Merle Fisher lived to his mid-90s.
He raised a whole litter of kids, nine in total, ran a bee farming and pollination operation, and said about six words the whole damn time. Merle was one of my best friend’s grandfathers. I started spending time on his farm when I was a boy and would see him periodically until he died sometime while I was in college.
I’d say, “Hello, Mr. Fisher.” He’d nod and say hi back. That was the extent of our communication for the decade I knew him. His wife, who was a lovely woman, talked a lot. In Pennsylvania speak, you’d say that her mouth ran like a duck’s ass. And I sincerely say that with all the respect in the world, she was a kind and generous woman. Maybe Merle was so quiet because he was maintaining balance in the soundwaves. More likely, he was a wise old timer who didn’t talk unless he truly had something to say.
By the time I met Merle Fisher, he was retired from farming and had already outlived the life expectancy of the average American man. He spent the idle hours of his retirement in a peculiar way. I saw it for the first time when his grandson and I came to the farm to go fishing.
We were walking down the farm lane towards the river when I looked over to see Merle swinging a sledgehammer. He was standing at the base of an old barn foundation made from field rocks. “What’s your pap doing?” I asked my friend, Josh.
“He’s breaking rocks with a sledgehammer. He does it to pass the time,” Josh replied.
There was no work to be done. Merle simply took satisfaction in using his body to accomplish a task, something engrained in him from a lifetime of hard work. The rock foundation is still there. I’m currently living on the farm, in the house that Merle lived and died in, and each time I walk past it, I remember the June day when I saw a man in his eighties raise a sledgehammer over his head to smash a rock.
Should we all be so capable when we’re old.
Remembering Merle makes me contrast what I know about him and how he lived with the fitness advice disseminated by research-based influencers lacking the practical experience to understand how their recommendations fit into a person’s life.
Mostly, it causes more harm than good by causing people to worry about things they don’t need to worry about. I am not a researcher; God knows I’d never want to be one. But during my 20 years as a coach, I’ve developed and honed the skill of understanding what matters, what doesn’t, and how fitting the right activities into a person’s life causes dramatic, positive secondary and tertiary consequences, a ripple effect that improves a person physically and psychologically. That’s why I get so frustrated by the out-of-touch bullshit perpetuated by people who read research but lack the insight to see how what they preach affects the people they’re preaching to.
So, I’m here to provide a counterbalance, not so much like Merle’s quiet wisdom, but with the accumulated, practical fitness and psychological experience to advise you on what doesn’t matter.
This column will be a series on the Beyond Strength blog. I’ll start by showing you why a popular fitness metric doesn’t truly matter for your health, fitness, or longevity.
Stop Worrying About Your V02max
The notion that you need to achieve a certain V02max to participate in certain activities was popularized in recent years by Peter Attia, now of Epstein File fame. Beyond the creepy relationship with an evil man, we need to consider the source of the recommendation.
Peter Attia openly admits that he’s an extreme form of Type A. He’s wound tighter than an eight-day clock. Folks like this are caught in a constant cycle of self-measurement and self-judgement. The son of a bitch pricks his fingers during aerobic workouts to measure his blood lactate, for Christ’s sake. Now, you could say he’s doing it in the name of science. That’s likely partially true. But, I’d bet it has more to do with an uncontrollable drive to constantly measure himself. People like Peter Attia need constant reinforcement to solidify their sense of self. They need metrics to make themselves feel like they’re doing okay.
That’s why people like him propose ideas such as the necessity of achieving and maintaining a certain V02max for the sake of longevity and to participate in certain activities. Is there a correlation between V02max and long-term health and activity outcomes? Yes. But we cannot infer causation from correlation. Overstating the meaning of the metric does more harm than good; it creates a thought parasite that causes people to focus on a metric that likely has no significant influence on the length of their healthspan or their ability to do the physical activities they love. You can just go do the shit you like to do.
Training science also tells a different story about V02max. As people gain high levels of aerobic fitness, their V02max often decreases. We see this in endurance athletes at the peak of their performance. It shouldn’t make sense. But, with a little logical probing, we see how it does.
The goal of any aspect of conditioning — strength, muscular endurance, aerobic capacity, etc. — is efficiency. We train our bodies to do more with less. As we improve our fitness, we reach a point where the demand for oxygen decreases. We don’t need as much for our metabolism to work well. It makes sense that oxygen uptake and utilization decrease. You need less to do more. If we know that’s the logical conclusion, why in the hell would we worry so much about pushing our V02max as high as possible? That dog just don’t hunt.
Do you think Merle ever gave a single thought about whether or not his fitness metrics determined what he could and couldn’t do? No. He went outside and smashed rocks because he enjoyed smashing rocks.
Don’t let the disconnected musings of an insecure overachiever make you believe that you need to worry about shit that doesn’t matter.
If you enjoy smashing rocks, go smash rocks.
Next Time
In the next column, I’ll cover why this push away from overall activity and towards short bursts of high-intensity activity is a poorly considered, terrible idea for most people.
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