What can we do to improve our quality of life? It’s more than just well-established fitness metrics.

Jackson Fyfe always does a great job of synthesising research into coherent take away advice. Here’s one of his most recent posts on exercises to focus on as we age. What I shamelessly enjoyed about this piece is how well it aligns with our Strong For Life programme.

I’d recommend reading the post, but I’ll summarise here:

• Train power. Creating force as quickly as powerful. This includes movements like throwing weighted objects, jumping, trying to overcome resistance as quickly as possible. 

• Balance (Or overcoming perturbation and balance challenges). Not just standing on one leg as we’re often told, but putting yourself in dynamic situations where one must actively react and recover. One example he gives, that is a big part of our Movement For Life programme is reaching from different positions.

• Unilateral (One sided exercises.) Sometimes with barbell or gym based training, it’s tempting to make everything symmetrical. Barbell deadlifts, squats, bench presses, overhead presses, row etc are all performed symmetrically and bilaterally. Real life is rarely bilateral: walking, running, leaping, even picking up real life objects tend to be asymmetric and we need to think about carry over to the real world.

• Carries: The importance of moving with load. This is great for strength, endurance, grip strength (and potentially bone density in the forearms.

One of my only past criticisms of Fyfe’s syntheses is that I think he undervalued the importance of skill transfer, function, and quality in training.

The major shortcoming of a lot of training data and peer reviewed evidence is that research is designed around the kinds of questions and answers that are convenient to measure. This is fine, this is how a lot of science works. The issue is that we end up asking a very narrow set of questions and producing a narrow set of evidence.

Unfortunately questions about quality, granularity, a nuance sometimes are never explored. This is why I think a lot of researchers say that training on machines or in gyms is just as good or better than other modalities of training, when actually what they’re saying is that this style of training is often more convenient to measure and the results conform with our measurement tools.

That being said, I think Fyfe’s recommendations above show the importance of breaking outside a lot of the older assumptions about training.

If we focus too much on narrow, isolation style gym work, it’s very hard to train ‘everything you’re supposed to’. This is one of the advantages of training more embodied, rich movement. It’s possible to enjoy the benefits that are tangible but hard to encapsulate in a randomised controlled study.

But I think there’s a bigger question underneath all of this: what are we actually trying to improve?

Strength, power, VO₂ max, bone density, balance - they’re all useful things to measure and, depending on the person, useful things to train.

But presumably the reason we care about any of them is because we hope they allow us to do more of the things that make up a good life.

Which brings me to another article I read this week.

Interesting though brief article from NY Times about trying to apply a more holistic metric toward measuring ageing. Some researchers and clinicians are pushing the concept of Intrinsic Capacity. As they say in the article: 

‘‘Intrinsic’ means all those attributes that you can attribute to the individual from the skin in,” he said. “And ‘capacity’ is looking at their functioning.”  

I remember this conversation when I was studying for my Masters in Public Health. It was where I was first introduced to Nussbaum and Sen’s Capability Approach idea, which informed the WHO’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health framework. Basically it’s an attempt to move away from disease models for defining health and instead focus on what we’re capable of doing and what options we have for interacting with the world around us.

It’s another way of looking at capabilities outside of Newell’s constraints framework, but is trying to tackle the same question: how can we measure and improve people’s capacity to live well and maximise our opportunities to engage in the world.

This model informs a lot of our thinking behind our teaching at the moment. What can we do to improve our quality of life? It’s more than just building VO2 Maxes or well-established fitness metrics.

What I thought was interesting about this article is that it acknowledges the limits of a lot of current attempts to measure health as we age and explores whether there are other ways to think about ageing.

This is where, for me, the two articles connect.

The point of developing strength, power, balance, coordination and cardiovascular fitness isn't simply to become better at strength, power, balance, coordination and cardiovascular fitness. They're resources that we can hopefully turn into capability.

And that increasingly informs how we think about our in-person and online teaching. We absolutely want to improve the things we know matter as we age. But the bigger question is what those improvements allow you to do.

Perhaps the most useful measure of all is whether your world is getting bigger rather than smaller.

Ref: The Most Important Longevity Term You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

Ref: Jackson Fyfe (Fyfe doesn’t have a static page for all his posts, so I’d recommend signing up here)