Build Endurance in Your Den - Fred Grace (1970)

 

Courtesy of Liam Tweed

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 "convenience" foods. Check non-food foods. Check the exercise gimmicks that come out every day. 

But you don't need the Better Business Bureau to protect you. If you're not looking for 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 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 with them.

Am I nuts? 

Check the health food stores' customers. Check the readers of exercise mags. I know a subscriber to four muscle mags who has been on the verge of starting to lift weights for 25 years. 

"Oh yeah, I've been on a bulking program for three years and should have an exercise layout picked out soon. But the diet's down great!" 

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 retirement. It will make you a better dove; or a better hawk. 

Find, or build, a box about 18" high, 18" wide and about 24" inches long. Be sure it's of sturdy lumber unless you don't mind large splinters in your legs. 

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 uppie walkies to an hour, add 25-lb. dummies to your hands and drop back to five minutes of stepping. Work it up to an hour.

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

But there's an alternative to endurance work with weights or the exercise I've just described to you. Pick out the wheelchair you like. You can be wheeled more places and cover more distance than stepping up and down on an 18" box. 

Enjoy Your Lifting!