#10. Weight lifting: An activity for everyone Monday, August 31, 2020 "Quality of life" is a concept as personal as it is vague. Everyone you ask is likely to define it a little bit differently. Consider these examples: 22-year-old D'jim Jones doesn't care about things like lipid profiles or a family history of osteoporosis; he just wants to look better. He's not a mess. Normal height, normal weight, normal-fitting clothes. But it'd be nice if those clothes flattered his form a bit more. 35-year-old Grace just found out she's pregnant. As soon as that plus sign revealed itself like a pee-covered omen, it purged all other cares from her conscience. Her only concern now is incubating in the tiny biological bedroom atop her bladder. "Little Boris will be the healthiest babe in the world!", she regularly promises uninterested bystanders. 76-year-old, fiercely-independent Barbella lives on the third story of her brownstone in Queens. Every week, she carries two dairy-packed grocery bags up those stairs. And she'll be damned if she's going to rely on some neighborhoodlum to help her out. For all three of these people, goal attainment will require resistance training. Repeatedly flexing without discernable reason is not just an activity for sweaty athletes and gym rats. It's an enormous enhancer of everyone's quality of life, no matter how they define it. Except toddlers, I guess. After puberty though, weight lifting is a valuable activity for us all. So here are some tips about it: Tip 1) Weight. Don't overdo it. People often get greedy here, and that's rarely helpful. More often, greed compromises our form. And form is far more important. Just watch a tank-topped grunter do bicep curls. His biceps only carry about half the load. The rest is distributed across his shoulders, back, and larynx. His arms would be more responsive to the exercise if they were allowed to curl on their own. Tip 2) Range of motion. This tends to be where people cheat the most. It's weirder than adding inappropriate muscles to the cause; at least that comes from a place of ambition. Here, people ignore half of the range of motion. Sometimes this is a consequence of increasing weight too quickly, and pretending the reps can still be done, but often people are just trying to get the set over with faster. In either case, it's weird. Consider the mile. 5,280 feet. I can cover that distance in world record time if I pretend half a mile is the full thing. But that sort of performance is not going to give me a miler's legs or lungs. And in the end, adaptation is what matters. Our muscles adapt to the ranges of motion they're exposed to. The more we cut that range short, the more we narrow the breadth of adaptation. Tip 3) Rest. Get plenty. Not just sleep, although that's important too, but days of recovery. Don't do the same body part two days in a row and if a muscle group is sore, go easy on it. You aren't going to make progress faster by overdoing it.