The king of human movement.
The squat trains what we do every day:
- sitting
- standing
- climbing
- lifting from the ground
Why it still rules:
- Massive muscle recruitment (legs, glutes, trunk)
- Builds bone density and joint resilience
- Improves balance and mobility simultaneously
- One of the best metabolic exercises you can perform
If you could only choose one exercise for lifelong function — this would be hard to beat.
Real-world strength in its purest form.
Picking something up safely off the ground is a life skill — not just a gym exercise.
Why it remains king:
- Trains posterior chain (glutes, hamstrings, back)
- Reinforces safe lifting mechanics
- Builds grip strength and spinal stability
- Transfers directly to daily life and sport
Done well, deadlifts are less about “lifting heavy” and more about learning how to move safely under load.
Total-body strength disguised as an upper-body exercise.
Standing presses demand coordination from head to toe.
Why it still matters:
- Shoulder strength and stability
- Core activation without needing crunches
- Postural control
- Functional overhead capacity (think reaching, lifting, carrying)
You don’t just press weight — your whole body learns to stabilise and organise force.
The classic push movement — and still incredibly valuable.
Yes, it’s famous. Yes, it’s often over-glorified. But when performed properly, it’s enormously effective.
Why it endures:
- Develops pushing strength
- Builds chest, shoulder and triceps coordination
- Improves upper-body structural capacity
- Easy to scale for beginners through to athletes
The key isn’t ego lifting — it’s controlled movement and good positioning.
The posture protector.
In a world of sitting, screens and rounded shoulders, this movement is gold.
Why it remains essential:
- Strengthens upper back and posterior shoulders
- Supports spinal alignment
- Balances pressing movements
- Improves pulling strength needed for daily tasks
If the bench press builds the front, rows keep the body honest from the back.
We sat less and moved more without even thinking about it
Back in the black-and-white era, most Aussies weren’t doing “fitness” as such — they were just living more physically.
Walking to the shops. Hanging washing. Mowing lawns. Doing manual jobs. Walking kids to school. Standing more. Carrying more. Fiddling with life the hard way.
So while hardly anyone was counting steps, they were often stacking up a heap of movement across the day — and that matters.
Modern life has done the opposite. We can now work, shop, eat, pay bills, order dinner, and watch the cricket without barely moving our backside off the chair.
No one’s “failed” here. The environment simply changed — and it changed hard.
Portion sizes quietly blew out
This one happened so slowly most of us barely noticed it.
A soft drink that once came in a modest little serve is now a bucket. Chips became family tubs. Muffins became doorstops. Café slices became roofing tiles.
And the tricky bit? We still tend to see one serve as… one serve — even when it’s twice the size it used to be.
So a lot of modern overeating isn’t greed or weakness. It’s simply that normal got bigger.
Bit by bit, decade by decade, our eyes, appetite, and expectations got dragged along for the ride.
Snacking became a national pastime
For a lot of old-school Australians, food had a fairly simple rhythm: breakfast, lunch, dinner — and Bob’s your uncle.
Now we’ve got morning tea, desk snacks, servo snacks, “healthy” snacks, afternoon pick-me-ups, post-training treats, movie snacks, and a little something while watching Netflix.
The problem isn’t just the extra calories. It’s that appetite never really gets a clean break.
We keep nudging the system all day long — often with foods that are easy to chew, easy to crave, and very easy to overdo.
Again, no shame here. Modern food is built to be convenient, visible, tasty, and hard to resist. That combo is a sneaky little beauty.
Movement disappeared from everyday life
This is slightly different to “exercise.” This is about the movement that used to be built into normal life.
Kids rode bikes. People walked up the street. Jobs were more physical. Shopping meant carrying bags. Lawns got pushed. Chores took effort. Life had more friction — and weirdly, that was good for us.
Now? Cars, screens, online ordering, remote controls, escalators, apps, delivery, e-bikes, ride shares, and chairs — lots and lots of chairs.
So even before we talk “training,” the average human now burns less through the day simply because the day itself demands less.
That’s why this issue isn’t about people becoming softer. It’s more that life became easier on the body — and tougher on the waistline.
Our food changed — and this is the big one
In my view, this is the biggest reason of all.
It’s not just that modern food has more sugar, more fat, or more convenience. It’s that a huge slab of it is now altered, enhanced, engineered, and built to make us want more than we physiologically need.
Years ago, food mostly looked like food. Meat. Veg. Fruit. Oats. Eggs. Bread. Spuds. Home baking. Simple stuff.
Now a lot of what lines supermarket shelves is designed for maximum reward: big flavour hit, soft texture, fast chew, instant pleasure, and very little natural braking.
And yes — I absolutely believe flavour enhancers play a big role here.
Once you start wandering into the world of E600–E699 — the flavour enhancer family — you are no longer just eating food in its natural form. You’re eating something that has been tweaked to hit the brain harder.
That means the normal appetite-regulating system can get a bit scrambled. The brain goes, “Crikey, this is fantastic — keep going.”
Throw in colour additives, aroma additions, refined starches, sugars, fats, crunch, melt-in-the-mouth texture, and salty-savoury sweetness all in the one packet… and you’ve got a product that can seriously override “that’ll do.”
That doesn’t make people weak. It means people are up against foods that are very cleverly built to keep the hand going back to the bag.
So when people say, “Why didn’t everyone look like this in 1955?” — this is why I start here.
Same human biology. Totally different food environment.
Pampy’s take: when food becomes more enhanced than nourished, more stimulating than satisfying, and more engineered than earned, the appetite system can start wanting more than the body truly needs.