convenient to think of our starting point as wherever we are today.
This is in accordance with the Wisdom of Granny Weatherwax, from Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies (lightly edited):
They ended up nose to nose.
"Who's this?" said Diamanda, out of the comer of her mouth.
"Um, it's Granny Weatherwax," said Perdita. "Um. She's a witch, um. . ."
"What level?" said Diamanda.
Granny Weatherwax's eyebrow twitched.
"Levels, eh?" she said. "Well, I suppose I'm level one."
"Just starting?" said Diamanda.
"Oh, yes," said Granny, quietly "Just starting. Every day, just starting."
It's OK to look back over the twisty road of time and see where you came from, but you won't always be looking down from the lofty slopes of achievement toward the valley where you began. Sometimes you're going to be looking up the next hill. Or the hill you climbed last year and have now fallen down, or somehow come 'round to again.
Starting from zero each day means you have a chance to change up your routine pretty regularly, too. I tend to get into ruts, so the idea that each day is a new start means I feel more free to do something different. I still don't vary my routine as much as I probably should, but keeping this in mind helps.
As we get older, the dips get deeper and crawling out of them takes longer. We can still do it, though, until we start on that last long slide, and who knows when that'll happen? May as well stay strong and mobile in the meantime, eh?
Walking is the foundation of fitness. Human beings are made to walk. We can walk longer, farther, and more efficiently than any other animals. Cheetahs may be fast, but we can out-walk them (assuming they don't eat us first.)
Treadmills are great for a lot of people, especially in Canada: if you can find a place to set them up they're extremely convenient, they take the weather out of consideration, and are nicely graduated. You can also watch media or whatever. I used to watch European football when running on the treadmill at the gym, which is a great way to pass the time if you're not too invested in the game: it really is beautiful to watch. Nothing much happens most of the time, but reading the field and feeling the ebb and flow of attack and defence engages the mind nicely. If you can find something like that, it makes your time on the treadmill pass pleasantly and turns it into something to look forward to.
Way back in the day, when I was thirty years younger than I am now, I started to build up my fitness with walking. I found ways to walk where I used to drive, which took some planning, and I eventually started taking short runs. It felt stupid to start, but that's the norm.
One of the big things about starting out with pretty much anything is that if you feel stupid you're probably doing something right.
So I'd run down to the end of the block, which was all I could manage at the time, and then back. It was less than 100 m. After a week or two of that I doubled the distance. After a week or two of that I doubled the distance. After a month or so of that I doubled the distance... It doesn't take very many doublings before you're taking about some real mileage, and for someone in their 30s or 40s that's no bad thing.
These days, I'm a pedestrian, and when life happens and I need to start again, I find a walking routine that works for me, either solo or with a buddy or in a group.
When I was living in Vancouver there was a time when my apartment was in Kits and I worked in Coal Harbour, and I found I could walk into work across the Burrard Street Bridge in about 45 minutes, whereas the bus took 25 or so. An extra 20 minutes was no big deal for the fitness it gained me, and I saw some spectacular sunrises in the in the winter, with the raking light painting the North Shore mountains in glowing reds and golds.
Later on, when I lived in East Van and it was too far to walk, I started getting off the Skytrain at Chinatown, which gave me a couple of kilometres on foot.
Look for things like this, where you can modify your routine to make walking a regular, natural, and enjoyable part of most days.
We lift our body weight all the time, but use a very limited range of motion. One of the side effects of lifting in a more deliberate way is it tends to increase our range of motion over time.
When I'm knocked right back, I do mostly assisted body weight reps. By "assisted" I mean I hang on to something or otherwise partially unload the muscles I'm working. That way I'm not relying on my newly wobbly muscles to keep me from falling over.
My two most basic starters are assisted squats and half-pushups.
Recovering from covid I was weak. I could stand and move but that was about it. Just before I got sick I'd moved up to working with 40 lb dumb-bells, and after it I felt like I could barely lift a toothbrush.
But I had to start somewhere, and standing in front of the bathroom sink is not a bad place. After brushing my teeth one day I grabbed the edge of the (very sturdy) vanity with both hands and did a very careful half-squat.
They say a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and they are not wrong, for a change.
After that, every day after I brushed my teeth before bed I'd do as many half squats as I could, not going down deep, always hanging on to the vanity. It was ridiculous. My muscles burned and my knees ached, and a month or two before I'd been doing deep squats holding a 40 lb dumb-bell in each hand. Time, chance, and covid. The bastards.
But each day I could do a little more. I was helped along by the fact that this wasn't the first time I'd been through this. I've lived a tumultuous life, and even without the joys of a vascular disease buggering up my body I'd had periods of prolonged inactivity that I'd come back from. I knew it was possible. Direction was all that mattered.
I graduated to assisted full squats, going down deeper but still hanging on to the vanity, or the edge of the living room table if I was downstairs when the notion to do a little work struck. I will still do this pretty often: just grab on to something and do a few deep squats, five or ten. Why not? It strengthens my legs and costs almost nothing. Just don't do it when there are people who don't know you around. They'll think you're showing off, or weird, or whatever.
Once my legs were recovered a bit I started adding toe touches, which might not seem like much but was a big deal at the time. I'd touch my toes--or get as close to doing so as my body would allow--and then stretch up high with both arms, arching my back, giving my vertebrae something to do. I also started doing simple twists, standing with both arms out and twisting at the torso one way and then the other. Not fast or hard, just a steady twist as far as I could go, then back to centre, then the other way.
I also started half-pushups, from the knees. My arms and back were weak, and it took me a while to work up to ten or twelve, at which point I started doing as many full pushups as I could, which was like, four. But then one day it was five. And so on.
Lunges are also good: these are just a step forward with one leg and then a step back to standing. Then repeat with the other leg. Hanging on to something may be necessary if you're at all wobbly, which I sometimes am. Even having one hand on a wall can be very helpful. Lean a little that way and it makes you much more stable.
Eventually I started back on pull-ups, which previously I could do about seven at a go, despite being fairly overweight. Half-pull-ups look very silly: you grab the bar and then do a little jump to get you past the difficult bit where your elbows are bent at 90 degrees. It should not be so much that your arms do nothing through the first half of the pull-up, but enough that you can actually make it to the point where your unaided arms can get you the rest of the way. And then--this is the really important bit--you let yourself down as slowly as possible. There's any amount of research that shows this kind of training builds muscle very effectively, and after a few weeks of this I was eventually able to manage one full pull-up. After two years I've been back up as high as five, although at the moment I've drifted back down to three because of that time and chance thing. Still better than zero. Although since starting to write this (over a month ago now) I've managed to hit six. Progress!
All of this is to say: Don't let feeling stupid stop you from starting as slow and light as you want. Listen to your body. Don't do anything that feels unsafe, unbalanced, or overloaded. The last thing a good exercise program should do is cause injury, because there's really nothing worse for your fitness than that, and the whole point of all this is fitness: strength and mobility, with maybe a little endurance on the side.
My basic body weight routine once I'm past the assisted stage consists of just a handful of simple things, in no particular order:
1) Squats
2) Toe-touches and back stretches (reaching for the sky after a toe-touch)
3) Torso twists
4) Lunges
5) Push-ups
6) Pull-ups.
I aim for a single set of 12 for each, with a minimum set of 8. A "rep" for lunges counts both legs, so if you're counting each leg individually you're aiming for 24 reps. Eight to twelve reps is kind of the sweet spot for building muscle. You ideally want to be lifting heavy enough that you can do 8 to 12 of whatever you're doing--curls, squats, presses, whatever--and when you can hit 12 consistently, move up in weight just enough that you're back down to 8.
I do one set most of the time--with weights, these days--which is an absurdly small amount, and that's my full workout for the day, usually just two days a week, although I'm doing other strength-oriented things or walking most other days. As I said: I'm not trying to anything other than stay strong and mobile enough that I can swing an axe without spraining anything. It's working pretty well so far.
There are two other big tricks that I'll talk about below, which are opposites of each other: combined motions, and individual sets.
Today, we have entire industries focused on training of different kinds, and fitness is has dozens of different, highly-specialized, training systems.
This is one of them, I guess.
Lifting has language: "concentric" motions are ones that contract muscles,
"eccentric" motions are ones that allow them to return to their resting length. So when we do a curl, lifting a weight up by bending the elbows, that's concentric, and when we lower the weight back down that's eccentric. For squats, the eccentric is the squat, the concentric is pushing back up to standing.
Most programs divide the body into upper and lower. Squats, lunges, and similar work the lower body. Curls, presses, push-ups, pull-ups, and so on work the upper body. Intense programs often split these two, with separate upper and lower days, but what I do is so minimal that that's not remotely necessary.
There are plenty of useful guides to the various muscle groups and how to work them. In general, pairs of exercises that work opposing muscle groups are recommended, but I'm not religious about it. I often do bicep curls without doing triceps curls, and so far it hasn't killed me.
It's useful to get to know the various muscles, and the exercises that work them. There aren't that many, as shown by this list from the site I've linked above:
Legs: calves (lower leg), hamstrings (back of upper leg), quadriceps (front of upper leg), and glutes (butt)
Arms: biceps (front of upper arms), triceps (back of upper arms), and forearms (lower arm)
Shoulders: anterior delt (front of shoulder), lateral delt (side of shoulder), and posterior delt (back of shoulder)
Back: trapezius (traps), rhomboid major (upper back), and latissimus dorsi (lats) (under the armpits)
I honestly never can remember all the delts and the various muscles in the back. I just think in terms of shoulders and upper/lower back.
"Volume" is the number of reps you're doing, or maybe how many workouts you're doing per week.
What I'm talking about here is an ultra-low-volume program, far less than you'll see pretty much anyone else recommend. All I can say is: it works for me, and if you do it, it'll be better than not doing it.
I talked above about starting out with body weight and assisted movements. At some point adding in extra weight is going to be worthwhile. It might not be much--I've worked with as little as five pounds in each hand, and some weight sets go down to two pounds--but something is more than nothing, right? And direction is more important than rate.
Once I'm comfortably doing ten or twelve reps in my minimal body-weight workout, except for pull-ups, where I do whatever I can and consider it good enough, I start adding weight.
For squats, lunges, and toe-touches, you add weight by just holding a dumb-bell in either hand and going through the same motions, although for me, I find that it's much easier to squat more deeply if I'm carrying a little weight because my ankles are my least-bendy joints, and having a little counter-balance helps me get down low without falling on my ass.
Toe touches with weights are called "Romanian dead lifts". Don't ask me why.
Deep squats should be approached with caution, as they can over-strain your ligaments, which you don't want to do. If you start out with moderately deep squats--your knees bent more than 90 degrees but not a lot more--you'll slowly stretch your ligaments, which will naturally elongate and allow you to go deeper. But it's a work of months to do that, so don't rush.
Every exercise has endless variations. Goblin squats are one of my favourite things: rather than holding a dumb-bell in each hand, you hold one dumb-bell in both hands in front of you, so as you squat it ends up between your knees or a little ahead of them. This is a great counter-balance and gives me a nice deep squat in a very stable posture.
It also lets me do my other favourite thing, which is combine movements, which is one of the tricks I alluded to above.
I should probably think of a clever marketing name for "combined movements". It goes like this: rather than do a series of squats, say, one after another, I will--holding the same weight throughout--do a deep squat, stand up, do a curl, do a shoulder press, then let down the press, let down the curl, touch my toes, and return to standing.
That's five exercises in one motion, with no pauses in between. Efficient, or what?
There are downsides to this, which everyone experienced who is reading this is already howling about. The big one is: not all the muscle groups worked by those five exercises need the same weight. So if your squat is at its maximum lift, you probably can't do a curl, and if your press is at its maximum lift your legs aren't getting The Best Workout Ever.
To which I say: I don't care.
I am here to get the maximum benefit with the least time and effort, and I just enjoy the feeling of squatting, standing, curling, pressing, toe-touching (or at least letting the weights touch the ground) that this gives.
There are many variations on this. If I do a goblin squat, with a single dumb-bell held in both hands, I'll often do a straight-arm lift rather than a curl, using my shoulders to swing the weight in a circular arc from my crotch to up over my head, and then do a triceps curl, which is letting the weight down behind my hand and lifting it back up, before doing a bicep curl back down--because training on the eccentric is just as good as on the concentric--followed by a toe-touch.
Recently I've gone down in weight a bit and am focusing on separating the individual movements cleanly, with a bit of a pause between them so I can't cheat by using the momentum of standing up--say--to help with the first part of the curl. This forces the muscles to some extra work, and is helping build them a bit.
The other trick I have is the precise opposite of combined movements: individual sets. As I alluded to above, I'll just do a set of squats or toe touches or push-ups or lunges when I feel like it, because I feel like it. There is no law that says exercise has to take place in a special time set aside for it. Standing around waiting for the kettle to boil? Do some wall push-ups (lean against a door jamb, holding it with your hands, and push yourself away from it, let yourself slowly come back close to it, and repeat...)
The world is full of opportunities to briefly exercise, and things that exist are better than things that do not.
I'm going to try to list here the full set of exercises I do and how I do them. The important thing is while I do have a basic core I fall back on, I also try to mix it up as I go. Writing this has made me consider how to do that more frequently, and the incorporating more opportunistic individual sets is something I'm going to put more focus on.
I used to play pick-up soccer, but everyone I knew who kept playing after the age of 50 ended up with injuries. I friend blew his ACL right in front of me during a game: he jumped for the ball, came down, there was an audible "pop", and he just collapsed in a heap. Soccer (football) is fun, and the people who play it are great, but when a part of a fitness routine can incapacitate me for months it's no longer my thing.
I also used to run, but my ankles and knees were complaining all the time, and I learned that walking burns 80% of the calories that running does and it much easier on the joints. That caloric burn takes longer when you walk rather than run, but I also get a nice walk out of it. I walk pretty fast and run pretty slowly, so the time difference isn't even all that big.
I grew up walking to school or to the bus, and walked or biked as my primary mode of transportation up until I had kids. I'm one of nature's pedestrians, and I hope and expect to be walking for the rest of my life. For younger folks, running and games are good ways to motivate yourself. For old folks, there's always pickleball.
I'm a kayaker, canoeist, and hiker, as well as doing all the stuff I do around the house. I'm building my wife a studio right now, which has me going up and down ladders all day on the days I'm working on it.
We live in a world where the default position is to be offended by anything that's not as physically easy as possible. George Orwell made fun of this attitude in "The Road To Wiggan Pier", where he takes issue with the assumption by writers like HG Wells that strength will continue to be valued in a world where everything is physically easy: "Presumably, for instance, the inhabitants of Utopia would create artificial dangers in order to exercise their courage, and do dumb-bell exercises to harden muscles which they would never be obliged to use."
Now, despite our considerable problems, we are living in something surprisingly close to the Utopia Orwell imagined in the midst of the Great Depression to be silly and probably impossible, and we have indeed created artificial dangers--we call some of them "extreme sports"--and we do "dumb-bell exercises to harden muscles"... but in my case, at least, I choose to lead a life where those muscles are used.
This is something Orwell found absurd. He took it as an absolute that "No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary", which is the most middle-class Anglo interwar attitude to anything, ever. His whole description of the absurdity of doing things because we want to do them rather than because we have to do them is worth reading.
But the important thing that we know that Orwell did not is that movement is life: simply sitting most of the time is hazardous to your health. Getting up, doing "dumb-bell exercises to harden muscles", and ideally getting out into the world and moving around in it under our own power is enormously beneficial to longevity and to a long healthy life, a life in which we can continue to do stuff that we enjoy, like kayaking or hiking or whatever.
And doing those things adds to our ability to do those things, the ultimate virtuous circle.