By Pete Ryan
You often hear the quote “I want to maintain”, or “I just
don’t want to lose any strength/size”.
This might be a reasonable sounding goal and it can often be the outcome
in the older trainee, but I do not believe it should be a goal. I will give my
reasoning below.
The human body is a dynamic organism. It is not like a car
or a bike. If you store it carefully, it will not maintain its abilities. What
happens is a body is in two states. The
body is either anabolic or catabolic, so it is either growing and rebuilding,
or it is consuming itself and destroying unnecessary parts of itself. This is an on-going process that occurs all
the time. Being catabolic can be health promoting by removing old or damaged
cells, but it can also have a negative impact by removing hard fought for
muscle, bone density, tendon durability or fascia strength. Meanwhile we have anabolic
effects which involves adding tissue, this can be muscle and lean tissue, but
adding fat is also an anabolic event. So, our goal is to create methods that
heighten the positive effects of both the catabolic and anabolic processes in
the body. We want to remove old and damaged cells, while also promoting the
creation of new lean tissue with minimal increases in fat storage.
The best way to achieve these goals is through progressive
resistance exercise. This can be bodyweight, or using equipment. Note the name
of this type of exercise. PROGRESSIVE resistance exercise. That is the goal,
but why is it important to progress, and what do we mean by progression?
Let us look at progression, or to be more precise, let’s
look at non-progression. Let’s say you reach a point where you believe 10 reps
of 100 pounds in an exercise is ‘strong enough’. So, you always do 10 reps or
100 pounds. If you never go over that
your body will adapt to it, you will become more efficient at the movement and
you will end up with the very minimum you need to do that 10 reps of 100
pounds. Any issue, ANY problem that increases stress or stops you training will
drop you below that level. As you age, it will become progressively harder to
get those 10 reps. If you reached 10 reps of 100 pounds with ease at 30 years
old, by 50 you will be struggling to get it, by 65 years old you probably won’t
have it any more…and you will blame old age. It will not be aging that took
that lift away from you, it will be the lack of progression.
Now let us look at what we mean by progression. When we talk about progression most people
think of ‘intensity’ the actually weight lifted, but that is an
oversimplification of progression. Yes
if you lifted 90 pounds and later lifted 100 pounds then you have progressed,
but there are other options. The amount of reps done during an exercise, a
harder variation of an exercise, taking less time between sets, even trying new
forms of exercise that stimulate the body in novel ways and develop new skills,
all of these are forms of progression.
Most people realise that you cannot keep adding weight to an
exercise (or repetitions). There is a
limit, most people will never lift 1,000 pounds or do 1,000 pull-ups in day,
but you can progress by cycling exercises so throughout your life you continue
to progress and move forward.
Let’s return to the person who believes 10 reps of 100
pounds is ‘strong enough’. My argument
is they should be aiming at higher numbers (let’s say 125-150 pounds for 12-15
reps), but not do it every week. They should do a mesa cycle working up to that
peak and then move on to other exercises, then return again regularly and aim
at equalling or ideally bettering that goal. So suppose you have four mesa
cycles in a year (3 months each). Mesa cycle 1 would be get to 12-15 reps of 125-150
pounds doing the exercise, mesa cycle 2 could be doing a variation of the same
exercise or working the same muscle groups using other exercises, mesa cycle 3
could be working up to 3-5 reps with 175-200 pounds of that exercise, mesa
cycle 4 could be another variation that works the same muscle groups. You can also do variations other than
increasing weight or reps, think about the rest time between sets, what you do
before this exercise. So, you could cut
your rest time between sets from 1 minute to 30 seconds, or if you are doing a
curl, do a chin up before you do the curl.
All these things will change the results and create new demands on your
body. You have more than a lifetime of
tweaks to play with. No one will ever have time to try every variable or even
every type of exercise available. So, progression is possible throughout life
and expect to set goals and repeatedly conquer them throughout your life, go
forward, ever forward.
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