My Favorite Exercises Volume IV
Move fast and don't die.
Post summary
This is the fourth installment of a monthly series featuring my favorite exercises of all time.
We’ll highlight one perfect exercise that works wonders for anyone who has a body and uses it. That is to say, you.
This month’s exercise increases your power—which is a key to performing well and maintaining health and function into old age.
Watch the video below to learn the exercise.
Housekeeping
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Audio/podcast edition
We’re discontinuing audio reads for My Favorite Exercise posts (they’re visual). If you still want to listen, go to this post in the Substack app and hit the play icon at the very top above the post title. That’ll give you an AI audio read. Here’s how to do that.
The post
My first real job was acting as Fitness Editor for Men’s Health magazine.
In that role, I talked to the world’s greatest athletes and its top health scientists and athletic trainers.
When these experts sent us an exercise or workout, I had to test it to ensure it would work for our readers. I vetted hundreds of exercises.
Along the way, I discovered many truly effective exercises—and I’ve kept all the best ones in a file ever since.
When I think about what makes a good exercise, I consider a few factors:
It should deliver many benefits in a single movement, improving our health and fitness in less time.
It should improve our fitness in a way that makes us safer in the future by improving our healthspan and lifespan.
It should help us move better—because the better we move, the better we feel and perform.
It should offset some of the harms of living in the modern world, where we sit behind screens and steering wheels most of the day.
It should translate to the real world and make us better at the activities we love, whether outdoor sports, pickleball, or chasing down kids.
Enter the My Favorite Exercise series. Each edition will feature one great exercise from my file.
Why just one each month? One is actionable.
For example, when I get a list of 10 really great exercises, I’m more likely to pick and choose. I’ll do some and not others—and I’ll miss out on many benefits.
By focusing on one each month, we’ll all slowly try new exercises and find those that work well for us. And that’ll make us fitter and healthier so we can do big things.
This month’s exercise
This month, we’ll break stuff. Or try to, anyway.
I do this exercise once or twice a week. It’s helped me:
Run trails, which require a lot of powering uphills and side-to-side bounding.
Improve my power, which is arguably the most crucial strength metric for healthspan and lifespan.
Not fall on my ass (which is important always, but especially as we age).
Strengthen my core, especially my back and obliques.
You’ll need a weight you can slam or throw. Think: A medicine ball, sandbag, sand medicine ball, etc.
We’ve long known that throwing and slamming weights can build fitness and health—crude training contraptions like animal skins filled with sand date back at least 3,000 years.
In ancient Greece and Persia, athletes and warriors used them for strength and power training.
Hippocrates, the Greek physician, recommended them for physical rehabilitation and longevity.
Modern science is backing what the ancients assumed. Various studies have found medicine ball training improves your body:
One study found a 12-week medicine ball training program improved bench press power by 15 percent and shoulder press power by 14 percent.
Another study found a 6-week medicine ball training program improved tennis serve speed by nearly 20 percent.
Another found that it boosted rotational power by about 20 percent.
Why it “works”
Weight training is great. This we know.
But we tend to lift the weights in a slow-ish, controlled fashion—we have to decelerate at the top of the lift, limiting how much power we generate.
By winding up, moving explosively, and letting the weight fly, we don’t have to slow down an exercise at its endpoint. We can accelerate fully through the movement and get peak power benefits.
That, in turn, allows us to recruit more of our powerful fast-twitch muscle fibers.
Build power or die: Healthspan and lifespan
Those powerful fast-twitch muscle fibers are critical.
The ability to exert force rapidly is obviously important in sports. It determines if you can jump well, run faster, accelerate and decelerate, power yourself uphill, and more. It’s involved in throwing, striking, hitting a golf ball, baseball, or tennis ball, and much more.
But it’s also critical for longevity—research shows power is a great predictor of whether a person can live safely and independently.
Around 40, however, your muscle power and fast-twitch fibers begin to decline rapidly.
Consider falls. Fall prevention in older adults is getting a lot of attention lately—as it should. Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death in adults over 65 and they’re becoming more catastrophic as general fitness declines.
If you break an arm, it’s an annoyance that’ll heal. But breaking a hip is devastating. About a third of people over 65 who break their hip are dead within two years.
We often think falling is a balance problem, but power is arguably far more important.
If you begin to fall, you need to quickly and explosively shoot out a foot or hand to catch yourself, then decelerate. No amount of balance can help you with many types of falls.
Hence, doing power exercises like this one is critical to performing well today and tomorrow.