I received PPST on Thursday of last week and spent Memorial Day weekend poring over the sections that seemed the most relevant to me; the chapter on the Advanced Trainee and Special Populations-Masters along with a few side trips on sleep and other matters. After training recreationally for a few decades I managed to get my poundages to the advanced level for some of your main lifts. I figured out at 45 how to tell some of the good from the all too common Silly Bullshit in lifting and fitness. I cut my volume and used session to session linear progression with 1-2 lb jumps in upper body and 2-10 lb for the lower body. It worked pretty well for some years and got me to where I am now.

Like I said in earlier posts, I'll be 60 soon and I now find I have to marshal my resources if I want to keep doing jujitsu and remain in some semblance of good shape. It's like one of those old mobiles with attached hanging parts to try to keep in balance. My priorities these days in order are: jujitsu, lifting, and cardio. Recovery and lower back fatigue (almost the same thing for me but not quite) get big votes in my ability to do these. Cardio is important for health, longevity, and performance but still a drain on my recovery. Your discussion of layoff, what you "ought" to be able to do, et. al, in Training for the Aged finally came home to roost for me just this week. After struggling to get up and go to work, then leaving early yesterday, I reviewed my recent history for causal factors. Some careful recall and brutal honesty revealed that I had been dragging for at least the last month from tougher sessions at the dojo and significantly raising poundages on my lower body and upper back exercises. Ego can be an enemy and denial is not just a river in Egypt. I have come to the conclusion that there is not enough caffeine in all of Christendom to keep my tired butt continuing along the path I have been on. Time to get smarter about all this.

Your explanation of cycling your lifting over longer periods of peaking and de-loading look like just what I need to lift longer and at a higher level than I could otherwise. I've never seen a better account adressing older folks like me. Everything else treats an over 50 lifter as little than a geriatric with 3 sets of 10 3 times a week as the cure for what ails them.

As I reviewed the approaches described for Advanced Trainees, they looked a little too high in volume and frequency for me. Your Wndler interviews caused me to use the search function here and some other research too. I hope you don't consider that I dismiss the approaches you covered out of hand because I know you are right about them. The 5 3 1 approach looks lke it could work for me if I split the 4 week sessions out into 2 a week over 2 weeks. The cycling of volume, frequency, occasional use of somewhat higher reps, and de-loading appear to be somethng I can handle these days.

Without your clear account of the importance of such an approach, I would never have considered it. I figured cycling workouts in this manner was for the real elite athletes, and I knew I never was and never would be one of those. It’s like a conversation I had in the dojo recently when one of the purple belts said, “You’re just as good as you ever were.” To which I said, “Well, maybe, but just not a s often.” Thank you again for making the complex easier to understand.