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In the pursuit of optimal health and longevity, the significance of strength training becomes increasingly profound as we gracefully navigate through our 40s and beyond.
As the calendar advances, our bodies undergo a natural evolution. Without a consistent strength training routine, muscle mass tends to diminish, bone density may decline, functionality can decrease, and the wear and tear of daily life accumulate. This reduction in muscle mass due to a lack of use of our muscles results in a slowing metabolism that naturally decreases by 5% every decade, making it easier to gain weight as we age.
The solution to the effects of aging: strength training.
It's precisely during these years that strength training emerges as the ultimate anti-aging antidote.
It’s a proven tool to counteract the effects of aging, joint pain, immobility, and weight gain and provides us with a myriad of physical and mental health benefits.
Ready to get into a consistent strength training routine? Here are 6 tips to help you get started.
You don’t need to spend countless hours in the gym to transform your strength and physique. All you need is 2-3 days a week of consistent strength workouts that last anywhere from 30-60 minutes. We recommend creating a schedule for the week and putting it in your calendar. If you’re going to do two days a week, space your days out a bit and do something like a Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday schedule. If you’re going to do three days per week, create a Monday/Wednesday/Friday or Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday schedule.
The biggest bang for your buck comes in the form of full-body workouts. Instead of focusing on one or two body-parts per workout, complete total-body workouts that target each major muscle group. Pick 1-2 exercises for each workout that target your arms, shoulders, back, legs, and core.
One of the biggest mistakes we see when it comes to strength training is not warming up. Not only does this decrease your workout performance, it significantly increases your risk of getting hurt. This becomes significantly more important as we age as our joints and muscles become increasingly stiff and, in turn, more susceptible to injury.
Start every strength training session with a 5-10 minute full-body warm-up to prepare your body, joints, and muscles to perform at their best and to help you feel better doing it. The goal of the warm-up is to improve your flexibility, increase your body temperature, and have your muscles and joints feeling loose.
Start with a series of stretches that improve flexibility in your legs, hips, shoulders, and ankles. From there, move to a series of body-weight movements like planks and squats. Finish with a bit of faster-paced movements to get your heart rate and core temperature up like riding the stationary bike, walking briskly on the treadmill, or completing jumping jacks. Finish your warm-up with a good sweat.
Want to know the #1 reason why people get hurt lifting weights? The answer is using weights that are too heavy.
When strength training, always prioritize your technique. This means being able to control the weight of each rep while maintaining proper body and joint positions. If you cannot maintain good body position and technique through each rep, simply lower the weights a bit.
If you’re learning a new movement, start with light weights that allow you to focus on rehearsing and improving upon the movement. Strength training is no different than any other activity; it takes time to learn the movements. Be patient and keep the weights light as you begin.
Once you have proficient technique in your strength exercises, it's time to increase the weight or resistance you use on your exercise to make them challenging.
This is one of the biggest mistakes we see in strength training. Once technique has been improved, people often stick to the same amount of weights workout after workout. They choose a weight for an exercise and do 10 reps but could have done 20 reps because it was so light. This is a recipe for a plateau in progress as your body quickly gets used to the stress, or lack thereof, you place on it.
The key to long-term improvements in your fitness, strength, fat-burning, and physique is to continually challenge your body with the right amount of weight. The key is to find the right amount of weight that doesn’t negatively impact your form but allows you to “feel” the involved muscles working the last few reps of each set.
Let’s go through an example:
Let’s say you're doing a dumbbell bench press for 10 repetitions. We want to select a weight that's going to get challenging around rep 7-8. If it gets hard at rep 3-4, then your weights are too heavy. If it’s still not challenging at reps 9-10, then you’re too light. You want to select weights that you really feel the muscles working during the last 2-3 repetitions of the set. This ensures you’re being challenged enough to improve.
Compound movements are a category of exercises that engage multiple joints and muscle groups simultaneously. Examples include push-ups, squats, lunges, rows, and deadlifts. These exercises yield superior results as they include larger muscle groups and enable the use of heavier weights imposing greater stress on both the body and muscles. This stress, also known as muscular tension, is pivotal for increased calorie burn, fat burning, and substantial enhancements in muscle strength and tone.
A common pitfall in many strength training programs is the omission of compound movements, often leaning heavily towards isolation exercises such as bicep curls, tricep kickbacks, and leg extensions. While these isolated exercises serve their purpose, they should make up only a modest portion—approximately 20%—of your strength training workouts. This means about 80% of your strength workouts should consist of compound movements.
As highlighted by the Harvard Business Review, incorporating progress tracking into your health and fitness journey increases your likelihood of achieving goals by 2X.
Tracking progress serves as a potent motivator, ensuring consistency and a steady trajectory toward your objectives.
Tracking your progress will be a key ingredient in seeing fantastic results through strength training. It allows you to see what you did last week and make small improvements each week. Without tracking what exercises you completed and things like the amount of weight you used or how many repetitions you completed, it becomes easy to forget and difficult to build off the previous week.
This is how you get better each week. It’s called progressive overload and it’s the simplest way to improve your strength and results. All you need to do is make it your mission to improve each week. It can come in the form of better technique, an increase in the amount of weight you use, or the number of repetitions you complete. Or it could be a combination of the three. The beauty is, it could be even the slightest improvement of adding a rep from last week or moving up 5lbs. It all adds up.
Here’s how to do it:
Write down your strength workouts, including each exercise and the order in which you’ll complete them. Include a note with each exercise on how many sets and repetitions you’ll complete. Leave a space next to each exercise where you can record how much weight you used. Before you start your workout, look back at the previous week and what you did. How many sets and reps did you complete? How much weight did you use? Then make a plan to improve from last week. Do this week over week, and you’re going to LOVE the results you see.
