Worstall's Law Of Fitness - Twice The Olympic Time Is Fine

A thumbnail guide you understand

So, how fit do we all need to be? Able to undertake an IronMan while in our 70s? Or does getting to the fridge for more dip for the crisp without wheezing mean we’re doing fine?

At which point a handy cut out and keep guide - Worstall’s Law of Fitness. If you can do the whatever it is in under twice the Olympic time for it then that’s just fine. You may, at that point, step off the treadmill and go get more dip.

Not that I have any expertise in such things as fitness - just the normal amount of forced labour true of anyone who went through public school. It still seems to me to be a good guide.

True, the accuracy of this varies depending upon the specific activity. Managing 100 metres in 20 seconds is not a huge call - only just managing it would have small children jeering perhaps. But a mile in 8 minutes, yes, that does require a certain level of fitness and one that’s also indicative of, well, being at a certain level of fitness. Not that I’m going to do anything so gauche as check this, but that sounds like about the fitness tests for middle aged men in the military (longer if it’s in full kit).

One recent Tour de France time trial was around the 45 km mark. Which they did in 45 to 49 minutes (again, from memory) and doing 45 km in 90 minutes is something the average club cyclist would do on Granny’s bike, with the basket in front. A professional cyclist would need to add a sheepdog to the basket to be that slow. But being able to crank out 45 km on a bike - in that hour and a half - is showing a level of fitness that I take to be just fine for the average couch lizard.

So too the mile swim. Olympic swimming is 1500m, in 14 minutes or so. So, a mile in half an hour? That looks quite testing but if I can get close to that (in my 60s) then I’m happy. I can swim a mile, which in itself is a reasonable level of fitness, but that time would, I think, qualify as being “fit enough”.

It’s possibly true that this guide is more accurate at the longer distances. For being able to even perform the longer distances is itself a guide to fitness and the time recorded is less of an issue. It would also be possible that personal experience is playing a part here - I’ve always been comparatively better at longer. Few fast twitch fibre. So the “Worstall’s” could well be “As applies to Worstall” rather than something more general.

But still, I do think this is a useful guide. If you can do the whatever in twice the time it takes the genetic freaks then that’s good enough - you’re fit.

The reason I like it is the generality. We’re all good/bad at different parts of sport. Some sprint, some trundle for miles, some swim or cycle and so on. But the Olympics has all of these and more (being able to go around a horsy cross country course would, I think, qualify as fit enough for example. Especially if you remember to take the horse) meaning that there’s a time for everything. And if we think of the mesomorphs who cannot actually move but can lift we can extend to being able to lift this or that weight and so on. That is, we’ve a general rule - 50% of Olympic is good enough.

Further, given that this is not a scientific law we do not need to try and disprove the hypothesis. It is an observation, so the request becomes so, who has a better observation? Anyone? What actually is a better - and pithier - rule of thumb about what is fit enough?

Not wheezing on the way to the fridge is too low a bar……