Our societal fitness problem all comes down to people failing to see fitness as a must.
Not only because this would, by definition, drive us to not merely do something about it, but to achieve it, and keep it. But because looking through this lens further guides us as to what this training will look like.
Must look like.
Our lack of understanding in this regard, further undermined by "do what you love" messaging, means that for the general fitness populace— like you and me— our efforts, such as they are, typically begin and end with some form of cardio.
While viewed more favourably in recent times, resistance training is still lacking, much less any refinement toward strength or hypertrophy, both rarer still.
And mobility, if it ever gets a guernsey, it’s only late in the piece when we’re finally moved by pain or incapacity.
At best, then, we have a lopsided idea of fitness, and with our efforts confined to one department, the absence of other, equally important qualities leaves us more predisposed to injury and illness.
Weak links are one thing. Weak links exposed to the stressors of running, rowing or riding are another.
But for all the vagaries here, one thing is damn near guaranteed. Power— being able to produce force quickly— is pretty much never on the cards. If it was ever on them, because most people have never trained this physical quality.
Unless you're a rugby player or MMA fighter, it's unlikely to be on your list of fitness goals, but, for good reason, few will follow either of these pursuits into their 40s. So, sooner or later, jumping, throwing, sprinting, and other powerful movements are just things we did as kids or on a sports field. Since then? Forget it.
Even those that might run, lift or stretch will often never leave the ground—such that many in their 40s and 50s haven’t jumped in years. Until it doesn't feel safe to do so. And it probably isn't.
And there goes that then. No more jumping.
Consigned to memory and likely not something we'll lose any sleep over. But that's a problem, because like the more commonly appreciated fitness qualities—strength and aerobic capacity— before power becomes a measure of performance, it is first one of health.
You may not be busting tackles, slipping punches or smashing the leather off a cricket ball, but as we age, the ability to move powerfully becomes more, not less important, and it is overlooked only through a lack of understanding its significance to our everyday lives.
THE TRIPLE THREAT
As biomarkers that precede the decline of human function and independence, you will (hopefully) be familiar with sarcopenia: the progressive loss of lean muscle through age, inactivity or illness.
Although often mistakenly lumped in with sarcopenia, dynapenia is the term for age-related loss of strength, not caused by neurological or muscular disease— the ability to use the muscle we have and declining at a similar rate as muscle mass at 0.5-1% per year beyond the age of 40.
But in both a sign of its importance and to address this gap in awareness, it was only recently, in 2024, that the term powerpenia was introduced to specifically identify the loss of muscle power.
Determining any hierarchy here —as with any respective facets of training like cardio, strength, hypertrophy, or mobility — is as fuzzy as it is pointless. It is only in our addressing all of these areas that offers any respite. Whatever our strengths, our engagement and enjoyment of life will be defined by our weaknesses, but before we take a look at power specifically, this raises a super-important point.
All three of these biomarkers are, directly or indirectly, a product of muscle, and you minimise the loss of it through strength training and protein intake— the signal you need it, and the raw material.
In light of the observation made above about our favouring of cardio, what is rarely understood, is that whatever form your cardio takes but particularly running — without resistance training, you not only give your body no reason to hang on to metabolically expensive muscle, you give it a reason not to — it’s just extra baggage. So it won’t.
So while you may be getting aerobically fit, you can be amplifying the rate of decrease in all three domains described above: Losing muscle. Getting weaker and slower.
Which doesn't sound like getting fit to me.
At Leftfield, power training is included in every session—in fact, it's considered part of the warm-up. In the first minutes of an early morning session, I'll typically see bodies going through the motions and warming to the task— but with heads still in a warm bed. By spacing power drills throughout the warmup— graduating from 60 to 80 to 100% effort— we not only sneak this vital work into every session, it also brings body and brain online.
But it’s not about dunking a basketball. At first, it's not about athletic performance at all, but something far more fundamental.
Defined as force x velocity, power is not just about muscle, but how fast your nervous system can recruit it. It’s your brain’s ability to send rapid, coordinated messages to your muscles and, like its precursor strength, it's largely neurological.
But where strength builds slowly and deteriorates gradually— you could do no training for 3 weeks before strength even begins to decay and is easily maintained with minimal training— your ability to use that strength quickly drops off sharply, especially after age 30 and far faster than either muscle size or strength at 2-4% per year beyond the age of 40.
So as we age into our 50s, 60s and beyond, even if we retain a high level of lean muscle and strength, we can be all show and no go. And while its presence—or absence—shows up across the full spectrum of physicality and with all the descriptors to match—from snappy and crisp to fluid and lithe—it can be summed up in one: vitality.
As can its opposite: frailty.
It’s the spring in your step that you lose. And lose fast. And with little more than a shrug.
Should you be motivated to do something about it, the good news is that what is fast lost, is fast won, and it can be recaptured relatively quickly with proper training.
And should you not be, the bad news is that lack of pep in your step is the mere physical sign of neurological decline.
If you stopped jumping long ago, you haven't only lost the ability to get off the ground— the physical expression— but a dimming of neural correlates, including spatial orientation, coordination, judging distance and proprioception.
Activities like jumping, sprinting, or quick changes of direction require precise body coordination in space. This keeps proprioceptive systems sharp—those sensory networks in your muscles and joints that tell your brain where your limbs are at all times.
Kids roll, jump, cartwheel, and fall all the time. Their brains are constantly mapping movement, but as your movement literacy decreases, that body map becomes blurry. Power movements re-awaken and reinforce it. Whole-body skills that only stay online when you keep using them.
You might well decide you no longer ‘need’ to jump, but it's all but impossible to untangle what else goes with it. One way to think about this is that, given the suite of associated neurological demands, being able to jump likely helps you parallel park.
Doing anything with maximum effort, fast, comes with a host of neural benefits. The less palatable flip side is that for every physical expression you let lapse, a series of associated neural elements dims or disappears accordingly.
By not training power, you're not challenging those fast, reflexive connections. And if you stop, the nervous system prunes those pathways, deleting the software. So it offers a bulwark to the slow, gradual decline of age, but where it really steps up is when the challenge to health and home doesn’t pass with a shrug but lands with a bang.
And should we continue the prevailing trend of sacrificing competence for ease, here we open the door to a whole new world of pain.
It doesn't get much press next to the ‘lifestyle collection’, but beyond the age of 50, your greatest health risk, by many orders of magnitude, is gravity, or more specifically, the ground.
When you trip or stumble, it’s your ability to move quickly—and precisely—that determines whether you fall safely, or at all. Should you trip and find yourself rapidly rendezvousing with terra firma, suddenly incentivised to position a hand or arm protectively, or otherwise orient yourself in space, quickly, it's power you'll be summoning, or lamenting the lack thereof.
This cannot be overstated.
Jumping, bounding, sprinting, and landing are all well and good, but where power comes into its own —and uniquely so—is when we're called to react.
I have long made the point that the purpose of training is not to be better at exercise, but better at life. And the fact is that truly important, life-changing moments often come with a requisite tempo. Imperatives are, by definition, essential and urgent.
Run!
Duck!
Move!
Can you? Rolling on the floor with your grandkids is priceless, but what if you have to move fast to save them?
The pot of boiling water, the reversing car, or the safety gate left open at the top of the stairs.
Maybe you don’t need to jump anymore, but in determining catastrophe or close call, it’s power that gets the casting vote.
The cultural association of power with performance hides its true role: survival and function. Power is not a luxury, but a necessity. There are the quick and the dead, and including power training regularly not only improves physical capability but delays functional decline, supports independence, and sharpens mental acuity. It fosters resilience, longevity, and faster responses to unpredictable life events.
It is protective of yourself and others.
So that’s it, that’s my power plug, and if you’re not motivated to do something about it now, I don’t know what to tell you. Good luck, I guess.
But if you are, I’ll give you the how in the Easter post next week, when, with a couple of days off, you’ll be able to get straight into it.
Right?
(Ever the eternal optimist…)
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Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI