How to Stay Interested in Exercise as an Aging Senior
By: Frank Wilhelmi
Let’s start with the understanding that NOTHING reverses age-related functional decline as well or as quickly as weight training done correctly. This has been demonstrated in so many studies as to be unquestionable and so evident in the lifestyles of fit seniors that it is axiomatic. Walkers and wheelchairs are put aside in a matter of two to three months in every study I’ve read, with injuries being very rare and temporary in every case.
Exercise, particularly weight training or what is popularly called bodybuilding, is the key to maintaining, or recovering, physical capability. Anyone who wants to stay capable of independent living and activity should be engaged in a life-long program of bodybuilding until they can no longer move. The difference can mean ten to fifteen years of vitality and active living.
There are many factors that go hand in hand with exercise to get the best results out of exercise, including nutrition, body building supplements, hormonal enhancement, rest and recovery. These factors can be addressed as you move into a bodybuilding lifestyle, and you should work with a medical practitioner because you will probably find that you can reduce or eliminate many medications as your body starts functioning better over time. The three most important helps to enhancing results (I can personally vouch for these) are:
- A nitric oxide boosting supplement such as BSN’s Nitrix and NO-Xplode
- A Creatine Malate product such as BSN’s Cell Mass (and NO-Xplode)
- A product that increases anabolic hormone production such as Iron-Tek’s 17-alpha Oxonolone.
So, let’s say we convince you to go join a gym and change your life-style; what’s going to produce the best results in the least amount of time? Well, for seniors, that’s not the right attitude! You need to adopt a mentality of SAVORING the workout. This is not a ‘do it for 6 months until I’m fixed thing’, it is an incremental process of improvement. The idea is to get progressively stronger as life moves along. The goal is to FEEL progress on a continuing basis. That feeling changes everything else in your life for the better – it makes everything seem doable.
Now, this takes a bit of self-deception! Here is why. If you decide that for every chest workout you are going to raise the weight by 1 pound in the inclined dumbbell press, sooner or later you will be unable to continue, or rip a pec muscle or get sick, etc. And you know with absolute assurity that at some point you will have to back down, ease off, give it a rest. So the secret is to ‘periodize’ your effort.
All successful bodybuilders, and we should imitate them in this regard, periodically drop their effort dramatically and ‘start again’. When you make a point of this as a matter of discipline, it doesn’t feel like LOSING. So every 6-8 weeks you drastically cut back, change the exercises, and begin the assault on a new personal best for, let’s say, a 5-rep max in the squat. You push yourself higher in weight each ensuing week until you feel the plateau coming, and then you go for the big one on the last set and see if you can best yourself this time around. The deception is this: even if you don’t make a new personal best, your body is tricked into this sense of having made steady progress for 6-8 weeks, and your brain logs that in as a good thing. It pumps out endorphins to make you feel good, and everything else goes better.
Now, you can’t do that for every exercise in your workout, you have to pick the one or two exercises for this cycle that you will strive for and let all the other moves be secondary. I like to use the compound moves that power lifters use (the squat, deadlift and benchpress) as the target for progress because they are the big anabolic triggers that jumpstart testosterone production. I won’t try for a max benchpress each time I cycle that move; it’s inclined dumbbell press on one cycle, declined benchpress on another and flat bench another and maybe flat bench with dumbbells another cycle. For legs, I will do inclined leg press one time then switch to the squat, then maybe to Smith Machine squats, then to hack squats (I hate hack squats). The last time I made 4 reps with 8 plates/side on the incline leg press was over 10 years ago. I thought about trying it for some photos to put on the website, but the image came into my mind of my wife’s face with a REALLY annoyed look if I was laid up for Christmas. I decided to try it in 2006. This time I settled for 6 reps with 7- 45 lb plates per side; not bad for a 66 year-old.
Good Living - Frank
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