Introduction — Resistance Is Not Futile
In recent years there has been an explosion of published biomedical evidence on resistance training — in the aged, in women, in children, and in people suffering from conditions ranging from diabetes and hypertension to congestive heart failure and Parkinson’s disease. What this growing body of data tells us is unambiguous: everybody who can lift weights should lift weights. This most emphatically includes those in their forties and beyond.
Strength training can slow, arrest, or even reverse many of the degenerative effects of aging — the loss of muscle and strength, brittle bones, floppy ligaments, dysfunctional joints, and the gradual decline of mobility and balance. Instead of losing lean mass and replacing it with fat, healthy aging can be characterized by the retention or even addition of healthy, functional tissue. Think of every bout of strength training as a prudent deposit into a Physiological 401K: saving strong muscle, hard bone, and full mobility for the years when you will need them most.
This book is both a prospectus and a training manual. It is theory and practice — an evidence-based case for why you should invest the time and effort to learn a few basic barbell and conditioning exercises, and a practical examination of exactly what must be done and how these exercises can be incorporated into a complete, lifelong training program.
For too long, aging has been an excuse to take it easy, to avoid the supposed dangers of over-activity, to act your age, to resign yourself to the inevitability of decline, and to consider yourself fit if you can get through a few holes of golf or hobble around the park twice a week.
Nobody here is promising perfect health or even longevity. Getting strong won’t bring back your eyesight, restore your bald spot, shrink your prostate, or smooth your wrinkles. Aging always ends in decline and death. Bad luck and disease can strike down even the strongest, just as a bad market can ruin a wise investor who prepared well. But getting old — even very old — doesn’t have to guarantee frailty, loss of independence, weakness, and misery. It is possible — in fact, it is essential — to save strong and healthy tissue for the years when you will need it most. With discipline, hard work, and a little luck, you can compress the morbidity of aging into a tiny sliver of your life cycle, remaining strong and resilient well into your final years. Instead of dwindling into an atrophic puddle of sick fat, make your ending like a failed last rep at the end of a final workout — strong, vigorous, and useful, to the last. Time always wins in the end. But resistance is not futile.
Chapter 1 — The Sick Aging Phenotype
Aging in the postmodern era can result in either the healthiest seniors the world has ever seen, or a ghastly and increasingly common syndrome of maladaptive aging. Call it the Sick Aging Phenotype: a complex of interrelated and synergistic processes in which the metabolic syndrome, muscle and bone loss, frailty, loss of function and independence, and an ever-growing stew of pharmaceuticals conspire to destroy the health and quality of life of the aging adult. Two organisms of the same species with nearly identical genotypes can age in dramatically different ways depending on how they live, and modern life has tipped the odds badly against us.
Modern aging and death phenotypes are increasingly the product of abundance, longevity, and idleness. The major cardiovascular diseases — including stroke — are by far the leading cause of mortality. Cancer runs second, while diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and respiratory diseases bring up the rear. When infectious diseases do kill us, they tend to do so at the extremes of age and ill health. The killers of the postmodern era are, in a very real sense, diseases of how we live.
The metabolic syndrome is a key driver of unhealthy aging in developed countries, affecting twenty-five to thirty percent of the population of North America. In medicine, a syndrome is a constellation of symptoms, findings, and disorders that tend to occur together. This constellation includes visceral obesity — the accumulation of fat around the internal organs, closely correlated with the truncal obesity measured by waist-hip ratio or BMI — along with insulin resistance and hyperglycemia, elevated blood pressure, and dyslipidemia: derangements in serum triglyceride and cholesterol levels. Chronic inflammation is increasingly recognized as part of the picture as well, a persistent over-activation of cellular and biological defense mechanisms that causes pain and tissue damage. People with metabolic syndrome or any of its components are more likely to become frail, to suffer from stroke, cardiovascular disease, and heart attack, to develop heart failure and kidney failure, and to suffer from erectile dysfunction, depression, loss of independence, and premature death.
The underlying mechanism is more insidious than it first appears, because insulin is not merely a glucose-regulating hormone — its effects run far deeper. Insulin is a growth factor. When it binds to its receptor, it triggers not just glucose uptake but also a network of powerful growth and survival responses, both in cellular chemistry and at the genetic level. Insulin signaling tells tissues they are in a fed state and tells the body that circumstances are ideal for growth, development, and repair. Insulin resistance in the setting of overeating and sedentary lifestyle therefore sends an inappropriate and paradoxical message that the organism is unfed. Unused, detrained muscle downregulates its insulin receptors, turns off protein synthesis, and begins to consume itself to provide calories and amino acids to the rest of the body, which, because of decreased insulin signaling, thinks it is hungry. The result is a progressive loss of muscle tissue and strength. Activity becomes more tiring and uncomfortable. The organism becomes more inactive. Tendons and ligaments lose their stiffness, becoming weaker and more susceptible to strain and injury. And so the cycle feeds itself.
Eventually hyperglycemia slides into full-blown diabetes, requiring oral medications like metformin or glyburide to control blood sugar. These drugs are effective for a while, but they do not address the real root of the disease, and they carry significant — occasionally fatal — side effects. When patients displaying this phenotype arrive in the emergency department, they invariably come with a plastic bag full of powerful medicines, many of which work antagonistically or synergistically in unwholesome ways. This is the end state of the Sick Aging Phenotype: not one disease but many, not one drug but a dozen, and a quality of life diminished in every direction.
Chapter 2 — Exercise Medicine
Exercise has beneficial effects at every stratum of biological organization, from the molecular and cellular levels to the realm of neuropsychiatric health. It is the medicine that actually gets to the root of the Sick Aging Phenotype, rather than treating its symptoms. “Medicine” has become almost synonymous with “drug,” and “health care” has come to mean going to a doctor to find out what pills to take. But modern drugs do not get to the root of the problem — and they never will. Health will never come in a pill.
No drug in the world will ever match the power of exercise medicine. No drug will ever confer so many beneficial effects to so many organ systems, at so little cost, with so few side effects. Weight-bearing exercise improves bone density, joint function, tendon elasticity and strength, range of motion, and overall physical function. Exercise improves cardiac stroke volume, decreases resting heart rate, inhibits the development and progression of hypertension, promotes more favorable blood-lipid profiles, and appears to retard the development of peripheral vascular disease — including coronary artery and cerebrovascular disease — with attendant decreases in the risk of heart attack and stroke.
There is an interesting paradox in the biochemistry of exercise: intense physical activity actually increases the production of free radicals, just as an engine running at high RPMs generates more exhaust and heat. Yet regular, vigorous exercise reduces actual cellular free radical stress and damage. It appears that exercise-induced oxidative stress promotes healthy biochemical adaptations that increase the cell’s tolerance to free radicals — the body, stressed in a controlled and progressive way, becomes more resistant to stress overall.
The effects on the brain are equally compelling. Exercise’s influence on growth factor release, neurotransmitter systems, vascular signaling molecules, antioxidant production, the growth of new cellular power plants called mitochondria, and the development of new blood vessels have all been cited as mechanisms by which exercise promotes brain health and fights cognitive impairment. Exercise promotes brain plasticity, decreases the loss of brain tissue in aging, and is increasingly prescribed for patients with stroke and Parkinsonism. On the whole, the research literature strongly indicates that exercise is critical for maintaining brain function as we age, and that exercise, mental health, and a better life all tend to go together — which should surprise exactly nobody.
A rapidly growing body of research has demonstrated the positive effects of physical exercise in patients with hypertension, heart failure, kidney disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, osteopenia, arthritis, and dementia. But the primary power of exercise is not its ability to treat these conditions — it is its ability to prevent them. Any disease state, once established, is likely to involve structural, epigenetic, and systemic changes that make reversal difficult or even physically impossible. The best treatment is to not get the disease in the first place. Exercise clearly decreases the risk of developing metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease, and there is tantalizing if not yet definitive evidence that it exerts preventative effects against cancer and some forms of dementia. Aging and degeneration are never cured; they are managed. Physical inactivity, a principal driver of the Sick Aging Phenotype, can only be treated by regular, vigorous, lifelong exercise. It is a medicine — but it is not a cure.
Consider how most medicines are dosed: as the patient gets sicker, the dose is increased or another drug is added; if the patient improves, the doctor tries to reduce it. Exercise medicine works in exactly the reverse direction. When used properly, the dose goes up as the patient gets healthier. You start weak and deconditioned. You begin an exercise regimen. Your strength and fitness improve, so you can work a little harder, increasing the dose. The increased dose improves your conditioning still further, allowing you to increase it again. This inverted dosing of exercise medicine illustrates the principle of progressive overload, which is fundamental to the administration of exercise medicine as a lifelong practice.
Chapter 3 — From Prescription to Program: Safety and Dosing
At the most fundamental level, exercise is physical activity. Going for a walk is exercise. Yoga is exercise. Cleaning out the garage is exercise. So are jogging, lifting weights, fencing, badminton, and Pilates. All of these are better than being a couch potato — but it should be obvious that not all forms of exercise are created equal. Exercise medicine comes in different formulations, with different dosing strengths, routes of administration, efficacies, and side-effect profiles. The prescription matters as much as the intention.
An effective exercise prescription must meet several criteria. It must be safe. It must have a wide therapeutic window — meaning it should be available in a broad range of effective doses, from low at the beginning of therapy to progressively higher as you get healthier. It must be comprehensive, as integrated and complete as possible. Most importantly, it must specifically and effectively combat the Sick Aging Phenotype: it should attack the metabolic syndrome, reduce visceral fat, arrest or reverse the loss of muscle and bone, and fight frailty by retaining or restoring strength, power, endurance, mobility, balance, and function. Ideally it should also reduce the requirements for additional medication. And it must be practical, accessible, and time-efficient — because a prescription nobody follows is a prescription that doesn’t work.
Strength training is traditionally and properly conducted with exercises that describe a natural but complete range of motion on a stable surface, using carefully selected loads that increase over time. Properly designed strength training programs avoid unpredictable forces, impacts, and joint moments. Correct strength training is therefore incredibly safe and well-tolerated by individuals of any age. Exercise medicine that meets all of these criteria — safe, effective, efficient, quantifiable, and precisely prescribed and administered to achieve specific physiological and performance goals — deserves its own name. That’s called training.
Chapter 4 — Enduring Resistance, Resisting Endurance: Comprehensive Training
Any complete program must hit all the General Fitness Attributes: strength, power, mobility, balance, endurance, and body composition. The difficulty is that strength training and endurance training compete with each other for valuable training time, and the body has a limited capacity to adapt to both simultaneously. Endurance can be built much more quickly than strength, but it takes committed training time to maintain — and it decays far more quickly than strength once that training stops.
The biology of aging makes the choice clearer than it might otherwise seem. Aging muscle is characterized by the preferential atrophy of high-power Type II fibers, and the loss of these fibers is disproportionately responsible for the decline in muscle mass and strength that accompanies getting older. Training in the high-intensity, high-power anaerobic range — and in particular strength training — allows the Masters Athlete to hang on to this vulnerable population of fibers or, if they have already atrophied, to return them to the land of the living and make them bigger and stronger again. This means that high-intensity training, and strength training above all, will have a powerful effect on the maintenance of muscle mass and strength in a way that aerobic endurance training simply cannot begin to approach.
The unfortunate biological realities of aging therefore indicate that training for strength should take precedence over training for aerobic endurance. Strength training puts you at the high-intensity end of the energy spectrum and promotes the salvage, retention, and development of the precious high-power Type II muscle fibers that are disproportionately lost with age, maximizing your ability to hold on to muscle mass and function. This is not a dismissal of endurance — but it is a clear statement of priority.
There are other fitness attributes to consider besides strength and endurance: power, mobility, balance, and body composition. The Masters Athlete needs them all. And all of these attributes are addressed more substantively and appropriately by training for strength than by training for endurance. Properly performed and programmed, resistance training increases mobility — the ability to perform within the full and natural range of motion with agility and coordination — by strengthening normal human movement patterns throughout that full range of motion. Correct strength training doesn’t merely increase mobility; it actually demands and therefore trains it, in a way that running, cycling, or even swimming cannot approach.
Further still: properly performed resistance exercise trains balance — the ability to express normal human movement patterns with stability, safety, and confidence. Correct strength training through the entire range of motion demands and therefore trains kinesthetic perception, which tells you where your body, your body parts, and your center of mass are located relative to the gravitational field and the floor. And it demands and trains the neuromuscular and skeletal components that maintain your center of mass over a stable balance point. What the gerontologists call functioning — the ability to carry out activities of daily life, including those that bring joy and give life meaning — is precisely what all of this adds up to. Getting out of bed, snatching a child from danger, lifting a box overhead into a cupboard, picking up a heavy bag of groceries, leaping for joy, playing Frisbee with the dog, remodeling the bathroom, rowing a boat across the fishing pond, or making love to your spouse: these are the things worth training for.
Chapter 5 — Specificity and Effectiveness: Your Physiological 401K
Although fat loss is associated in the public and medical minds primarily with aerobic exercise, there is growing recognition that resistance training can increase fat loss and decrease fat gains by maximizing muscle mass and the energy expenditure that comes with it. Muscle is metabolically expensive tissue, and more of it means a higher resting metabolic rate — which matters more and more as the decades pass.
In the world of exercise physiology, cardiovascular fitness is closely associated with VO2max — the maximal rate at which an individual can deliver oxygen to tissues during exercise, sometimes referred to as maximal aerobic capacity. Many investigators find that a program of strength training produces only very small increases in VO2max, or no changes at all. These findings underscore the importance of including a conditioning component in any complete exercise program, since strength training alone will not optimize cardiovascular fitness. No form of exercise appears capable of curing established hypertension, but it is now clear that both aerobic and strength training exert positive influences on blood pressure. Strength training in patients with heart failure has been shown to be safe and to improve exercise tolerance, function, and quality of life — and research by Smart and colleagues suggests that the high-intensity, intermittent nature of strength training may actually be more appropriate for this population than endurance-based aerobic training.
On balance, the preponderance of available scientific evidence indicates that endurance training is probably superior to strength training for the optimization of cardiopulmonary fitness and health. This is an honest concession. But consider what it actually means for the aging individual. When you are sixty or seventy, you are not going to need to run twenty miles, or ten, or even three. You are going to need muscle, bone, strength, power, mobility, balance — and yes, some endurance. Too often the aging individual sees that they are getting weaker, lowers their expectations and their efforts, and thereby grows weaker still. The trajectory is not fixed. The Physiological 401K can be funded at any age, but every year of delay is a deposit missed.
Chapter 6 — Simplicity and Efficiency: From Black Iron to Grey Steel
The exercise prescription should be as simple and efficient as possible. The number of exercises should be kept to a minimum. The complexity of the programming should be kept to a minimum. The program should permit significant progress with two to three days per week of training, and total weekly training time should be kept to a minimum. Despite its simplicity, the program should be comprehensive with regard to the musculoskeletal and energy systems, and should apply training stresses sufficient to drive progressive, long-term improvements in the maximal number of fitness attributes: strength, power, endurance, mobility, balance, and body composition.
The key to achieving this is to think in movements rather than muscles. In the arena of daily life, no one needs to lie on their belly and flex their hamstrings against resistance, or perform an isolated knee extension, or — for heaven’s sake — execute a pectoral fly. No normal human being ever performs these movements against significant resistance outside a gym. They are not in the repertoire of normal human movement. What aging adults do in the arena of life is sit down, stand up, push things away, pull things in, lift things off the floor, and heave things over their heads. These simple, natural movement patterns are the building blocks of physical existence, and taken together they encompass the functional range of motion of the human organism.
The advantages of focusing on movements instead of muscles run deep. There are about 640 muscles in the human body, but just a few basic movement patterns capture input from the vast majority of this muscle mass. If you take the basic patterns of squatting down and standing up, pushing something away, lifting something overhead, and lifting something heavy off the floor, you will strengthen and condition the entire musculoskeletal system and make all of those movements stronger throughout the natural range of motion, increasing both strength and mobility simultaneously.
Four simple exercises performed over the course of a two- to three-day-per-week program, combined if necessary with intense conditioning drills, will drive profound and dramatic improvements in strength, power, endurance, mobility, balance, body composition, and health. The squat is the cornerstone — simply squatting down and standing up again while loaded recruits a vast volume of muscle tissue over a complete range of motion, forcing major improvements in overall strength, muscle mass, joint integrity, back strength, and overall athleticism. The deadlift is nothing more than lifting a heavy barbell off the floor, but it is complementary to the squat and allows trainees to lift more weight than any other exercise, strengthening the back, legs, trunk, hips, shoulders, and grip. It is particularly accessible to older trainees with limitations in their range of motion and produces transformative changes in confidence, self-image, and outlook. The press trains the fundamental movement pattern of lifting something overhead and, because it is performed standing, demands balance and recruits muscle mass from the entire body — legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest. The bench press trains the basic human movement of pushing something away, is complementary to the overhead press, and promotes massive increases in upper body strength.
After the initial stage of training, devoted entirely to the rapid accumulation of strength, a conditioning component is added. This may be the athlete’s sport of choice — tennis, swimming, biking, hiking, martial arts. But the General Exercise Prescription fills this requirement through a high-intensity interval conditioning component, which can be pursued using a stationary bike, kettlebells, rowers, or sleds — the preferred option, for reasons discussed later.
Chapter 7 — Elementary Iron
There are many materials available for instruction in barbell training. Mark Rippetoe’s text and videos, available at StartingStrength.com, are far superior to any other instructional materials available anywhere, and anyone serious about learning these movements should begin there. The movements can be learned, but they must be learned correctly, and correct instruction matters enormously.
If the space is available, an investment of roughly three thousand to five thousand dollars will result in a home facility far superior to what is available in most commercial gyms — no waiting, no commute, no interference from others using the equipment for purposes unrelated to training, no arbitrary rules, and the freedom to listen to whatever music you like. The convenience of a home gym removes one of the most common barriers to consistent training.
Whatever the setting, athletes must warm up with light weight, always starting with the empty bar — except for the deadlift — before progressing to heavier loads or performing the exercises at the weights prescribed for that day. Increases in weight over time must always be judicious and guided by the program, not by the athlete’s exuberance or ego. This discipline, practiced from the first session, is what separates training from mere exercise.
Chapter 8 — A Brief Overview of the Squat
The squat is performed with a shoulder-width stance, toes pointing out at about thirty degrees. As you descend, you drive your knees out so that your thighs are parallel with your feet. You open your hips, bend forward, push your butt back and point your chest toward the floor, and keep your head in a neutral position. By about a third of the way down, your back angle is set and your knees are as far forward as they are going to get — no more than an inch or so beyond your toes — with your shins set like rigid posts. Your hips drop below your knees.
At that depth, your groin muscles and hamstrings approach their full extensibility, triggering a stretch reflex — the “bounce” — that helps drive you out of the bottom position. You call upon this hip drive by thinking about driving your butt straight up, as if there were a winch attached to your sacrum pulling you toward the ceiling. By the time you are two-thirds of the way up, your back and shank angles begin to change as you assume an upright position. You stand up, breathe out, take a deep breath, and squat again.
This method of performing the squat maximizes range of motion and recruits more muscle tissue than other variants because it incorporates what is called the active hip, which transforms the squat from a leg exercise into a movement that trains the entire posterior kinetic chain. The active hip demands contributions from the calf, the groin muscles, the hamstrings, the femoral rotators of the hip chassis, and the spinal erectors — a huge volume of muscle, all trained with a single exercise. No other exercise comes close to training such a large volume of contractile tissue through such a large range of motion with such intensity. This is why the squat is the cornerstone of strength training.
Properly performed, the squat is simply the loaded version of a normal human movement pattern. It is a movement you were designed to perform. The difference in bar position between what are called high-bar and low-bar variations may seem minor and inconsequential. It isn’t. Even a few inches of change in bar position on the torso — from just beneath the scapular spine to the top of the traps — significantly shifts how the bar aligns with the athlete’s center of gravity during the exercise. This affects the back angle, and the effectiveness of the movement, quite profoundly.
Chapter 9 — A Brief Overview of the Deadlift
A huge amount of muscle is involved in the deadlift: the muscles of the legs, hips, buttocks, lower back, abdomen, upper back, and chest all contribute to the movement. The squat may be the King of Exercises, but the deadlift is the Queen. The movement begins with a standard barbell positioned directly over the middle of the feet. The bar is lifted straight up, in contact with the legs, with a grip just slightly wider than the stance. At the top of the movement, the lifter is standing perfectly erect, head neutral, with straight knees and no bend at the waist. The bar is then lowered quickly to the floor by reversing the movement, the trainee breathes and resets position, and the pull begins again — from a dead stop each time.
The setup is everything. The bar should be over the middle of your foot, about an inch from your shins. Keeping your knees as straight as possible and your hips high, bend at the waist and take the bar low in your hands — toward the fingers, not the wrists — with straight arms. Without moving the bar, bring your shins forward just until they contact the bar. Then, without moving the bar or lowering your hips, raise your chest and tighten your entire body, locking your entire spine into rigid extension. Only now do you pull.
The purpose of good deadlift technique and setup isn’t to make your back vertical — it’s to make the bar path vertical, lifting the bar straight up over the middle of the foot. If you have performed the setup correctly, the bar will end up where it started. Keep your grip on the bar, keep your hips up, get tight, raise your chest, lock your back into extension, take a deep breath, and pull again. Training the deadlift this way loads the back and therefore strengthens the back, making the athlete stronger and harder to break. That is the whole point.
Chapter 10 — A Brief Overview of the Press
The standing overhead press — or simply the press — is an exercise in which the bar is held in the hands at the shoulders and lifted overhead to a position directly above the shoulder joints and over the middle of the foot. For general strength training, the press can and should be performed so as to recruit muscle tissue from the entire body. Because the press describes such a long range of motion and creates such a long potential moment arm, it demands balance and stabilizing contributions from the muscles of the lower extremities, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms. It is an excellent exercise for the development of upper body strength, balance, mobility, and proprioception.
The execution exploits the hip chassis — the center of human power. The lifter pushes the hips forward, creating clearance between the bar and the chin, then drives the bar straight up, keeping it close to the face. As the bar just begins to pass the head, the lifter drives the torso forward to get the shoulders beneath the bar. The bar moves upward in a straight vertical line. The press is finished with a forceful shrug that completes the rotation of the scapula to support the humerus, which supports the forearm, which supports the bar. Legs, glutes, abdominals, back muscles, shoulder and arm muscles, spinal erectors, pectorals, and traps all get a workout from loading this movement pattern.
When people think of upper-body exercises, they think about bench presses, flyes, and curls. But the standing overhead press is the paragon of upper body strength exercises, because no other upper body exercise describes such a long range of motion, recruits so much muscle mass, demands so much balance and coordination, or recapitulates such a universal human movement pattern. The shoulder is designed not to impinge during this movement. You can help this natural design by shrugging hard at the top of the press, emphasizing the contraction of the trapezius, which drives the proper rotation of the scapulae. And if you do not put more weight on the bar than you are ready for, and if you set up with proper grip, breathing, and stance each time, the press will not hurt your shoulders.
Chapter 11 — A Brief Overview of the Bench Press
Of the four primary barbell exercises, the bench press is the only one that is not a structural exercise, and it describes the shortest range of motion. However, it allows considerable weight to be handled and produces marked improvements in upper body strength. The bench trains the anterior muscles of the chest and shoulders and also trains the muscles of the upper extremity, particularly the triceps. Although it has a shorter kinetic chain than the other primary lifts, it nevertheless trains a large volume of tissue in the chest, shoulders, arms, neck, and back, and it has meaningful beneficial impacts on glucose disposal, insulin sensitivity, neuromuscular and bioenergetic adaptation, cardiovascular health, frailty, and function.
The setup requires care. The torso is parallel to the ground, feet flat on the floor, and grip width is set so that the forearms will be perpendicular to the floor at the bottom of the movement — almost always about one hand width wider than the press grip. Your upper back at the shoulder blades and your buttocks must remain in contact with the bench, but the lumbar spine should be arched such that a coach could pass a hand between the bench and your lower back. The shoulders are pulled down and back, as if you are trying to hold an object pinched between your shoulder blades. This raises the chest, improving the angle at which the chest muscles engage the humerus, and decreases the distance the bar has to travel.
With the bar locked out over the shoulder joints, take note of its position against the ceiling and fix your eyes on that reference point for the entire set. Lower the bar slowly to touch the middle of your sternum lightly — this position drops the elbows to about seventy-five degrees of humeral abduction and prevents shoulder impingement — then drive up hard. Do not watch the bar; stare it into place at the top. The bench press must never be performed with a thumbless grip. Do not bounce the bar off your chest, which both dissipates training effectiveness and is dangerous. Never use collars on the bar for the bench press: if you are caught under a failed rep, you must be able to tilt off the plates to escape.
If shoulder discomfort occurs, three techniques can be combined to resolve it. First, narrow the grip: starting with your pinkies on the smooth part of the bar, move the grip in one or two finger widths at a time until a comfortable position is found. Second, touch the bar lower — with as much arch as possible, bringing the bar to the very top of the abdominals rather than the sternum. Third, tuck the elbows instead of allowing them to flare. A combination of close grip, a low touch point, and tucked elbows will allow almost any trainee to safely and effectively bench press a barbell. Microloading should be used to the greatest extent possible — for most Masters Athletes, five-pound increases on the bench press are significant.
Chapter 12 — A Brief Overview of the Power Clean and Power Snatch
In the snatch, a barbell is pulled from the floor to a position overhead in a single, uninterrupted movement. The bar is caught with straight elbows — it may not be pressed out to full extension — and is usually racked with the lifter in a deep overhead squat position, to reduce the distance the bar must travel. In the clean and jerk, the barbell is pulled from the floor and caught on the shoulders, usually in a deep front squat position. This is the clean. The lifter then stands erect and slams the bar overhead in a single sharp, explosive movement — the jerk — racking the load on fully extended arms.
Work is not dependent on time, but power is. When you lift a one-hundred-pound bar four feet in one second, you are expressing ten times more power than if you do it in ten seconds. The ability to express power — the ability to explode — is fundamental to all athletic endeavors, and it is the specific quality these movements train. In both the clean and the snatch, the bar is pulled from the floor like a deadlift and then begins to accelerate — its velocity increasing the higher it moves — until it reaches a position on the thigh where the athlete must jump, explosively slamming hips, knees, and ankles into full and powerful extension. At the completion of the power clean, the athlete stands erect with the bar still racked on the shoulders, then either lowers it down the front of the torso to catch it in the hands or drops it to the platform if equipped with bumper plates.
The most important technical point in the power snatch is that the bar is not pressed into lockout — the drop straightens out the elbows and wrists, not the triceps and deltoids. Any press-out in this position is intrinsically dangerous, disqualifies a snatch in competition, and should not be tolerated in training. The power movements are important because they allow you to improve your ability to display the power that your underlying strength makes possible.
That said, the clean and snatch can be hard on aging tendons, ligaments, and joints. They challenge the older athlete’s capacity to recover and can interfere with performance and progress on the more fundamental and important exercises. Accordingly, the power clean and power snatch are considered entirely optional movements for the Masters population. Particularly fit and active Masters who engage in sports or professions that demand the expression of power — track and field, combat sports, rugby, military and police work — may productively train these movements, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
Chapter 13 — Assistance Exercises
Assistance exercises are frequently misunderstood and misused. Their proper role is to supplement and support progress in the primary barbell movements, but all too often they end up becoming the core of a strength training program. This is unfortunate, because they are completely unsuited for such a role. These movements typically recruit less muscle, use a shorter range of motion, impose less comprehensive training stresses, promote less general adaptation, and have far less potential for progressive development than the squat, deadlift, and pressing movements. When you see someone in a gym whose workout consists of barbell curls, leg presses, lat pull-downs, dips, and maybe bench presses, you are looking at someone who is, in the words of Jim Wendler, majoring in the minors.
Chin-ups and pull-ups, performed through the full range of motion, quite thoroughly work the musculature of the lats, upper back, forearms, and biceps. Which variation you choose is not terribly important, and many trainees alternate between the two. Chin-ups use more muscle mass and are usually performed with greater strength; they recruit much greater involvement of the biceps. Pull-ups place more stress on the forearms and the lats. As with most assistance exercises, chins and pull-ups cannot be programmed at the same level of precision as the big multi-joint barbell movements — performance varies from day to day and a predictable linear progression is never realized. Andy Baker is fond of telling his Masters that chins and pull-ups are a “completion grade” at the end of the workout: you do them, but are not overly concerned with session-to-session improvement. Performance is judged on a monthly basis. An excellent way to program both is through repetition totals — simply select a target number, say twenty, and perform as many sets as necessary to reach it, tracking both the number of reps on the first set and the number of sets needed to hit the total. For Masters who cannot perform pull-ups or chins due to excessive bodyweight or insufficient strength, lat pull-downs or bodyweight rows are excellent alternatives.
Curls are the archetype of an overused exercise with limited utility, especially for those most prone to use them. They train a very limited amount of muscle mass through a relatively short range of motion, do not promote the same gains in functional strength as the primary movements, usually confer minimal health and performance benefits, and can easily result in overuse injuries. That said, curls are not completely useless — they promote accumulation of muscle mass, however limited, and that is always a good thing. The barbell curl, properly performed and programmed, can be a useful assistance exercise for selected Masters with limitations in the primary barbell movements, and steady progress on curls has excellent carryover to those whose chin-up or lat pull-down strength has stagnated. Barbell curls should be done with a full range of motion, a supinated forearm, and involvement of the shoulder. The bar should be curled up to the bottom of the chin and lowered to the point where the elbows are straight but not completely relaxed. Two or three sets of eight to ten repetitions are sufficient.
The leg press is not a useful training modality for Masters who are able to squat in regular training, but it is valuable for preparing those who cannot yet squat through the full range of motion due to a lack of strength. A popular method for managing deadlift recovery is a weekly rotation between halting deadlifts and rack pulls. These exercises split the deadlift’s range of motion into two overlapping components that can be trained heavily but separately, reducing the demand on recovery capacity. Halting deadlifts begin on the floor and are pulled to just above knee height, then returned. Rack pulls begin just below the knees and are pulled to lockout. Alternating the two allows heavy pulling on a weekly basis without overtraining on the full movement.
Chapter 14 — Programming
When adjustment to a program is necessary, change one training variable at a time. This is not a suggestion — it is a principle. When multiple variables are changed simultaneously, it becomes impossible to identify what produced any given result, and the ability to make rational decisions about future adjustments is lost. Adjust one thing, observe the outcome, then adjust again if necessary.
For the Masters Athlete in particular, there is little to be gained by comparing one’s own progress to that of others, other than to see what might be possible or worth avoiding. Every athlete begins from a unique starting line shaped by decades of prior activity, injury history, genetics, recovery capacity, and life demands. Train yourself to be the best you can be, beginning from your own unique starting line and progressing on your own unique journey. The numbers on the bar are not the point. What they make you is.
Chapter 15 — Adaptation
Any rational training program, whatever its modality and whatever its goals, is nothing more than a cycle of applying a physical stress, recovering and adapting to the stress, and then increasing the stress to drive progress. This is the General Adaptation Syndrome as described by Hans Selye, and it is the underlying logic behind every effective training protocol ever designed.
Exhaustion is the alternate, unhappy ending of this cycle. If the stressor drives the organism too far from homeostasis, the physiological or structural disruption will overwhelm adaptive responses. Alternatively, if the stressor is within the organism’s adaptive range but is applied too often or for too long, the adaptive capacities of the organism will ultimately fail and it will become progressively weaker and less adapted to the stress. Both of these represent failures of programming — one from too much at once, the other from too much over time.
When the stress has been of sufficient but not excessive dose, and when recovery has been adequate, the organism will undergo adaptation during the recovery period — not merely returning to its previous performance baseline but progressing to a higher state, expressing its improved capacity to respond to a future stress. This is dependent on the correct application of the overload event: the dose, the timing, and the recovery must all be calibrated together. The older the trainee, the less efficient recovery will be. The Masters Athlete simply cannot tolerate training stresses of the same dose or frequency as younger counterparts. It is this relative lack of efficiency in the recovery phase that partially explains why older adults cannot productively train as often or increase their strength as quickly — not a failure of will, but a biological reality to be respected and planned around.
Chapter 16 — Recovery: The Forgotten Training Variables
The principal components of effective recovery are active rest, adequate nutrition, quality sleep, hydration, and stress reduction. A very few nutritional supplements may be of some benefit, but most are unproven or even harmful. The principle that organizes all of recovery is captured in a single idea: you do not get stronger by lifting weights. You get stronger by recovering from lifting weights.
Training five or more days a week will be entirely counterproductive for the Masters Athlete. This does not mean, however, that the athlete reverts to a state of torpor on rest days. Exercise every day — but this is explicitly not the same thing as training every day. Active rest is unprogrammed, light physical activity: a walk in the woods with the dog, a bike ride with a friend, cleaning out the garage, Tai Chi, dancing, a game of golf. This light exercise can actually promote recovery by keeping muscle and connective tissues supple and perfused with blood and nutrients. Light activity signals the body that it needs to be ready to move even on non-training days, and it maintains engagement with the life the Master is training for. The key is that active rest must be low in intensity and volume, especially during the novice phase.
For strength training, a caloric surplus must be present, and dietary protein will exceed the usual recommended daily allowance. Calculating a general formula for daily caloric needs is a perilous undertaking, since body composition, overall health, daily activity level, and training history vary considerably in the Masters population. As a rough starting point, the Master should consume about 1.25 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight, about 1 gram of carbohydrate per pound, and just under 0.5 grams of fat per pound. For a typical two-hundred-pound, fifty-five-year-old untrained male at roughly twenty-five percent bodyfat, this works out to about 2,600 calories per day: approximately 250 grams of protein, 200 grams of carbohydrate, and 90 grams of fat.
Build the diet starting with protein sources first. There is compelling evidence that older athletes need more high-quality protein than their younger counterparts to overcome the general anabolic resistance of aging. A good estimate is about 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight from high-quality animal sources. A couple of protein shakes a day make this target much easier to hit. Whey is the preferred source for supplementation, as it provides a very beneficial amino acid profile — one that is high in the critical branched-chain amino acids leucine, isoleucine, and valine. Protein intake should be steady and consistent throughout the week, not crammed into one or two meals.
During exercise, particularly high-intensity exercise, glucose and muscle glycogen are the body’s preferred energy source — carbohydrate must be present in muscle to fuel hard training sessions. But too much dietary carbohydrate may promote fat accretion and possibly the development of metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance. A good starting point is what might be called bracketing: eating starchy carbohydrates like bread, potatoes, and rice just before and soon after training, while keeping ingestion of such carbohydrates lower at other times. On non-training days and during meals that do not occur near the training session, athletes who want to minimize bodyfat accumulation should get their carbohydrates from fibrous vegetables and fruits. Eating a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and meat selections is a practical way to cover micronutrient needs. A clichéd but useful recommendation is to regularly consume lots of color when it comes to produce.
As a general rule, nutritional supplements are valuable to those who make and market them, and just about nobody else. A few exceptions are worth noting. Vitamin D is synthesized in the skin when exposed to sunlight, and its role in the absorption of minerals from dietary sources — particularly calcium, magnesium, iron, zinc, and phosphorous — makes it essential for skeletal health. Many people in northern latitudes are deficient and benefit from supplementation. The role of coffee as an ergogenic aid has been extensively studied. On balance, caffeine appears to promote better workout performance, probably due to its effects on neuromuscular function, mood state, calcium release during contraction, and an increase in plasma catecholamines like epinephrine and norepinephrine. It does not have a negative effect on hydration in healthy humans — coffee and tea can serve double duty as mild workout stimulants and hydration agents. The real downside for the Master is caffeine’s potential impact on sleep.
Creatine supplements have been shown to be moderately useful for those engaged in anaerobic training. Creatine supplementation doesn’t make you stronger directly; rather, it helps extend the capacity of the phosphagen system, which might allow you to complete that last rep so you can get stronger. There is also some evidence that creatine enhances muscle hypertrophy by promoting an increase in muscle cell nuclei and the activation of satellite cells. Special formulations — buffered preparations, creatine combined with other supplements — add nothing except cost and contamination. Plain creatine monohydrate will do nicely. Contrary to what you may have heard, there is no conclusive evidence that creatine is effective in the prevention or treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, nor is there any evidence that it inflicts harm on the healthy kidney. Its use appears to be very safe.
Hydration recommendations divide into two categories: maintenance and replacement. Maintenance hydration for the athlete training a few hours a day calls for about two to three liters per day. Athletes who sweat very heavily may require a gallon or more. Testosterone levels begin to climb upon falling asleep, peaking during the critical REM cycles that begin about ninety minutes later, and remaining elevated until waking. Human growth hormone is also elevated during sleep. Eight hours is a reasonable target — eight actual hours of sleep, not two hours watching television followed by six hours of sleep, and not eight hours interrupted three or four times a night.
A small glass of bourbon in the evening may initially help ease you to sleep, but many people report being wide awake a few hours later. Alcohol disrupts the normal sleep cycle architecture, decreasing the amount of time in slow-wave sleep. Very spicy food in the evening is antagonistic to sleep for many, especially those in their sixth decade and beyond. Caffeine, nicotine, high-fat meals, chocolate, and alcohol all promote relaxation of the lower esophageal sphincter and can lead to reflux and heartburn — both of which will disrupt sleep and cause other problems as well. Chronic stress suppresses anabolism and has unhealthy effects on cardiovascular parameters. Managing stress is not optional for the Master who wants to recover from hard training.
Chapter 17 — Elements of Program Design and Execution
Sets of one to three repetitions at high intensity are classically associated with the production of raw strength and power. Sets of eight to twelve repetitions at moderate intensity are used to increase muscle mass and size through hypertrophy. A tremendous amount of practical coaching experience has shown, however, that general strength is very efficiently developed with multiple five-repetition sets. In novice programming, the five-rep set is the target for all primary barbell movements because sets of five work in the optimal range for both strength and muscle mass — the two primary goals of the novice. Sets of five occupy what might be called the metabolic middle of the strength training spectrum: they produce a training stress powerful enough to drive adaptation while permitting recovery within a forty-eight to seventy-two hour window.
For strength work, a minimum of three to five minutes should be taken between work sets at the onset of training. As strength increases and the weight on the bar gets heavier, rest intervals of eight to ten minutes will be needed. Shortchanging rest times in the interest of saving time is a false economy — it compromises the quality of the work and undermines progress. The importance of recording your work cannot be overemphasized. Training is a long-term, highly structured project in adjusting your physiology and performance to optimize your health. Without records, you cannot identify trends, troubleshoot stalls, or make rational decisions about programming adjustments. The logbook is not optional.
Chapter 18 — Athlete Program Categories: Novice, Intermediate, and Beyond
Any increase in physical activity virtually guarantees short-term increases in strength for the rank novice. This phenomenon is known as the novice effect: any physical activity that requires even the most minimal amount of effort and exertion will yield some positive effects for a completely untrained adult. The novice effect is responsible for much of the confusion about physical exercise found not only around the water cooler but also in the exercise physiology literature. Studies that test untrained subjects on almost any exercise protocol will find gains, regardless of the protocol’s actual design quality, simply because the subjects were untrained.
Understanding the novice effect is important because it helps set realistic expectations about what different training approaches can and cannot deliver over time. The gains of the novice phase are real and should be exploited aggressively. But they are not permanent, and a training approach designed for the novice will eventually stop producing results — not because the approach has failed, but because the athlete is no longer a novice. Recognizing that transition, and responding to it correctly, is one of the central challenges of long-term training.
Chapter 19 — The Novice Master
The Starting Strength model prescribes a three-day-per-week program that traditionally falls on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The point is not to prescribe particular increments in weight but to illustrate the principle that increases in loading will start out larger — ten, fifteen, even twenty pounds at a time — and then taper off as the athlete approaches the limits of what they can recover from in forty-eight to seventy-two hours. The loading pattern is inexorable at the beginning and slows over weeks, which is exactly what should happen.
If the trainee has been using the Starting Strength model or a very close variation, they will rarely if ever need to add additional work to the program in order to get progress going again when it stalls. If progress is not happening on the standard novice program, there are exactly three possible reasons: excessive training stress within the workout, insufficient recovery between sessions, or greed. Greed — the temptation to add weight faster than biology allows or to pile on extra volume in the belief that more is better — is the most common culprit and the easiest to fix.
Chapter 20 — The Novice Over 60 and Common Novice Variants
An athlete in their sixties will be far more likely to require recovery intervals that extend beyond seventy-two hours and reductions in training volume in order to make progress beyond the rank novice phase. The standard Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule may need to become a Monday-Thursday arrangement, or even Monday-Friday, allowing more time between sessions for the older organism to complete its recovery and adaptation. This is not a failure — it is a biological fact that must be incorporated into programming from the start.
One practical detail deserves attention when programming bench press and overhead press in the same training week. Bench presses affect the overhead press less than the overhead press affects the bench press, probably because the overhead press exhausts the triceps more than the bench press does. Once the triceps reserves are depleted, all hope for effective bench pressing in that session evaporates. For this reason, when both exercises appear in the same session, it makes sense to bench first and press second. Moreover, after heavy bench presses the nervous system will be primed for the lighter pressing variation that follows, having already dealt with the heavier weight of the bench at the beginning of the workout.
Chapter 21 — The Novice Over 70 and Remedial Variants
A program built around just two major barbell movements will seem quite limited — and it is — but it still represents a full-body workout with the potential to produce massive increases in strength and preserve muscle mass and function. Bench presses work the pectorals, triceps, and deltoids. Deadlifts effectively train the hamstrings, glutes, quadriceps, low back, upper back, forearms, and abdominals. That is the lion’s share of muscle mass. For a trainee whose mobility or recovery capacity is genuinely insufficient to support the full four-exercise program, this stripped-down approach is not a compromise — it is the appropriate prescription, and it can be the foundation from which more is eventually built.
Chapter 22 — The Intermediate Master
Even short breaks from training tend to be a more significant setback for older trainees than for their younger counterparts. A week of missed training due to illness might mean two to three weeks of work just to return to the level you were at before — not because muscle disappears that quickly, but because the neuromuscular patterns and the specific conditioning needed for heavy lifting decay, and the older body is slower to recapture them. This sobering reality underscores the value of consistency over intensity at any single session.
The design of intermediate programs for Masters demands that several principles be borne firmly in mind. First, Masters need frequent breaks from very hard training — regular deloads are not optional self-indulgence but a structural necessity. Second, Masters are volume-sensitive: they will not benefit from and cannot tolerate very high-volume workouts, or volume work done at a high percentage of their one-rep maximum. Third, Masters are intensity-dependent: they will detrain very quickly when intensity is reduced for too long. These three realities define the narrow corridor in which effective intermediate programming for older athletes must operate.
Setting objectives provides focus. Specific weight-rep goals for the training year, preparation for a physically demanding vacation or sporting event, excelling at a particular physical pastime, or meeting the requirements of a strenuous profession — all of these can provide motivation and drive the individuation and focus of an intermediate-level program. Progress without purpose tends to stall; purpose without a program tends to result in injury.
One effective organizing principle is a three-week cycle built around the five-rep maximum. Every time the athlete sets a new five-rep max, the weight is increased by two to five pounds for the following week, but the rep goal is reduced to a set of three. The goal for the three-week cycle is to complete the target weight for three sets of five reps by the end of week three. Once achieved, two to five pounds are added for the following week, but the goal is now five sets of three — the total workload remains the same, but triples at the new weight are easier than fives, giving the Master a physical and mental respite after achieving a new record. The second week of the next cycle holds the weight constant while using four sets of four reps — the extra rep per set is slightly harder than the previous week and paves the way for a new three-sets-of-five personal record on week three. By that week, the trainee has handled this load on two previous occasions and should be well-prepared physically and mentally to set the new mark.
Chapter 23 — The Texas Method
The Texas Method is suitable for intermediate Masters who have made strength acquisition their primary athletic focus and who are willing and able to train on a fairly grueling program. It has three fundamental components that reflect the Stress-Recovery-Adaptation formulation of Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome. The overload event begins with Volume Day, traditionally on Monday — without question the most difficult workout of the week. Training stress is produced by performing the exercises at moderately high intensity and high volume, delivering a very large dose. This level of stress will exceed the trainee’s capacity to recover and adapt before the next session, and that is by design.
Recovery Day traditionally falls on Wednesday. The low-intensity, low-volume work of Recovery Day flushes tired muscles with blood and keeps motor pathways fresh between heavy sessions. It stimulates the ongoing biology of recovery triggered by Volume Day without impeding it. The goal is not to train hard but to train just enough to promote recovery while staying far below the threshold of new fatigue. Intensity Day, traditionally on Friday, is where adaptation is displayed. Unlike the novice progression, in which each workout both imposed new training stress and displayed new strength, the Texas Method emphasizes a different aspect of the cycle in each session. Intensity Day calls for just a single work set on each exercise — heavy and hard, but not so much as Volume Day, and not so hard as to prevent the delivery of a new, heavier training stress the following Monday. The entire week’s work is focused on the realization of the Intensity Day goals. Squats and pressing movements on Volume Day are at eighty-five to ninety percent of Intensity Day targets; Recovery Day work is at eighty to ninety percent of Volume Day targets at decreased volume. Weight on Intensity Day increases from week to week: that weekly increment is the measure of progress.
Progressing on the Texas Method gets complicated sooner rather than later. The basic setup will not last forever — in fact, it likely will not last longer than a few weeks, possibly a few months if recovery is going well. One of the biggest mistakes trainees of all ages make is trying to stay with an unmodified Texas Method template for far too long. When displaying new strength with a five-rep set every week becomes untenable, two alternate paths are available. The simpler is running it out: continue adding weight to the bar but aim for three to four reps on Intensity Day, then reduce to heavy doubles, then eventually to multiple heavy singles across five sets of one. The alternative is rotating rep ranges — using the volume and intensity knobs on the programming machine in different combinations to produce new stimuli. The dynamic effort method, in which sets of two are performed with maximum velocity and limited rest, can compress the same total volume into a fraction of the time and serve as a powerful new stimulus to break a training rut. When all of these approaches prove insufficient, substituting a supplemental barbell movement that closely resembles the stalled primary lift — in both performance and loading — can restart progress on either Volume Day or Intensity Day or both.
Chapter 24 — Heavy-Light-Medium and Split Programs
Heavy-Light-Medium programs spread the Stress-Recovery-Adaptation cycle over a one-week training period to produce a versatile intermediate training approach that is less grueling than the Texas Method and therefore more suitable for the majority of Masters Athletes. The two methods look remarkably similar on paper, but key differences make Heavy-Light-Medium programs less stressful and easier on recovery — distinctions that matter enormously for the older trainee who cannot bounce back from Volume Day by Wednesday. In the Heavy-Light-Medium system, the heavy day is the focal point of the program. The light and medium days support the heavy day by promoting recovery, keeping motor patterns fresh, and building toward the next heavy session, rather than simultaneously serving as the primary stress event.
Chapter 25 — The Advanced Master
Training at this level is not conducted for health or fitness but rather to optimize performance for competition. The athlete who has reached this stage has years of consistent training behind them and a well-developed intuition for how their body responds to stress and recovery. Programming at this level must be individually tailored to the athlete’s specific competitive calendar and performance goals, and it requires a sophistication in both design and execution that cannot be reduced to a simple template.
One effective organizing structure is a four-week cycle sometimes called Two Steps Forward, One Step Back. The first week is Preparatory Loading — moderate-to-high volume at moderate intensity. The second week is Primary Loading — the highest volume of the cycle at the highest intensity possible at that volume. The third week is Deloading — low volume and low intensity, allowing the athlete to consolidate the adaptations driven by the first two weeks. The fourth week is Performance — very low volume at very high intensity, displaying the strength built over the cycle. This approach keeps both volume and intensity at appropriate levels throughout the cycle while creating enough fluctuation that the trainee does not go stale over the course of many repeated cycles. The structure is a vehicle for long-term progress, not a guarantee of it.
Chapter 26 — Conditioning
Conditioning — also known as endurance training or cardio — is an essential component of the complete exercise prescription, magnifying the metabolic, cardiovascular, and performance benefits of strength training. Conditioning is far more sport- and vocation-specific than strength training, and for many athletes the best recommendation is simply to lift weights and play your sport. For Masters who practice low-intensity sports or who train solely for health, however, this prescription does not suffice. Evaluating the available modalities through the lens of the exercise prescription criteria makes clear that high-intensity interval training alternatives are superior to low-intensity, long slow distance exercise. Conditioning at high intensity confers the health benefits of low-intensity training in less time, while producing less interference with strength training and promoting more comprehensive bioenergetic and performance adaptations.
The best data available suggests that combining strength and conditioning improves the general health and performance benefits of either modality alone. But strength training is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The objective is strength for life: membership in a recreational sports league, skiing in the Rockies, hiking a nature trail with someone you love. Once the foundation of strength is built, it must be complemented by appropriate conditioning so the athlete can use that strength to engage in meaningful physical activities outside the gym. Significant fat loss, however, doesn’t happen in the gym — it happens at the dinner table. Attempts to run off a beer belly will sacrifice knees, ankles, and low backs in the process, and such high-volume conditioning will be detrimental to building and maintaining strength and muscle mass. That is a fool’s trade-off.
The conditioning component must be safe, must have a broad therapeutic window, must be as comprehensive as possible, must specifically and effectively combat the Sick Aging Phenotype, must be as specific as possible to the physical demands confronted by the individual athlete, and must be as simple and efficient as possible. To meet the criterion of safety, conditioning should be low in volume — to reduce interference effects, minimize residual fatigue, and avoid overtraining — and should incorporate low-impact, repeated motor activities requiring minimal technical proficiency. It should ideally avoid eccentric movement patterns, which produce soreness and interfere with recovery from strength training. A simple, stable, repetitive, low-impact exercise that produces the least soreness will be the safest choice.
In high-intensity interval training, the trainee engages in short bouts of very intense effort alternated with short periods of rest. On a stationary bike set at moderate-high resistance, pedal as hard and as fast as possible for sixty seconds. Rest or pedal lightly for sixty seconds. Repeat four to eight times. This approach has been studied extensively and compared to traditional long slow distance aerobic training. The cardiovascular and performance adaptations produced by high-intensity training are similar to — and in many cases superior to — those produced by continuous endurance training. Another metabolic benefit is what physiologists call excess post-exercise oxygen consumption: HIIT results in an elevated rate of oxygen consumption and energy utilization well after the training bout is over. This extended burn draws on triglyceride as the preferred fuel for oxidative metabolism and promotes fat loss.
Sleds are the ideal implement for conditioning, fulfilling all of the exercise prescription criteria. Sled pushing is a low-impact, repetitive motor activity performed on a stable surface with no eccentric component, meaning there is no delayed soreness. Many athletes report that the concentric-only activity of sled pushes actually helps dissipate soreness and improve recovery after heavy lower body work. There are anecdotal reports of strained calves and Achilles tendons from sprint work with loaded sleds; if this is a concern, simply walk the sled — a no easy task in itself. Prowler-style sleds that accommodate standard barbell plates have a wide therapeutic window and allow dosing manipulation via load, speed, distance, rest intervals, total volume, and frequency. Athletes can begin pushing an unloaded sled a short distance at a slow pace once a week and work their way up to multiple sprints over longer distances with heavy loads and short rest intervals. Sled work can be done heavy and short or light and long, and optimal conditioning is likely best attained by a combination of both approaches, perhaps alternated by session. Short sprints with heavy weight can be effective in increments as short as ten yards; longer sprints are typically forty to sixty yards with lighter weights.
Sled drags are another excellent option. Like pushes, drags are concentric-only and do not produce soreness. Light sled drags are an excellent way to speed recovery after heavy lower body work. Drags are typically done for total time — fifteen to twenty minutes without stopping — or for longer intervals of fifty to one hundred yards with brief rest periods. With light weights, drags allow for a very upright posture and long strides that are extremely beneficial to the development of the hamstrings, making them useful for lifters who struggle with squat depth due to a weak posterior chain. Rowers and bikes are both safe — low-impact, predominantly concentric exercises on stable surfaces — and the absence of a foot strike makes them excellent choices for trainees recovering from certain types of lower body injuries. An easy way to begin with either is a simple one-minute-on, one-minute-off protocol for ten to fifteen total minutes.
The most useful feature of a treadmill is the ability to set the machine at an incline. It is most useful to manipulate difficulty through the degree of incline rather than the speed of the machine. Running and jogging, by contrast, do not meet the criteria of the exercise prescription and are not recommended. Although not particularly dangerous in an absolute sense, they are high-impact exercises with prominent eccentric components, frequently performed outside on variable grades, and therefore not as safe as the alternatives. They promote muscle soreness and fatigue that blunt recovery capacity, and the negative orthopedic effects on the ankles, knees, and low back are unavoidable. Running and jogging are simple activities but hardly efficient: the health and performance adaptations they produce are also conferred by HIIT protocols in a fraction of the time. If you are a Master and you are passionate about running or some other long slow distance activity, that is your sport — lift weights and play your sport. You won’t get as strong as you could be, but you’ll be stronger than you were, and you’ll perform better when you’re stronger. But running is not recommended as the conditioning component of the General Exercise Prescription.
Some CrossFit boxes are run by excellent coaches who understand how to modify and adapt protocols for Masters Athletes. In general, however, CrossFit does not meet the exercise prescription criteria and is not a wise conditioning option for Masters, who have no business doing high-repetition deadlifting in a state of fatigue, high-repetition box jumps, or heavy snatches for time. Masters should not be using rings for dips or kipping their pull-ups. A highly individualized CrossFit program run by an experienced, well-informed, and careful coach might be appropriate for a few trainees in their forties — but these individuals are the exception, not the rule. Walking, finally, has one great advantage: it isn’t very stressful. That is also its great disadvantage. Walking is not particularly subject to volume manipulation for progression, and simply walking more often is of limited value. After several weeks of consistent daily walks, even most novices will find it no longer serves as an effective conditioning stimulus but rather as active rest. Increased conditioning fitness will only be achieved through more intense modalities.
Chapter 27 — The Female Master
Female athletes have less strength, neuromuscular efficiency, power production, and muscle mass than men, and have less upper body strength relative to lower body strength. On the other hand, they are able to perform multiple repetitions at a higher percentage of their one-rep maximum, tend to recover faster between sessions, and can tolerate higher training frequency and volume overall. Many female Masters can use the programs presented in this book exactly as written. When modifications are indicated, the most common will be to switch from three sets of five to five sets of three for high-volume training stress, to switch from sets of five to sets of one to three for high-intensity, low-volume training stress, and to increase the volume or frequency of deadlifts.
Life is not fair, and the aging female loses muscle, bone, and strength at a greater rate than her male counterpart. The hormonal changes of menopause accelerate this process in ways that make consistent, progressive strength training not merely advisable but urgent. In all cases, the fundamentals remain the same: regular training with a view to long-term progressive improvements in all of the General Fitness Attributes, proper performance of a small set of big multi-joint barbell exercises, assiduous attention to recovery factors, and careful record-keeping and analysis. Above all, athlete and coach must always bear in mind the underlying structure of any rational exercise prescription: the Stress-Recovery-Adaptation cycle. This is the constant that does not change regardless of age, sex, training history, or goals. Work hard. Recover completely. Adapt. Repeat.