The Old Man Olympics

One of my ‘old man Olympics’ goals is to do the following in a single day:

• Trap bar DL one and a half times my body weight for 10 reps

• Three-minute plank

• 90-second dead hang

• One minute standing on one foot with arms crossed and eyes closed

• 20 dips in a row

• Run a quarter mile in under 90 seconds

• Hold HR zone 4 on a fat tire bike ride in the sand for an hour straight

• Hard standup paddle for an hour through the ocean

• Run a 100m dash in under 15 seconds

The thing about these is that none of them is particularly impressive done in isolation. You should be able to drop what you’re doing, hop on the set of bars and bang out 20 dips, no questions. But to be able to do all of these in one day, almost like the old man decathlon, is a different matter entirely.

Now, if you want to do something like this, don’t treat the event as the training session. You don’t work up to being able to do these things in one day by doing all these things every workout. That’s a monumental feat that will take a ton out of you, and you’ll have to recover for days. You train everything separately, intelligently.

Also, these are very personal goals of mine. If I can do all these things, then I can do pretty much anything that I want to be doing right now on a physical level. It means I can still spend half the summer walking and hiking through the South of France, not ever slowing down or getting tired. It means I can hop on my fat tire bike and go for a hard, hard ride whenever I have someone in town who wants to go for one. I don’t think about it, I just do it. It even means I can play a game of Ultimate Frisbee with the younger guys. 

It's a good exercise to determine what you want out of life. What are the physical attributes and activities that you want to maintain as you age? Decide that, and then figure out what your baselines are. What do you need to be able to do in order to do what you want? How would you test that? What's your Old Man (or Woman) Olympics?

For general health, of course, I would recommend heavy lower-body lifting just for strength and bone density. Something involving both knee flexion and hip hinging, which is why I like the trap bar: you can make it “squattier” (hitting knee flexion/quads) or you can make it “hingier” (hitting hip extension/posterior chain).

I would recommend some speed work like sprinting. You can certainly sprint on a stationary bike or rower and get all the cardiovascular and fast-twitch muscle fiber benefits, but if you can do it, I would definitely recommend maintaining the ability to sprint on flat ground just because it’s such a good barometer for overall health and resilience.

Some measure of upper-body strength is important, which is why I like the dips. It could be push-ups. It could be pull-ups. It could be anything, but just keep tabs on your ability to move weight with your upper body.

Balance and bone density are very important. You don't want to fall, and if you do fall, you don't want to break. 

Grip strength is huge. Associations in the literature with mortality risk are likely more about overall strength rather than grip itself (grip is just an easy thing to test), but having a strong grip is important. You can’t be robust with a soft handshake.

You want the ability to run really fast for short distances, and you want to be able to run moderately fast for longer distances. You want to be able to move at a slower but somewhat brisk pace almost indefinitely. 

And more than anything, you want to be able to play. You want to be able to explore the world with your body, to test its limits, to have fun moving through space and time. 

What will it take to get you to that point? What will it take to maintain that?

Let me know down below.