I am 50 years old, and have been running for the last 20. According to my orthopedist (who treats me for osteoarthritis), my pelvis, knees, ankles, and so on are in excellent health. I have significantly better bone density than most adult men my age. He attributes those qualities to my running. Before you think I’m one of those little guys with no body fat, I’m 6’1″ and I weigh 210 pounds. Running is one of the principle reasons that’s not 275 pounds. I’m slow; I recently finished a half-marathon 19th out of 20 in my age group.

The reason people have bone and joint problems from running is the same as if they played basketball, bicycled, or did some other sport. They played beyond their ability and developed an injury because of it. It’s not the fault of the sport. Running in worn-out shoes, adding 6 miles a week when you’re a 15 mile-a-week runner, doing a marathon on a whim, all of those are stupid things to do that beg for an injury. It would be no different if I played a pickup game with a bunch of 25 year-olds, and then complained my knees hurt. It’s my own damned fault, not basketball.

Go! Read it now, I beg you.

It is a super-concentrated distillation of fitness and strength training knowledge; the best summary I’ve ever seen. In particular, two brief illustrations IMO are key — the “Formula for Getting Fit” and “It’s All About Timing”, both on page 4.

If there is such a thing as a “secret” to getting fit, you will find it there.

Kind regards.

Thanks Alan for this great suggestions.

I get pissed off at this stuff sometimes.

There are postural muscles of your body that keep you upright and balanced, and there are big muscles that you can strengthen (eg. abs, pecs etc). You can’t actually do much to strengthen your postural muscles, and you don’t need to. They’re strong enough to do their job just from every day use. What you do need to learn to do, however, is to control them.

What people don’t realise is that sitting upright is the position that requires the least energy. People think it takes a lot of effort to sit up straight. The people who think this are generally not sitting up straight when they think they are. They are usually over-concaving their lower back, pulling their shoulders back and contracting their neck.

I like to think about my body as a pile of boxes on top of each other. If they’re stacked directly on top of each other, it’s a fairly stable structure that you can move around easily. If the boxes are more skewed and out of alignment, it takes a lot more effort to keep them from falling over.

I suppose a lot of my dispute with the main article is that it’s showing only half of the picture. Push ups are only beneficial if you do them properly (which is surprisingly difficult to do!). Stretching, also, is only beneficial if you do it properly. Without proper guidance you can do a lot of damage.

An article, such as the one above, can be very very dangerous, because it only tells half the story and leaves itself open to interpretation. I’m sure your friends with decades of experience in the fitness industry will agree that personal supervision and instruction is vital in doing exercises.

ps, google tensegrity structures.. the human body is a complicated form of a tensegrity structure.

A few tips for the office that I find work:
1 – at least once every half hour or so, get up from your seat and walk around just to loosen up the legs/back. Good for resting the eyes too – can’t count how many times I’ve come back to find an obvious problem in my code ;-)
2 – use a glass for your water – gives you an excuse to exercise #1, and it will encourage you to drink more. As a side effect you’ll end up getting up more often to use the bathroom
3 – Do some chair exercises, I won’t go into detail, but there are loads of websites out there that will provide some guidance (http://exercise.about.com/cs/exerciseworkouts/l/blofficeworkout.htm and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEYvmHg3Pw0)