Why I want you to stand up faster this week

Fall showed up on schedule this year.

It got dark on the drive home this week and I've already had three people tell me they feel like they're moving slower. Every September. Like clockwork.

Speaking of 7 AM — Alyssa's Tuesday/Thursday small group is up and running now. Four people, each on their own program, in and out before the day starts. If mornings have ever been the thing standing between you and consistency, reply and ask me about it.

Now, the thing I actually want to tell you about.

Strength and power are not the same thing

When we train, we mostly talk about strength: how much weight you can move. That matters. But there's a second quality sitting next to it that gets almost no attention, and for a body between 40 and 75 it's arguably the more important one.

It's power. Strength is how much you can move. Power is how fast you can produce that force.

Here's why I care about it. Strength fades slowly as we age. Power fades faster — roughly twice as fast. So you can be a person who's genuinely strong, who deadlifts respectable weight on Tuesday, and still be slow to catch yourself when your foot clips the curb on Wednesday. Those are two different systems.

And power is the one that shows up in ordinary life more than you'd think. Getting out of a low chair without using your hands. Climbing stairs at somebody else's pace instead of your own. Carrying a grandchild who has decided, mid-carry, to lunge sideways. Catching your balance on a wet sidewalk — that's not a strength problem, that's a "how fast can your body respond" problem.

The good news, and it's genuinely good: power responds fast. Faster than strength does. You don't need new equipment, more time, or heavier weights. You need to change how you move the weight you're already moving.

The fix is one word: intent

Take a rep you already do. Instead of moving it at the same steady speed the whole way, push or stand up as fast as you can on the way up, then lower slowly and under control on the way down.

Fast up. Slow down. That's the whole idea.

Two things to be clear about, because this is where people get it wrong. Fast doesn't mean sloppy, and it doesn't mean heavy. You use a lighter weight than usual for this — something around half of what you'd normally lift — because the goal is speed, not grinding. And you stop the set while every rep is still crisp. The moment they start slowing down, the set is over. Five or six reps, not twelve.

This week

Try this, twice, on non-consecutive days:

Sit on a sturdy dining chair. Stand up as fast as you comfortably can — no hands, if you can manage it — then sit back down slowly, counting three seconds on the way down. Five reps. Rest a minute. Do it three times.

That's it. Maybe four minutes total. If standing without hands isn't available today, use your hands and go for speed anyway, or start from a higher surface like the arm of a couch. Meeting yourself where you are is not cheating, it's just the correct starting weight.

Then tell your trainer you did it. We'll build it into your sessions properly and pick the right lifts to apply it to, because it works even better with a bar in your hands than a dining chair under you.

And if any of this raised a question — about your knees, your balance, whether this is right for you specifically — hit reply. I read every one of them. Or grab me in the studio and we'll sort it out between sets.

See you this week,

Nino

Sage Personal Training
Whitestone, NY

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