These Five Fitness Tests Are Designed to Help You Save Your Life
When you’re working on your fitness, a specific goal can help you. Rather than choosing an arbitrary weight for lifting (or a specific body type ), the five fitness goals in this video are aimed at helping you save your life in an emergency.
As the self-help blog The Art of Manliness points out, one of the best reasons to improve your fitness is to make sure you can handle yourself in an emergency. A 500 pound bench press won’t help you if you can’t run far or jump very high. While these guidelines apply to some fairly unlikely scenarios (which all emergencies are), they also provide a fairly balanced view of fitness. As longtime strongman Earl Liderman describes in detail, here are five fitness criteria you should ideally achieve in order to save your life:
- Swim at least half a mile or more.
- Run at a maximum speed of two hundred yards or more.
- Jump over obstacles above the belt.
- With the strength of your hands, pull your body upward until your chin touches your hands at least fifteen to twenty times.
- Dip between the uneven bars or between two chairs at least twenty-five times.
While these goals are not an easy feat without some preparation, they are also possible for the layperson. They don’t require a specific diet or body type, and they don’t focus on strength training per se. While exercise won’t magically make you invincible or prevent emergencies, it is worth keeping in mind when exercising that a goal that prepares you for emergencies can be more practical and therefore more reassuring.
Are you strong enough to save your life? | The art of masculinity