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Thread: Press form check and programming advice needed

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Sep 2014
    Posts
    116

    Default Press form check and programming advice needed

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    I'm posting on behalf of my 64 year old mother.

    She has a degenerative spine, and arthritis in her hands, shoulders and knees. The arthritis is particularly bad in one of her knees and means she cannot straighten it all the way. She weighs around 115lbs and doesn't like to eat much. She goes swimming once a week for 45 minutes but is pretty inactive other than that. She is very weak and I figured lifting weights could potentially help with her arthritis / general quality of life.

    So far I have only attempted to teach her the press. She started off with a wooden broomstick weighing 1lb and recently her best lift was 26lbs for 3 reps. This was over the course of a couple of months and de-loads. She started off with 2lb increases, but have been doing 1lb increases for a while now. She has just stalled again at 26lbs and had to go back down to 19lbs (the bar).

    She is currently doing 5 sets of 3, twice a week, with plenty of rest between sets.

    She has a lot of form issues which tend to come and go, some of which include:

    - wrists over extended.
    - elbows behind the bar.
    - the bar being pressed unevenly
    - bar path in front of the mid foot, especially at lockout where it tends to drift forward.
    - relaxing everything at the bottom.
    - not getting tight enough in general and lumbar over-extension.
    - forgetting to breath at the right time.
    - pushing the bar very slowly and carefully instead of aggressively.
    - I don't know if this just comes with the territory of being a 64 year old woman, but half the time when she fails her reps it seems like she just isn't even trying. When I fail a rep I'll sometimes collapse on the floor afterwards and almost die, but when she does, she will barely even be out of breath and look like she hasn't just lifted something which is heavy for her. She will say it's really heavy but it just doesn't look like she found it heavy.

    The main problem I seem to have is that I can fix one thing at a time, but when we move onto the next thing she'll start doing the previous thing wrong again. She says she has trouble thinking about all the different things at once and sometimes she will just seem to forgot everything and do everything completely wrong.

    I have a few questions regarding her form in the video and also her programming.

    1) What should I try to fix first?

    2) I don't know whether she should stay at 19lbs until she can use good form and then start increasing the weight again, or whether she could increase the weight so that she HAS to learn good form. When I was doing the novice progression (or not) I wasted a lot of time at lighter weights trying to achieve perfect form, but in the end I leaned that the only way to improve my form was to increase the weight to something meaningful where it was necessary to use good form to complete the lift.

    3) Regarding the lockout position being forward of the mid-foot, could this be a flexibility thing? Or does she just need more weight on the bar (even though she can't seem to get past 26lbs).

    4) Should I introduce the bench press as well? She has a lot of neck and shoulder pain and I don't want to make anything worse, but at the same time I think it would probably be more effective to rotate the bench and the press, rather than just pressing twice a week.

    5) As she cannot straighten one of her knees properly and is having a knee replacement sometime within the next year, should she be trying to Deadlift and Squat also?

    Here is the video of her pressing 19lbs. I included sets 4 and 5 from two angles.

    Press form check 8.5kg - YouTube

    Thank you for your time and sorry for the long post.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Posts
    10,378

    Default

    There is no way the woman in that video is 64 years old. Fifty-four, perhaps. Tell her I said so.

    The good news is that she is in very good shape and that is not a heavy weight for her. Degenerative arthritis is rather vague. We all have, or will have, degenerative arthritis, which is a breakdown of the soft tissue in the joints. I think your mom could probably do the program more or less as written provided she has a meniscus in her knee. What she probably needs is a coach. Where do you live?

    For what it is worth, I was working with my 76-year old mom on her squats and presses last week when I visited her on the East Coast. She is a breast cancer survivor and is mildly kyphotic. The only things she isn't doing are power cleans. I wished I lived closer to her so that I could coach her more often. She would be a badass senior lifter. I have a 66-year old trainee who cured the arthritic pain in his hip by squatting with me. When he told his doctor what he was doing, the doctor was horrified and told him to stop immediately. My trainee wisely ignored that advice, got stronger, and now his hip feels just fine.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Sep 2014
    Posts
    116

    Default

    Thanks for the response.

    I asked her and it's osteoarthritis that she has. I don't know if she has a meniscus in her knee, I assume she does but she is going to ask her doctor first before starting the Squats and Deadlifts.

    We live in the UK so there is only one coach here and he is about 4 hours away from us. She doesn't want to do that yet because of the distance, the cost and the fact that she isn't really that into lifting at the moment. So I will have to keep trying to coach her for now, it's a good opportunity for me to learn anyway. (But I will try to persuade her again in the future).

    As for programming, would the following be suitable, or too much rest? (It works well with the "Two on, Two off" schedule that I am doing myself at the minute so I can actually be there to coach her)

    Day 1: Squat, Bench
    Day 2: Rest
    Day 3: Rest
    Day 4: Rest
    Day 5: Deadlift, Press
    Day 6: Rest
    Day 7: Rest
    Day 8: Rest

    I don't have anything she can do lat pull downs with but should I try and get her doing chin ups / band assisted chin ups as well?

    Regarding the video, any specific advice on that? The main thing I really need help with is getting her to stop letting the bar drift forwards in the lockout position. Could it be a flexibility thing? Or the weight not being heavy enough? (If so that's tricky because after a few kilos more she will be struggling to lift it again).

    Thank you for your time.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Posts
    10,378

    Default

    She should train three days a week at the moment until that becomes problematic. She will not be lifting anything heavy, or even anything that taxing for a time, so your proposed schedule is far, far too little work. There is no stress in it. Therefore, no adaptation. As of right now, don't worry about chins. The bar will stop drifting forward at lockout when she gets a chance to press more often and it gets heavier. I would have her do fives on everything. Presses are going to advance by 0.25 kg at a go. That's okay.

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