Fitness after 50 General Physical Preparedness (GPP)

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Fitness after 50

General Physical Preparedness (GPP)

“It’s not the years, it’s the miles”

Aging is inevitable. Let’s say that you’re the average person who had reasonable to good health and fitness as a younger person. Over time, the amount of physical activity you perform is less and less. As we age there are changes in our hormone levels, testosterone for men and estrogen in women which impacts our physical and mental health. Aging has a nasty way of conspiring against us, we used to be able to eat as much as we wanted, could stay up late and still put in a full day’s work with some social activity afterwards, rinse and repeat.

The fitness industry is saturated with terms. A lot of them are abstract and relatively difficult to define (functional training anyone?). Unfortunately, the term general physical preparedness is also used to describe several different training applications.

“A degree of fitness, which is an extension of absolute strength.” Louie Simmons (Westside Barbell)

GPP is general training that improves your specific training by limiting your weaknesses, improving your quality of movement, and enhancing your body’s ability to handle greater workloads. In athletic training terms, if you have good GPP, it means you have now built a strong and broad enough base of general fitness that you may start to apply the intensity in training needed for sporting success

(Dan John) The five basic human movements, which are push, pull, hinge, squat, and loaded carry.

Those fundamental human movements are:

  • Push – exert force on (someone or something), typically with one’s hand, in order to move them away from oneself or the origin of the force
  • Pull – exert force on (someone or something), typically by taking hold of them, in order to move or try to move them toward oneself or the origin of the force
  • Hinge – a type of joint, such as the knee joint, that moves only backwards and forwards
  • Squat – To sit in a crouching position with knees bent and the buttocks on or near the heels
  • Loaded carry – Carrying a weight, like taking groceries from the car to the house or being able to pick a small child and carry them.

I would add another basic human movement – the ability to move from a horizontal to a vertical position, to go from lying down to standing up. This quite possibly, could be the most important movement we learn in order to survive. I’m sure you can remember the commercial for Life Alert where the elderly person is on the ground and says, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up”, think about that. If you are not in good enough physical shape to get off the ground it could be a death sentence. Standing up requires a complex set of core strength to enable a person to move from the ground to a standing position, and having the ability engage the kinesthetic sense and spatial awareness so that the individual can balance and move. That sounds like a very complex movement for something we take for granted. But, imagine an elderly person who is disabled, even minimally with the loss of muscle and coordination that comes with old age.

These 6 principles for general physical preparedness should be the foundation on which you build to ensure that you can function in a healthy manner, and improve your health and fitness.

https://www.t-nation.com/training/practical-guide-to-gpp

https://breakingmuscle.com/fitness/its-not-the-years-its-the-miles-training-after-50