You were sufficiently clear, but that’s going to be a different place for everybody. I read it to mean you push until multiple injuries mean it’s becoming increasingly more destructive to strength than it is to reduce the rate of injury by altering the training. Tweaks are not injuries and injury being something that forces a rest and potentially an operation. A competitive lifter-I don’t count myself as one-is an utterly focused athlete, a product of a demand for excellence at any cost. I consider myself a recreational lifter, more focused than a non lifter, but I’m going to give in to tweaks far more rapidly than a competitive lifter.
Not everyone can be a competitive lifter and that’s how it goes. The mental toughness, or obsession required to be that competitive just isn’t in most people, it occupies a lower value in their life for whatever reason. I don’t live to get strong, I get strong to live. Multiple tweaks, tiredness and long days in the gym 4 or 5 days a week interfere with my life on the same level as multiple injuries interfere with a competitive lifters obsession with excellence. I think you were very honest writing that article and I think for you it took more guts to write it than it took to write every other article and book you have written. Don’t kick yourself for having written it, no matter how it’s perceived it wasn’t a mistake to have written it.
I liked the article it’s sensible and smart to grow old gracefully. In my case I’ll never hit a pr again compared to my 40s but I still train/maintain as best as possible.
I don’t want to hurt, my goals are to be able to do the things I enjoy as long into old age as I possibly can.
Strength, actually the lack of it, is the limiting factor in that goal.
If I have a bad day under the bar I just give myself an extra day to recover and don’t beat myself up over it.
I have no one to impress and don’t care what anyone thinks that’s the privilege of making it to old age.
I’m at least twice as strong as I would be if I didn’t train and at this point that’s good enough.
In my experience there are also quite a lot of people who need to be told to back off for one reason or another. Myself being one of them. Eventually you just get tired of beating the shit out of yourself and working through pain for no gain. I've been messing around with the ideas here for quite some time trying to find the right mix of maintenance and training and have gotten to a place where it works. Like Ripp said swapping out SQ with box SQ, rack pulls instead of pulls from the floor, slingshot bench instead of regular bench, etc. Sometimes I'll alternate for example Box SQ with regular SQ every other WO. What has amazed me and I'd never have believed it had I not tried it was how much strength can be retained with so little work relative to how hard I had been pushing prior. Eg, I went for couple of months doing only one top set and working each major lift once a week. So if I had been doing 5x5's and banging my head against the wall trying to add a few lbs here and there, back off to one set of 5 (or even 3) weights hardly dropped, maybe 5%. And I felt like I was on vacation or something, leaving the gym with gas still in the tank felt weird, but good. Lot of old injuries and so forth started clearing up, more energy to devote to things outside the gym which frankly had been sliding. Eventually I added more WO's because the DOMS got to be too much. Have to cut back some on food though.
So now I'm thinking I'm going to try this maintenance thing most of the year and "peak", or switch back to actual training see how it goes, just for fun. Maybe I can get away with this for another 5-10 years we'll see. FWIW 63 years old, lifting since early teens.
Yes sir, that's correct. I'm 55 and with the exception of a couple/three years in my 20's, I've been lifting since high school. Also, neck surgery last summer took me out for several months and I just did my first deadlift session since then earlier this week. The neck injury also caused what now appears to be permanent nerve damage to my right tricep as it is quite atrophied and very weak and despite diligent work to convince it to fire, it is not cooperating to this point. For instance, I can not currently bench press more than 65 pounds without my elbow flaring out badly as my delt takes over for what my tricep should be doing. Presses fair no better. That injury was pretty much the final nail in the coffin for me. I still train, or I guess "exercise" would be more accurate, doing what I can, but I know I'll never be the same as I was. I've also had a torn tricep, a completely ruptured tricep tendon (there seems to be a pattern here - apparently I got my triceps on sale at The Dollar Store), lower back injuries and too many dents, dings, aches and pains to count over the years. Even so, I considered myself lucky as that's still relatively few injuries for such a long time training...until this neck thing happened and it really took the wind out of my sails due to the restrictions I now have.
So at 60, your chronological age is older than me by a few years but your training age is very young. As long as you are progressing, keep trying to progress. At our age, brute force training doesn't bode well though. We have to be smarter. We really have to think about frequency, volume and intensity and how it impacts us. If your back just won't get better and you're sure you're doing everything right, something needs to change.
Anyway, that was long as hell and as I re-read it, not exceptionally helpful. I guess in short, if something keeps injuring you, don't do it but keep progressing as long as you can. Given the relatively short time you've been training, you may not be done getting stronger in the lifts that don't hurt you.
I agree with you. I think the article is crystal clear. I also very much enjoyed the episode What happens when a lifter gets old.
Yes my training age is young, but because I began later, it is shorter. For instance if you begin training at 80 then you aren’t going to be getting stronger into your 90s, the chances are that almost all the potential is gone in a year, or two, maybe less. Start in your 90s and I doubt it lasts more than a year unless you’re some physical freak of nature.
I still have some improvement left, but probably not a great deal. I don’t think my back is going to let me get to 500lbs for certain LOL. If I can get 400lbs without anything breaking I reckon I’m about done-not bad if I look back at where I began at less than 30% of that. I’m 3x stronger than I was 4 years ago and how many people can say that at 60 ?
I know for me when I entered my 60’s that the seriousness of my injuries and the length of recovery became an issue. Hernia surgery, two torn hamstrings and a full knee replacement all took a lot of rehab time. This was a plus and a minus. Looking at the plus, you get to see progress again in a way you never would if you had stayed healthy as you roll the rock back up the hill....you can figure out the minus part yourself. At 69 I pretty much do what the heck I feel like and then have a beer.
Why not manage down with a linear REgression?
Once an aged lifter experiences unacceptably diminishing returns, or overwhelming accumulation of injuries, or just creeping sarcopenia, set a program that attempts to take the minimum OFF the standard lifts such that a programmatic reduction of strength, at a satisfyingly slower pace than that of a non-resisting victim of sarcopenia, takes place. The weight reduction might be governed by maintaining a constant level of fear (as measured by a scary 5th rep, or something like that).
To me, the regular encounter with fear is very rewarding, despite a declining amount of weight involved, because it reaffirms my ability to overcome a significant challenge. And a programmatic reduction of strength, at an identifiably slower pace than that of a non-resisting victim of sarcopenia, is motivational.