At the time of this writing, I am 61 years old. I don’t consume much fitness content. To me, it’s like trying to find something to watch on television. There is way too much out there and almost all of it is garbage. Designed mainly to get attention and without much honesty or merit. And it’s a shame, because there are also a few gems out there, like True Detective Season 1 and kboges.com. They’re just really hard to find.
Valuable fitness content for older trainees is severely lacking. What I have seen generally follows the same formula. “You should not train when you’re 50 like you did when you were 20”. This is obvious. “You should not lift heavy”. This may or may not be true. But this type of advice is very narrow, and seems to assume that we are all the same, that we have the same motivations that we had when we were 20, and we’re just too old and damaged to pursue them in the same fashion. But we should anyway, just in a slower, milder kind of way. When I was 20, I wanted to lift heavy weights and get as big as possible. And I went about it in a very wrong-headed way. And I made very little progress. And it was a bad goal to begin with.
But when the standard training advice for older people gets more specific than “don’t go heavy”, “prioritize recovery”, “don’t use a barbell”, “stop benching pressing”, “squats will damage your knees”, etc., that’s where I see the real problems arise. When you’re over X age, you should not train more than 3 or 4 times a week and you should prioritize rest and recovery, the wisdom goes. It takes a lot longer to recover than it did when you were 20. Less frequent training is a staple of this advice. Is the assumption that size is still the main goal? And the training that you actually do on these 3 or 4 days is the same type of training you did when you were young, there is just less of it? Must we take a much slower and mellower path to a similar goal to the one you had as a 20 year old? Really?
I’ll get right to the point here. I’m as enthusiastic about training now as I was 40 years ago. Perhaps moreso. And I don’t go heavy and try to get as big as possible at all now, not because I CAN’T, but because I DON’T WANT TO. I’ve grown, but not in the bodily sense. I’ve been around long enough to see clearly that bigger is not better. It’s worse. Even if BIG bigger is mostly muscle rather than fat. We don’t need to take up more space for its own sake. And once you lose the desire, naturally, to train for muscle size as a main goal, everything changes. There are many, many things in life that are important to be able to do, and muscle size and increased body weight, and to some degree even raw strength, do not support or even help us to be able to do most of these things.
So why should we train? The more I train the more I realize that conditioning is king. Not just cardio-vascular conditioning, which is incredibly important, but muscle endurance, the ability to stay in the game. Muscle mass is money in the bank but there is a cutoff. And once you’ve reached it, it’s not necessary to keep training for more mass. Further, training for muscle endurance gets you something new and much more important, and has the added benefit of helping you preserve the muscle mass you already have. Living well into older age means being able to last, to stay in the game, so you should train to last and stay in the game. High volume and high frequency.
Muscle endurance and conditioning are best trained with lighter loads, higher reps (possibly MUCH higher), and higher frequency, not lower. For many years, I found that my job situation required me in the office two days a week. I biked to work, which was 13.4 miles each way. This was usually the only riding I did during the week, and the rides tanked me. I would find that I was very tired and lethargic the day after these rides, and my legs were usually stiff and sore for at least a couple of days. Nowadays I ride every day for pleasure, always at least an hour and often two or three. Whereas my mileage before was about 54 per week, I am now pushing 150. I have found that my endurance has increased, my fatigue has decreased, and the more I do, the more I seem to be able to do. Before, a 13.4 mile ride seemed long and daunting. Now it seems rather trivial. It’s as if the gas tank grows in size the more work I do. This is work capacity.
Does such a thing serve one well into old age? The “Steel Grandpa” famously “won” a bike race across Sweden at the age of 66 but was not the official winner as he was not allowed to enter due to his age. He did the race anyway, and won. He continued riding his bike up until his death at the age of 101.
If I want my body to keep going, I need to require my body to keep going. This does not mean a maximum effort set or two of a heavy lift to the point of muscle failure and then days of rest to recover and do it again. Rather, this means sets of 12 at minimum, 20 to 40 usually, and sometimes up to 100. Or more. Full body. Every day.
What might this look like?
High Rep Sets
High repetition bodyweight squats will ground you and set you free at the same time. They are magical. Check out this, this, this, this, and this. It’s a fundamental movement pattern and a resting position for much of the world. Done with high repetitions they are a potent tool for strength and conditioning. The Great Gama, a wrestler who was undefeated across his 52 year career, built his massive physique on thousands of repetitions of push-ups and squats every day. If you try nothing else, take a month or so to get really good at bodyweight squats. Start with assisted squats if necessary, and work slowly towards a set of 100 quality repetitions.
Glenn Wilkinson does three sets of 30 reps for all of his exercises. Simon Martin cranks out hundreds of reps a day. They are both in their 50s. Obviously, high repetition training helps to increase strength and muscle size as well as conditioning.
Density Training
Density training involves compressing your training into a set period of time. And then you progress it by doing more work in that same amount of time or the same work in less time. One popular approach is EMOM, or “every minute on the minute”. Set a timer and do a set of 50-60% max effort per minute. 10 pushups, for example, in 10 minutes. Another approach is AMRAP, or “as many rounds as possible”. Choose a push, a pull, and a squat. Do supersets at about 70% max effort and see how many rounds you can complete in a given period of time. Try to work towards more rounds or more total time. Density training is a powerful way to build strength and conditioning.
Rest / Pause
This is one of my favorites. Choose a weight or a version of the exercise that will allow, say, 35 – 50 reps unbroken. Then continue to perform the exercise until you reach 100 reps. Once the burn is intolerable, “rest” for a few seconds, and continue. I usually rest long enough to take about 3 breaths.
These aren’t the only ways to work on muscle endurance, but they are very good ones. You could take a simpler approach and just increase your reps by a few each week. Add volume and don’t worry about wasting your time, because there is no such thing as junk volume. Just ask Kestutis Sadkovskis.
