Build Endurance In Your Den - Fred Grace

Doug Hepburn

Roy L. Smith, age 78
easily bent pressing over 150 lbs.

Father Bernard Lange, age 67
Deadlifting over 525 lbs. without much trouble

Paby Salas, age 50
Crucifix with over 55 lbs. each hand

Build Endurance in Your Den
by Fred Grace


There’s one born every minute. Or there was in Barnum’s day. Today the number has to be four or five. Check the race tracks. Check Vegas. Check the brain blowers. Check the arm blowers. Check “convenience” foods. Check non-food foods. Check the exercise gimmicks that come out every day. But don’t need the Better Business to protect you. If you’re not looking to find something for nothing you can’t be taken in.

If you’re not willing to pump like an oil well for three to five years, no nutrition, pill, vitamin or exercise gimmick is going to make you a top Head. Heads are esthetically atrophied. However, they didn’t get that way stinting on hard pumping and just swallowing growth pills.

If you’re not willing to get out and run, no running gimmick is going to make a runner out of you. The market is glutted with running tracks measuring from 18 feet down to 18 inches. Endurance-wise they’re as useful as a hand with five toes or a foot with five fingers.

Health stores and exercise mags are loaded with super foods and super vitamins. But they won’t give you super health unless you take super workouts along with them. I’m nuts? Check the health store’s customers. Check the readers of exercise mags. I know a subscriber to four muscle mags who’s been on the verge of starting to lift weights for 25 years.

However, here’s something for nothing, or practically so, except for hard work. It will give you endurance and a springy step. It will keep you out of a convalescent confinement. It will make you a better dove; or a better hawk.

Find, or build, a box about 18” high, 18” wide, and about 24” long. If your ceiling won’t accommodate, then build the box lower. Just be sure it’s the right height and of sturdy lumber unless you don’t mind splinters in your legs and bumps on your head.

Now, just step up on the box, and step down. Alternate feet every time. When you get the rhythm it’s as easy as kissing a girl without the risk of mononucleosis.

Forget the count. Concentrate on your Timex. If you’re under 100 and still mobile, start with one step with each foot and work it up to 30 minutes. It won’t exactly be a 50-mile run, but a good start.

If you’re under 80, start with a couple of steps, and work up your walkie-walkie to one hour. It won’t exactly be a 50-mile run but it’ll keep you off elevators even when you’re 100.

But if you’re under 60 – ah, you can still be a tough monkey and run 50 miles by the time you’re 80. After you work up your walk-uppies to an hour, add 25 lb. dummies to your hands and drop back to 5 minutes of stepping. Work it up to an hour.

This exercise won’t make you a 600-plus squatter, but it’ll add a lot more years to your squatting than the straight super squatter can hope for. Even if he kept up his thing until a heart attack got; but he’ll quit by the time he’s 40 more than likely, and he’ll be next to nothing by the time he’s 50.

Take hope. There’s an alternative to endurance work with weights or the exercise I’ve just described to you. Pick out the wheel chair you like. You can roll around more places and cover way more distance than stepping up and down on an 18” box.