Cut From Steel

He did one-armed push-ups on the Oscars stage at seventy-three

Jack Palance won Best Supporting Actor at the sixty-fourth Academy Awards on 30 March 1992, for playing Curly in City Slickers. He was seventy-three years old, standing in a room that had spent his whole late career treating men his age as finished.

Palance took the statue, then got down on the stage and did three one-armed push-ups. He framed it as an answer rather than a stunt, telling the room this is what a man does when producers decide he is past it.

Palance had the background for that. He was born Volodymyr Palahniuk in 1919, the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, and he boxed professionally under the name Jack Brazzo. In the war he enlisted in the Army Air Forces, trained on B-24 Liberators, and was injured in a 1943 crash that took reconstructive surgery to put right.

Palance closed the speech with a producer he had met on his first film in 1949, a man who told him he would win an Academy Award one day. Forty-two years later, Palance said, the fellow turned out to be right. He died on 10 November 2006, at eighty-seven.

You are not doing push-ups on television. Palance belongs here because getting down onto the floor and back up under your own power is a young man’s trick that he still owned at seventy-three. He could still get up. That is the entire test.

Sit down on the floor and stand back up

You have not been down on your living room floor in about two years. Try it tonight. Sit down cross-legged without support, then stand back up, and count every hand, forearm, knee, or piece of furniture you used on the way.

I want to tell you what that little test predicts. Brazilian researchers scored exactly that movement out of ten, five points for sitting and five for rising, taking a point off for each support used. They followed 4,282 people aged 46 to 75 for a median of 12.3 years and published it in June. Ten-year survival ran 97 percent for a perfect score, 88 percent at eight, and 73 percent for men scoring four or under. The hazard ratio for natural-cause death, lowest scorers against highest, came out at 3.84.

Three measurements that outrank your blood pressure

So what else can a man measure in his own hallway? I have three, and one of them beat systolic pressure in a study of 140,000 people.

01 / Grip

You can buy the instrument for the price of a takeaway. The PURE study followed 139,691 people across 17 countries, and every 5 kilogram drop in grip strength carried a hazard ratio of 1.16 for death from any cause, 1.17 for cardiovascular death, and 1.07 for heart attack. Per standard deviation, grip predicted death better than systolic blood pressure did. German reference means for men run about 51 kilograms at forty and 45 at sixty, and the European working group calls anything under 27 kilograms weakness.

02 / Balance, With Your Eyes Shut

You should be able to stand on one leg. A 2022 study of 1,702 people aged 51 to 75 found that those who failed a ten-second single-leg stance had 17.5 percent mortality over seven years against 4.6 percent for those who passed, with an adjusted hazard ratio of 1.84. Failure climbs steeply through exactly your decade... 4.7 percent at 51 to 55, and 17.8 percent at 61 to 65. Normative times for men with eyes closed drop from about 12 seconds in your forties to 5 in your sixties, and that is where the real decline hides.

03 / What You Are Losing, and How Fast

You are losing strength faster than you are losing muscle. The NIH puts muscle mass loss at roughly 3 to 5 percent per decade from thirty. Over three years in a large ageing cohort, knee extensor strength fell 3.4 to 4.1 percent a year in men while leg lean mass fell only about 1 percent. In that same cohort, strength predicted death and muscle mass did not.

Train the thing you just failed

You should train getting up, deliberately. Do five sit-to-stands from the floor tonight, using as much support as you need, and remove one support each week. Add a one-legged stand while you brush your teeth, thirty seconds a side, and close your eyes for the last ten once that feels easy.

You can put strength behind it after that. The physical activity guidelines ask for muscle-strengthening work at least two days a week across all major muscle groups, eight to twelve repetitions to a set, with two or three sets for more benefit. Drive the weight up fast rather than grinding it, because a meta-analysis of fifteen trials found power training beat traditional strength training for muscle power and for the timed function tests that actually matter. The Preventive Services Task Force gives exercise a grade B for preventing falls, and every programme that worked included gait, balance, and functional training.

One last thing. Getting off the floor without a hand is a skill, and you lose the skills you stop practising.

— Travis

Insider Member's Corner

6 free habits that keep you getting up off the floor:

You didn't put in 45 years to settle for beige.

01 / Iron · A Heavy Bag in the Garage

The rule of thumb is a bag about half your body weight, so 100 pounds for most men over 180. Century sells an oversized 100-pound bag near $199.99, and Outslayer builds theirs in the United States from about $100 unfilled. The part men get wrong is the mount. A swinging bag generates far more force than it weighs, so you want a structural joist or a wall bracket rated for at least twice the bag, and a drywall ceiling will not hold it. Leave three feet clear on every side.

02 / Bike · Ducati Monster

Ducati starts the Monster at $13,295 in the States, with a 937cc Testastretta ninety-degree twin making 111 horsepower in a bike that weighs 386 pounds wet. Miguel Galluzzi designed the first one in 1993 out of parts Ducati already had, and it is fairly called the bike that saved the company. It accounted for more than half of Borgo Panigale’s output between 1993 and 2014, and 300,000 had been built by 2016.

03 / Leather · Danner Mountain Light

Danner sells these at $470 and builds them in Portland, Oregon. The stitchdown construction gives a wider platform underfoot and, more to the point, means the factory can recraft the whole boot rather than sell you a new pair. Full-grain leather in a one-piece upper, a GORE-TEX liner, and a Vibram Kletterlift sole. Danner introduced the Mountain Light in 1979 and still builds it to the original specification.