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09-03-21 10:12 AM - Post#913057
If you've been active for your lifetime you sometimes don't realise what an advantage that is in dealing with physical challenges, compared to the person who's been sedentary.
There was a study a while back where they asked the doctors in a state to look at pictures of kids and put them in the BMI categories of "overweight", "obese" and so on, just visually. The doctors assessed the overweight kids as normal, and the obese ones as merely overweight. It's just that they were so used to seeing big kids their idea of "normal" had changed.
It can happen the other way. If you've been active for a lifetime, chances are a lot of your family and friends are, too. And then you don't realise that deadlifting bodyweight would be a significant challenge for most people they'd actually have to train for, and - walking 3 miles in 45 minutes? Why would you walk 3 miles, that's what the car is for!
Walking 3 miles in under an hour, deadlifting your bodyweight and jumping a yard isn't much to an active person, but it's a huge deal to a sedentary person.
In the modern West, it's actually an achievement to be physically active for decades on end. Being physically active in the First World is like having a personal library of 500 books in the Third World.
Don't underestimate your achievements, guys.
These are excellent points, Kyle. I remember when that study came out, and it certainly applies in spades to adults too. If you live in the West, then you are just used to seeing really big people, from kids on up, and it's important for those of us who hang out in places like this forum to be reminded from time to time. And also to be reminded from time to time that even a bodyweight deadlift is vastly beyond most people, even if it seems like nothing to many of us.
And the size of people seems to be going more the wrong way every day. Usually the school drop-off and pick-up is something I do, but since the kids are just now back to school full-time after almost 18 months, their mother has been coming along too, and seen a lot of people she hasn't seen in ages. After we dropped the kids on Monday, she said "you must be the only person who lost weight during the pandemic -- these people all got BIG." But I'm not sure the people in question really see it that way -- it's just what they're used to and what they always see.
Aside # 1 -- @ipood -- I ended up walking an additional errand to the pharmacy yesterday evening, so made it to 20,000 steps without any particular effort to do so.
Aside # 2 -- tried a broad jump when I got back from my post-workout, pre-lunch walk yesterday, for the first time in ages. Made it 104" (or 8'8") barefoot on grass -- could maybe go a bit further in shoes on a hard surface. That's not a huge jump, but I'm only 5'6"/66", so it's a bit more than 1.5x my height, which I'm happy with. As a short-arse who doesn't weigh much, I'm always trying to convince people standards should be measured taking into account height and bodyweight. :-D
So, TL; DR -- stay active -- I don't think you'll regret it.
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