In the last post, I shared a few suggestions for creating a durable exercise routine using the American Heart Association guidelines as a starting point [1].

Today, I wanted to discuss how to select exercises to improve your durability in the performance sport of life.

Training > Exercise

Our first step is to shift our vocabulary from exercise to training. This may sound like a semantic distinction, but hear me out.

Most people think of exercise as something you show up and do. Training is different in that it carries expectations beyond simply doing an exercise.

The four primary expectations you should have of training for durability are:

1. To increase your muscle mass (or help stave off muscle mass decline, also called sarcopenia).
2. To increase strength (strength is your ability to generate maximum force against an external resistance).
3. To improve your bone health (or stave off weakened bones, called osteopenia or osteoporosis).
4. Improve your cardiovascular fitness.

Expectation four, improving your cardiovascular fitness, is relatively straightforward and is usually managed by most “exercise” routines.

Meeting expectations 1-3 doesn’t come as easily. They take purposeful planning, dedicated execution, and a commitment to do hard things when you don’t feel like it. That’s training.

Exercises For Durability

With expectations 1-3 in mind, we have a clear view of the types of exercises best suited for the training objective of durability:

• Performed on stable surfaces
• Incorporate multi-joint/compound movements
• Utilize bilateral (both feet) movements
• Favor an element of real-world instability (free weights) over the less sport-specific movement of a machine
• Are scalable to meet relative intensity targets from the untrained to highly trained

Considering the above points, the most practical and sustainable exercises to improve durability usually involve a barbell.

Of course barbell training isn’t the only option to begin improving your durability, but it remains the gold standard by which other exercises are graded.

So how should you program your barbell movements? We’ll get into that in our next post, but in general we want to focus on the four most common human movements:

• Squatting down
• Picking something off the floor
• Pushing something over our heads
• Pushing something away from our body

These “functional” human movements line up with the four most powerful barbell exercises we have:

1. Squat
2. Deadlift
3. Overhead Press
4. Bench Press

With these exercises forming the core of our durability routine, we’ll get into how to best program them next.