Drop and give me 20, or so

When it comes to health and fitness, I guess I should be happy with being average as I'm knocking on the door of 55 years old.

By average that means when it comes to health and fitness some things I do well, and some things I don't do so well, but when you average things out I'm about in the middle.

I'm not a fitness nut. I do pretty well by way of exercise, so I'm probably a little above average there. But I don't do so well by way of diet. Given the choice of a piece of celery dipped in peanut butter vs. a Buffalo wing slathered in hot sauce and bleu cheese dressing the wing will win every time.

I've gained a couple of waist sizes in my pants over the last several years, no longer the 30 inch waist and 30 inch inseam of an age that now seems prehistoric.

But I work out regularly and can run four miles at a reasonable clip and do laps in the pool without having a near drowning experience.

My latest measure of fitness comes by way of a recent article in the New York Times that said, and I quote: "The push-up is the ultimate barometer of fitness."

After reading this article, during recent workout at the gym, I dropped and gave myself as many as I could do -- 20.

I stopped at 20, thinking maybe I could squeeze another one, but I stopped anyway out of consideration of the blood vessel in my neck that looked like it was going to open up like the Hoover Dam with a crack in it.

The good news is that 20 is the number of push-ups a 55 year old man should be able to do.

According to the article, for those of you counting at home, a 40-year-old man should be able to do 27 push-ups while a 60-year-old man should be able to do 17. For women, the numbers are 16 for a woman of 40, six for a woman of 60.

The push-ups we're discussing here are the real ones, like the ones we did in high school gym class -- palms and toes on the ground, the body ram-rod straight.

The Times article noted that push-ups are important in the biomechanics of aging. The better someone is able to do push-ups, the better that someone will be able to withstand a fall without breaking a wrist or arm.

This attention to upper body strength comes as something relatively new in the fitness game, especially for aging men and women. Cardiovascular health -- the stuff that comes from running and walking and the like -- is one thing, but health and fitness researchers are now saying that strength conditioning -- especially upper body strength -- is just as important.

According to the article, the ability to do push-ups on a regular basis is an important indicator of our capacity to deal with the challenges of aging.

So drop and give me 20 ... or so.

By the way, ever-young exercise guru Jack LaLanne is 93 years old and does push-ups as part of his daily workout, with his hands and feet balanced on three chairs. The article didn't say how many he's doing these days, but he once did 1,000 push-ups in 23minutes. He's definitely ruining the grading curve for the rest of us.