Snatching 80kg
I have an arbitrary personal goal to snatch 80 kilograms before I turn 35. This post is a little blurb on why (which I can then paste to people in the future).
Much like others in 2020-21, I emerged from the pandemic a bit older and worse for wear with a desire to be "healthier" before it was "too late." Eventually I decided "healthier" meant snatching bodyweight (about 80kg / 176lb these days), and "too late" meant before 35.
Snatch, for those unfamiliar, is a movement in weightlifting. Here's an example from one of the best to ever do it:
Lü Xiaojun, bona fide 🐐ed multiple time Olympic champion
If I had to pick one thing to benchmark general fitness, snatch is the top contender. It requires the strength (and muscle mass) to lift the weight, the active mobility to support the weight at the bottom, and the body awareness to move everything together – plus the mental fortitude to throw the bar up and get yourself under it. Lü, above, is doing > 2x bodyweight. For us normal people,~1x bodyweight is widely considered a non-beginner threshold so that seemed like a reasonable target. A bodyweight factor is better than a set number because, as one gym friend says, "you can just make the weight go up by getting really fat." If I can snatch bodyweight, I am probably strong / mobile / coordinated "enough" for anything in regular life.
Other options I considered: deadlift 2x bodyweight, squat 1.5x bodyweight, or a # of pullups. The powerlifting movements are missing the mobility + coordination pieces, and calisthenics don't spike as much on strength and muscle mass. If I had to add one more thing to the list, it would probably be running-related: running X miles without stopping, sprinting X meters in Y seconds, that kind of thing. I'd still put strength first, but there is something to be said about moving yourself effectively on your own two feet.
As for the "age 35" time frame: current bro-science says that muscle mass has strong benefits for all-cause mortality, but building muscle is exponentially harder after your third decade or so. So, better to have it and not need it than to want it but not have it. 40 seems like sandbagging a little bit, so 35 is just a nice number that perhaps requires a bit more of a personal push.
So there it is: still working to snatch 80kg. After about a year of training I've hit 67kg as a personal best. In another year or so I turn 35, so let's see how this goes.