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How to deal with pain and discomfort?

This is an excerpt from Building Strength and Muscle After 50 by Chad Landers.

Luckily, strength training after 50 doesn’t have to be much different than in our younger years. The mechanisms that cause our bodies to get stronger and add lean mass are the same. There are no special exercises that an older trainee must do or must never do—unless a condition or injury excludes a certain exercise—despite fearmongering articles on the internet.

However, that doesn’t mean that our bodies haven’t changed over the years and that we should train like a college football player. In my younger years I never thought I’d have to adapt how I trained when I got older. I figured if I kept training and stayed strong (which I have), why would I need to make concessions for age? And this was largely true well into my 40s. What I failed to consider was the normal wear and tear my body would experience from both everyday life and a lifetime of training. We gym rats often forget that training is a stress on the body. While this is typically a good thing (and how we get our bodies to change), too much stress in the short term can lead to overtraining, and too much training in the long run can increase the risk of overuse injuries.

Unfortunately for me, the cartilage in my knees has slowly worn away, and when I squat heavy and to competition depth (hips below parallel with the knee), I suffer from Baker’s cysts. Unsurprisingly, I don’t squat heavy to depth anymore. I work around it. In the exercise chapters I’ll discuss my favorite alternative exercises for a variety of issues you could be dealing with.

By this age almost all of us are experiencing pain or discomfort somewhere. It could be an old high school sports injury that hurts when you barbell bench press; or that pain in your neck that flares up every time the weather turns cold; or just simple wear and tear from a life well lived. In addition to any preexisting injuries and the big three, we “mature” trainees may also be dealing with other medical issues such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or arthritis, or we are taking medications that can impact our training.

None of these issues are reasons to avoid training, because the benefits of resistance training are far too great to miss out on. But as important as strength training is, you need to be able to incorporate it into your busy schedule efficiently, safely, and consistently to truly benefit from this fountain of youth.

Remember in the introduction when I mentioned the “dreaded sleep injuries”? I was only half joking. The fact is that most of us over 50 do wake up with some kind of ache, pain, or discomfort. That doesn’t mean we are “injured” and shouldn’t train. At this age, if we only trained on the days when we felt 100 percent, we’d rarely, if ever, train.

My clients hear me say that “some days are diamonds, and some days are coal.” Showing up on those “coal days,” when you “slept wrong” and just don’t feel like training can often be when most of your progress is made. “Diamond days” are simply too rare to count on, so you need to get the most you can out of those coal days.

Of course, if you are truly ill, stay home and rest. And if you are injured, depending on the extent and severity of the injury, you’ll likely be able to train around the issue. But if you just feel out of sorts, and dare I say, lazy, go to the gym and see how the warm-up goes. If you feel good after that, try a warm-up set on your first exercise.

If anything causes a sharp pain, stop! But the “general malaise” of small aches and stiffness most of us deal with on the regular will typically go away as we warm up. Remember, although we are always striving to do more reps or lift more weights than our prior workouts, we also don’t want to turn a small problem into a big one. If you are unsure how you’re feeling after a warm-up set or two, go lighter on your work sets—as light as you need to so you don’t exacerbate what you are feeling.

Although we all want to train like a montage from a Rocky movie, remember that no rep or set, exercise, or workout is worth an injury that leads to prolonged absence from the gym. Listen to your body and let pain be your guide. Go lighter, skip an exercise altogether, or skip the weights entirely, do some cardio, and live to fight another day.

More Excerpts From Building Strength and Muscle After 50

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