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Age Considerations in Weight Training

This is an excerpt from Rock Solid Resilience by Dean Robert Somerset & Daniel Pope.

Young lifters are awesome responders to weight training, as they can do pretty much anything in the gym and see results. They get to take advantage of all the pubertal hormones, tissues that are more elastic and resilient to stress, and not as many competing interests to take their time away from logging those crazy gains. The older folks (and for the purpose of this I’m defining “older” as anyone beyond their early 30s) have lower production and volume of circulating sex hormones, making it more difficult to gain muscle; less-elastic and less-hydrated tissues, making it a challenge to stretch without tearing; slightly slower recovery times that affect their weekly training volume and intensity; and other responsibilities such as work, family, hobbies, mortgages, and so forth that take time and energy that could otherwise be devoted to turning into an absolute unit.

Young Lifters

I make the joke that teenagers and people in their early 20s could get some strength and muscle gains simply by walking past the gym. Young people don’t need the best program, just consistent applications of the fundamentals. For the rest of us, though, it’s better to avoid the temptation to max out and see how much you can lift in favor of focusing on quality training.

A big reason why you shouldn’t be maxing out every day is that very heavy workouts tire you out, and that fatigue can last for a few days, affecting your ability to put out big numbers in your subsequent workouts for up to two days.¹³ Some very high-intensity training workouts—perhaps involving sprinting, max height or distance jumps, or max effort strength training—could mean you need up to 72 hours to fully recover from before you can produce similar force outputs.¹⁴ These time frames get longer the older you are. Training heavy all the time might sound good in theory, but in practice, it’s a good way to just get tired. If you do this, you risk sacrificing the strength improvements you’re after.

In most training programs, you might have a few phases each year where your goal is to work up to max or near-max loading. The rest of the year typically involves training at a submax level where recovery is a bit easier, allowing you to make it to your next training session and put out sufficient numbers after adequate recovery. If you achieve peak loading only once or twice a year, there’s no real point in testing your max weekly because your training program isn’t geared toward getting you the biggest weights until those peak phases. It’s like flexing in every mirror you pass: it might be fun but it won’t produce new muscle mass or strength gains. (Worse, it might make you look weird to everyone else around you.) Most people don’t even really need to peak their loading, because it won’t help with their goals and will just increase their risk of injury more than using submax loading. If someone isn’t training to be a strength athlete or isn’t looking to go through any combine testing for their sport that would require max or near-max lifts, using this tool won’t be all that useful for them compared to other lifting volumes and intensities.

Additionally, if you’re a strength athlete always battling fatigue from lifting too much too frequently, your training will suffer. You might find you start missing lifts you’d otherwise get easily because you haven’t allowed enough time to recover; you might wind up with more muscle aches and creaks than usual; and you might not see the kind of progress you want to see.

In your younger years, your ability to bounce back from hard training is pretty remarkable. Most young lifters can do multiple heavy workouts back to back and only really start feeling the effects when they’re too tired to stay up late playing video games. They don’t see the benefit or even the need for mobility work because they’re still bendy and elastic, so most warm-up drills are better thought of as activation or ways to ramp up force generation in preparation for hitting the weights hard. Accessory work for younger lifters can focus on hypertrophy.

Older Lifters

Lifters with a few more years of training might need a different approach. Their bones and joints tend to change shape over time^{15, 16}; connective tissues tend to become more stiff, less elastic, and carry less water content^{17, 18}; and tissue changes in relation to increased stress or workloads tend to take longer to get to the same endpoints, such as vascular diameter or blood effusion to working muscles.^{19, 20} It takes longer to recover from true max efforts or even just heavier training volumes and loads. Older folks’ warm-ups might take a bit longer as the sticky joint capsules and fascia reluctantly slide and glide, blood crawls into working muscles, and ligaments and tendons agree to stretch and manage loading more effectively. Warm-ups focused on mobility with activation work can produce enough movement to prepare the older lifter for the heavier lifts to come. Accessory work can be about conditioning, working through or around previous injuries, producing higher-volume work, and leaving the gym feeling awesome.

In addition to the physiologic differences, older lifters may have a different psychological approach to the gym. They may have accumulated more injuries over time and know how much injuries suck, so they’re more hesitant to overexert for the sake of overexertion, especially if there’s a higher risk than they’d like. Their goal isn’t to prove they’re the best but to generally get more out of their life. Understandably, this can change the calculus of how much heavy or intense work they do. While training heavy and hard is still important for lifters who are more seasoned, it’s less about “all at once” and more about “as much as needed,” avoiding the need for a long recovery between sessions.

Adjusting for Age

While lifters of all ages can significantly benefit from strength training, sometimes you have to adjust a few variables to make it work best for each individual. When in doubt, try to address the biggest beneficial areas to see progress first, add loading to what you can tolerate, and make sure you can differentiate between productive soreness and work that needs to be fixed or skipped entirely to avoid soreness. Use lots of variety, have some fun, and leave enough in the tank to get back to the gym for your next session.

A realistic approach for younger lifters is to make more of the work done in the moderate range with some high-intensity work and a sprinkling of lower-intensity work used for pattern development or activation drills to prepare for the more intense work. Older lifters should use more low- and moderate-intensity work, with a smattering of higher-intensity lifting for seasoning and to give them something more exciting to look forward to without smashing them in the process.

More Excerpts From Rock Solid Resilience

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