Cardio

If you wear a watch or a band, you know the picture: it’s eleven at night, you’re two thousand steps short, so you walk laps around your building. The watch sets off fireworks and you feel like you’ve done your duty for the day. That number — 10,000 — you’ve assumed is a scientific standard. It isn’t. It was a slogan invented in 1965 by a Japanese clock company to sell pedometers, and at the time there was no research behind it at all. The science only got bolted on decades later. ...

Ask a man in his forties how his training is going and you’ll hear about his squat, his bench, maybe his deadlift. Ask about his VO2max and you’ll usually get a blank look. That’s a strange gap, because of every number you can attach to your body, your VO2max is among the best predictors of how long you keep doing anything at all. Here’s the tension at the heart of the decade-scale plan. You lift to keep muscle, protect your joints, and hold off the slow leak of strength that middle age brings. That’s correct — strength matters, and it matters more after forty, not less. But the aerobic engine underneath it is the thing most lifters quietly neglect, and the evidence says that engine is doing some of your most important longevity work behind the scenes. ...

Cardio or strength first? The answer (and why) The question sounds like a chore nobody should have to solve: do I lift weights or do cardio first? But behind it sits a tension every man over 40 eventually feels — there’s only so much time and recovery in a week, and you keep hearing that both are essential. Good news: for almost everyone, the evidence points the same way. Put strength training first — both in priority and in workout order — and treat cardio as the supporting player, not the main event. ...