Older Trainees

[tennisgod]

I would love to hear from my fellow older (over 40?) SS trainees.

I am 50, 188cm, 96kg... and am still progressing on my lifts:
sq - 132kg
dl - 152kg
press - 54kg
bench - 80kg

I am eating a lot and have added 5kg to my weight in the last month, but unfortunately have added a great deal to my gut. I'm very happy how the rest of my body is filling-out especially since I have always been thin, but this gut-thing is starting to worry me.

What's your experiences regarding weight-gain? Did you initially get a gut but then it subsided (as Rip says it will). Or did you have to limit the food intake?

What other factors do you notice... increased recovery periods? Some bad days (where you feel weak)? etc? etc?

[Kyle Schuant]

I'm 38, close enough?

If you want to put on muscle, you must put on some fat with it.

If you want to lose fat, you can do it without losing too much muscle.

Unless you are overfat to begin with, you usually cannot lose fat and gain muscle at the same time.

It's for this reason that bodybuilder types have bulking/cutting cycles. For example with out of the air figures, over three months, add 4kg muscle and 4kg fat, then next three months lose 1kg muscle and 3kg fat, after six months net result is +3kg muscle +1kg fat, overall stronger and with a leaner body composition.

Yes, recovery tends to take longer the older we get. Recovery is helped along by stretching after the workout, sleeping and eating well. A 19 year old can eat junk and work out with a hangover after three hours' sleep and still improve. You and I can't.

As for bad days, everyone has them. Sometimes it's better to work through them, sometimes it's better just to chuck the workout in and rest. But it takes some experience to know which is which, so when in doubt keep lifting.

[titan]

KA's advice is spot on, and it should be said that your lifts are going up nicely and you ought to be proud to post those numbers...

Linear progression will always come to an end, for some it's after 6 months, and for others it can be years depending on your genetics and how much you are willing to eat to continue getting strong.

I'm only 26, so don't quite fall into the "older" category, but I can tell you from a once stick thin novice I started with a 30-32" waist and my waist is now around the 34-36" mark (depending on trouser type). I am more than happy for it to pop right out to 40" so long as I'm continuing to add weight to the bar and getting stronger.

Once I've reached my goal (if I ever do), I can then decide whether to drop my waist size back down to 34" or somewhere in between, bareing in mind that some of that size increase would be down to increase in core musculature as well as some fat.

As for your last point, bad days affect everyone. Even us not so old trainees, and again, as KA eluded to it is how you deal with those days that sets you apart from people who just make excuses like "I don't feel well" or "I have a headache". You will know when it's time to call a workout a day, your body will tell you when it's had enough and needs rest more than a 150kg squat.

[misspelledgeoff]

tennisgod,

I'll be 40 in a few months and have been on SS since August. Squats are beginning to become very heavy, but I feel like there's a lot more left in the other lifts.

I pretty much threw caution to the wind with the eating business. I've gained 23 kg. I estimate half has been muscle. And obviously i have a gut, but for some reason just don't care as much anymore. My worksets as of yesterday are:

sq: 145 kg
dl: 161 kg
bench: 108 kg
press: 65 kg
powerclean: 82 kg

I don't feel a difference in recovery (vs being younger) as much as a difference in warmup required. At 19 I would squat (half squat) with pretty much no warmup. Now I need to go through 20 minutes of warmup sets and other kineptions to ensure I don't tear something vital. I also notice a lot of random aches and pains I never had 20 years ago.

[Bleve]

I'm 38, 112kg, 183cm (6'). My current stats :
squat 1rm 205kg
DL 1rm 185kg
BP 105kg (3x5)
press 61kg (3x5)
p-clean around 85kg 2rm
snatch 1rm 70kg

I'm using SS-ish programming as part of a track cycling sprint program, so not pure SS, thus I've put less emphasis on bench, press etc that most here probably would and have concentrated on squats (I'm the first rider in our club masters team sprint, got to get out of the blocks fast) which partially explains why it's a bit out of whack with the rest. Also, my squats are a little bit shallow, I had a knee reconstruction that left my knee less flexible and I can't get full depth. Also my p-cleans and snatches are low because my technique still sucks.

[Charles Staley]

Tennis, I'd simply take regular body comp measurements- this way you'll know how much of your weight gain is muscle VS fat.

Weight gain always includes both muscle and fat, and I'd posit that slower weight gain (as opposed to faster) puts this ratio in your favor

I would love to hear from my fellow older (over 40?) SS trainees.

I am 50, 188cm, 96kg... and am still progressing on my lifts:
sq - 132kg
dl - 152kg
press - 54kg
bench - 80kg

I am eating a lot and have added 5kg to my weight in the last month, but unfortunately have added a great deal to my gut. I'm very happy how the rest of my body is filling-out especially since I have always been thin, but this gut-thing is starting to worry me.

What's your experiences regarding weight-gain? Did you initially get a gut but then it subsided (as Rip says it will). Or did you have to limit the food intake?

What other factors do you notice... increased recovery periods? Some bad days (where you feel weak)? etc? etc?

[IlPrincipeBrutto]

Hi TennisGod,

I am 40, 1.82m (6'') tall and started SS in June.
Back then I was about 76 Kg, now I'm between 84Kg and 85Kg.

My progress has been very slow, due to injuries and breaks (holidays in August). Before messing up my back big time on a deadlift two weeks ago, my lifts were:

Sq: 200# (~88Kg)
DL: 270# (~118 Kg)
PC: 145# (~63 Kg)
Bench: 153# (~67Kg)
Press# 102# (~45 Kg)

Back when I started I was lean and I almost had a six pack. Now the pack is gone, I have a hint of a gut, and when I bend to tie up my shoelaces I can feel the skin on the side of my trunk folding and creasing.

On the other hand, my back is bigger, my physio was impressed by my legs, and, this is the ultimate accolade, my Mum said recently that I was now looking big enough to stop putting on weight.

I am happy with my new body shape. I am still quite weak in absolute terms, but far stronger than I've ever been, and this is enough to make any other aesthetic consideration pointless.

the only drawback of the program is that I had to cut on my running, and I lost a lot of stamina.

I am now being a bit more careful about what I eat, while I recover from the back injury, but once I start training again I'll eat more than I've done so far. I am thinking it would be good to get to 90Kg, just to appreciate how is it to be that size. For someone who has spent his whole adult life in the 72/76 Kg range, it should be quite an experience.

IPB

[Mike O.]

tennisgod,

I'm 44 and on my 11th week, so I'm not far enough along to say how it turns out with the gut yet. I can say that mine is growing though.

Started out with squat/bench/dl, squat/press/clean for 8 weeks then switched to onus wunsler. My progress has been going pretty well so far, possibly aided by the fact that I'm regaining lifting strength I once had at a skinny 160lbs in my early 20's. But I'm closing in on where I was back then, and the squats are becoming daunting.

My bodyweight didn't change much the first 6 weeks. I was already getting chubby before I started, at 190lbs and about 23% bodyfat, and embarrassingly weak. So it's possible I was losing a little fat while building muscle. I started out with very light weights, practically with the empty bar on most of the lifts, as I was trying to rehab a shoulder injury and also had poor ROM in my hips from years of cycling and running. So I didn't feel the need to eat more calories at the start.

But when the bar started getting heavy I increased the calories a bit, and I've gained 10 or 12 pounds in the past 5 weeks or so. Some of the weight is obviously fat around my middle and under my chin, but it's hard to tell how much. For now I'm taking the approach of eating enough to gain a pound or so a week. If I start to have recovery problems not attributable to poor sleep then I'll increase the calories and see if that helps.

As for bad workouts, I've had a few, and it's frustrating. But each one so far I can attribute to 2 or more nights in a row of poor sleep, and to periodic low back pain which I've always experienced during periods when I'm lifting. The low back pain may itself be partially attributable to poor sleep, since they seem to coincide. Keeping a sleep log has been a big help in identifying these recovery problems.

I've been having a harder time sleeping since I've been near failure on the squats each workout for the past couple weeks. When I sleep well I seem to recover fine and the bar goes up convincingly. Changing my schedule so I lift earlier in the day instead of in the evening helps a little but not entirely. I see this sleep problem as my biggest impediment right now.

current stats:
44 y/o, 70.5 inches, 201 lbs.
sq: 265 lb
dl: 265 lb
bench: 165 lb
press: 117.5 lb
powerclean: 125 lb

[hbriem]

I'm 47. I started lifting 6 years ago at 41. I had always been really skinny, around 70-75kg (154-165 lbs). I used to do karate in the old days for about 12 years. At 39 I stopped smoking and gained 12kg (26 lbs) of fat in one year. I swam for a couple of years, but in the long run that didn't agree with my shoulders so I started lifting.

At first I used machines, but got bored after about six months and started using free weights and compound exercises. Not SS which I had never heard of, but similar. I compete in powerlifting every now and then and was even the 100kg national champ this year. No, I'm not that strong. There have been recent changes in policy here that caused many of the stronger lifters to leave the IPF affilated fed that I lift in.

Current stats:
57 y/o, height 180cm (5'11"), weight 94kg (206 lbs), 15% fat?
Squat: 175kg (386#,gym,raw), 190kg (419#,gym,equipped), 185kg (408#,meet,equipped)
Bench: 127.5kg (281#,gym,raw),140kg (309#,gym,eq),135kg(298#,meet,eq)
Deadlift: 232.5kg(513#,gym,raw),235kg(518#,meet,raw)
Press: 75kg(165#,gym)
Power Clean: 100kg (220 lbs,gym)

[TomF]

As I said on one of the threads in Rip's section, I'm 47, and did my first bout of SS when I was 44.

At 5'9", my bodyweight went from 180 to a high of 192, while my working weights for squats rose from #160 to #305. Working sets for the other lifts (i.e. not 1RM lifts) were DL #405, press #135, bench #205, power clean #180.

Some of that bodyweight was fat, which I later lost when I returned to CrossFit. Though I wasn't terribly interested in getting heavier, my SS progress stalled when I didn't eat to caloric excess. Drinking 1-2 quarts of milk/day made a noticeable difference to whether my squats continued to go up in linear fashion. So did sleep. As an older guy, I've found I need to pay much more attention to recovery than my 16 year old son does.

For me, that meant thinking more about the program. So when my squats and DLs stalled when the squats reached #260, and re-setting conventionally or dropping the rate of increase didn't work, I realized I needed to rest the movements more. I flipped over to front squats on DL days, and progress picked up again. That happened sooner than it's likely to for my son, even though I outweigh him by quite a bit.

Similarly, when I miss 2 decent nights' sleep, or things are completely hairy at the office and I miss a couple of lunches, it shows up in my workouts. That's life.

Also, when I've had to take periods away from training (e.g. doing renovations at night instead of lifting), I've de-trained further and faster than a younger guy who's at my stage of strength development. It would probably be different if I had a decades-long history of strength adaptation, but I'll lose 10-15% pretty quickly ... and it takes a while to get it back.

Those elements of training while getting older suck, but they're much better than the alternatives.