Barbell Medicine Newsletter Volume Issue 6

Training Q&A [Moderated]
1

Good day, this is question I’ve had in mind ever since I read the Barbell Medicine Newsletter Volume Issue 6, specifically regarding how strong is strong enough for health? As I understand from that newsletter, if you can bench press 1.1 times your BW, and leg press 1.9 times your BW then you are strong enough for health. This is music to my ears, because I have long held pretty unattainable (for me at least) strength standards. I also tend to good morning my squats and for some mental reason always go over my RPE on squats, and since reading that newsletter, I have replaced squats with single leg - leg press and leg press. I enjoy leg press a lot more than I did squatting, plus I’m seeing leg hypertrophy. My leg press e1RM is about 3.3 times my BW atm. One day I’ll probably be in the mood to squat again, but does it matter for health if I don’t squat? I still deadlift, press and bench press with barbells, I just replaced squats with leg press.

And is the following way a good way to conceptualize good physical health? I should meet the baseline strength set in that newsletter. My waist circumference should be in the ideal range for my demographic, and I should meet a certain cardiovascular measurement. Is there some kind of baseline measurement that I can use to see if I’m cardio vascularly fit enough for health? Any feedback would be appreciated.

2

Willem,

Thanks for the post. I have good news and potentially bad news. The good news is that you can live a full and complete life without training the squat, provided you don’t care about your squat performance.

The bad news is that while these strength standards seem to correlate well with health, we’re not sure if achieving them from a lower level of strength improves health trajectory. Similarly, we don’t know if maintaining them (vs improving) has the same effect on health outcomes. For example, some data shows only those who have gotten stronger during the study period see resting blood pressure decrease and blood sugar regulation metrics improve. I’m not exactly sure how far we can extrapolate these findings, though I think trying to get stronger and adjusting programming parameters to stack the deck in your favor seems reasonable.

As far as priorities for health, I think this article reflects our current thinking: Where should my priorities be to improve my health?

3

This is great, thanks! I just don’t know about avoiding naps :slight_smile: