What a great thread! My thanks to everyone who has contributed thus far. A few comments and questions from me, in no particular order:
@offwidth,
MAF Method for Determining Your Aerobic Threshold — Uphill Athlete and other reading suggests that finding one's heart rate zones, where [Ae]robic [T]hreshold lies, and similar numbers is important for training purposes; the numbers I have for myself confuse me at least as much as they help me. I'm 66 years old, I can get my heart rate up to at least 179 any time I want to, and my pulse sitting here in my chair for the last hour is 55 so I'm assuming a true resting pulse is lower.
@Anna C said:
it's just a matter of what you want to be and what qualities you want to develop.
... which succinctly puts things in perspective. To put things another way, we all bring our own experiences to the table and those experiences can be large part of determining what goals we wish to pursue, at least once we reach a certain age. If you're new to exercise and without a history, well, I can't really relate.
Mine are 25 years of distance running and 20 years of weight lifting.
I only started exercising when I began practicing music seriously in my mid-20's. I was at the piano 2-3 hours a day, with those wonderful twin goals that music requires: concentration and relaxation. I felt I need to do something physical so, it being the 1970's, I started jogging. 20 years later, I'd completed three half-marathons, I was skinny-fat, I was bored, and then I herniated a lumbar disc.
I now find that aerobic training in my life needs function as a counterbalance to my strength training - I walk with a focus on being relaxed, and specifically without a focus on my walking "performance." I choose to try to perform better in the arena of strength because, as I look at my life, past and present and my best guesstimates of the future, increased strength benefits my quality of life much more than increased endurance ever did, and the combination of powerlifting for strength, kettlebell ballistics for strength-endurance, and walking for easy endurance is the right mixture for me.
For me, it's all about this, "You can be anything you want. A warrior. An athlete. A hard man or woman ready to handle whatever life throws at you. But you must be strong first." from
Strength Has a Greater Purpose | StrongFirst We could debate all day long whether the general population has more of a strength deficiency or an aerobic deficiency. As I look at it, anyone who's accepted and acted upon the responsibility to take care of their bodies is already in a small, elite group, and the differences beyond that are relatively minor.
-S-