Gertrude is my lovely 98 year old grandma that will eventually pancake into explosion. But Gertrude is alive…for now. I’m telling you about Gertrude because she’s an important character in my mental model to explain training methods (namely barbell and bodyweight training) and their effects (on physique and performance). Fasten your seat belts. I don’t [...]
Gertrude is my lovely 98 year old grandma that will eventually pancake into explosion.
But Gertrude is alive…for now.
I’m telling you about Gertrude because she’s an important character in my mental model to explain training methods (namely barbell and bodyweight training) and their effects (on physique and performance).
Fasten your seat belts. I don’t know where we will end up, but I know where we will start.
Here:
Think of the human being that you are at this exact moment in time. You can wiggle your toes. You can hop, jump, and skip. You can run. You can throw a ball. You can pick your nose. You can hump…things.
TL;DR: you can move yourself, you have a certain degree of physical capacity.
Now think of Gertrude.
Gertrude lives in a nursing home. She’s 98 years old. She’s not one of the elderly anomalies with a Master Roshi disguised power, doing the splits, owning the shuffle board competition in the rec center.
Gertrude can wiggle her toes. That’s about all she can do. She uses a walker to move from place to place.
Unlike your vim filled bones, Gertrude’s bones are fragile.
If you decided to hump your neighbor in a fit of adulterous rage, you’d be able to jump out of the bedroom window that’s five feet from the ground (when you’re co-offender’s husband [wife?] got home) and run away.
If Gertrude flung herself from window ledge five foot high, a clean up crew would have to squeegee her guts off the concrete patio slab.
Point made: there’s a HUGE difference between you and Gertrude.
Now…
Imagine if we shuttled ‘ol Gertrude into the vacuum of space. Would she still need a walker?
Suddenly the difference between your parkourin’ behind and Gertrude’s non-existent behind isn’t so huge.
Gertrude has an enemy on Earth that doesn’t exist in space:
Gravity.
Earth’s gravity is under appreciated because it’s a constant medium crashing atop your body. Just like water to a fish.
It’s best to imagine Earth and gravity as something real instead of invisible space. So imagine floating above the surface of the earth. Weightless. Now imagine strings poking out of Earth’s surface. Those strings insert into every one of your joints, like a reverse marionette. Then, pending the level of gravity, the strings pull downward.
Gravity glues us to the floor in the vertical direction.
You are always sifting through this medium…unless you’re Gertrude. She can’t sift very well, so she just erodes away in bed. She lost the ability to overcome the downward pull of the gravitational strings.
But you? You can still overcome the pull a bunch of different ways.
Gertrude blames the natural aging process for her decline. Most Americans would.
“I’m just getting old,” she says. “Look around me. Everyone my age is like this.”
Age plays a role. Humans are finite creatures, after all. But there’s more to Gertrude’s woes than age.
And as whackadoodle as it sounds, understanding Gertrude’s physical decline is the key to unlocking an understanding of most physical inclines.
This is our “launch pad” for next letter.
(In air quotations for secretsz reasons!!?)