Free  ·  Five tests  ·  About twenty minutes

TheBaseline

Five strength tests you can run at home this week. No lab, no appointment, no gym, and nothing you need to buy.

You end up with five dated numbers and a sheet to measure them against in twelve weeks. If they climb, whatever you are doing is working. If they fall while your weight is coming down, a meaningful share of what you are losing is the tissue you wanted to keep, and you find that out in twelve weeks rather than in a year.

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You have been weighed.You have probably never been measured.

The scale is the only instrument most women are ever handed, and it reports one number that mixes muscle, fat, water and what you ate last night into a single figure. It cannot tell you what left.

That matters more now than it did at thirty. Through perimenopause, menopause and the years after, muscle goes quietly and steadily, and the going is invisible on a scale, because fat leaving and muscle leaving both arrive as a smaller number. Both feel like progress.

It matters more again if you are on a GLP-1. The medication works, and that is settled. What is missing is anyone tracking what goes with the weight, because your clinic has one instrument and it is the same one.

Everyone says protect your muscle. Almost nobody says how you would know whether you did.

What is in it

Five tests, and a page you write your numbers on.

01
Floor to standing
Stand up off the floor with as little help as you can manage. It looks trivial and it asks for leg strength, hip mobility and balance all at once.
02
Dead hang
Hang from a bar with straight arms until your grip gives out. A doorway bar, a playground, a sturdy branch. If you cannot find one, you skip it and do the other four.
03
Push-ups
One set, as many as you can in a row, from your toes or from your knees and recorded honestly as one or the other. The instructions tell you how to spot the rep where your form goes, since you cannot see it happen.
04
Goblet squat
A weight held at your chest, to the lowest depth you can hold. Heavy enough that the last two reps are genuinely hard, which is the part almost nobody is told.
05
Carry
A weight in each hand, walking at a normal pace, until your grip starts to open or two minutes have passed. If you reach two minutes, the weight was too light.

What you need, and it is less than you think. Something with a bit of weight to it, something to hang from, a bit of floor, and about twenty minutes. If you do not own a dumbbell or a kettlebell, a gallon jug of water is eight pounds and a backpack with books in it is whatever you decide it is. Do this at home. There is no reason to go to a gym for it.

And the page that makes it worth doing. A tear-out sheet with two columns, today and twelve weeks, so the second measurement has something to sit beside. There is no passing score anywhere in it, on purpose. Published norms for women in midlife are thin and drawn from small samples, and they would tell you considerably less than your own second number will.

And then there are twelve weeks.

The Baseline is free, and for plenty of women it is enough on its own. What it cannot do is decide what you should be doing between the first column and the second.

The Block

$197

Twelve weeks, two sessions a week, at home

  • Every decision already made: what to do, in what order, how heavy, and when to go up
  • Bodyweight for the first three weeks, so you can start the day you are set up
  • Delivered through an app on your phone
  • Built to run in exactly the window your sheet commits you to
  • At the end you send me both columns and I write you back
See The Block