First off I am 60 years old.
I have been doing 2x2x2 just doing main lifts (5Pros) with some chins and db rows thrown in at 3x10. I decided to throw in some assistance from each of the 3 categories keeping it conservative. 3x10 light weight.
I have just finished a cycle and my shoulders and knees are killing me.
My question is has anyone else experienced this and were you able to overcome it.
Are there other options?
Assuming one day is squat/bench and another is press/deadlift, you could try just hitting one main lift per day and increasing assistance a little for a little easier volume. So each week youāre hitting your upper and lower body with just one day of barbell work instead of two. Cycles would last 6 weeks this way if that makes sense. Could be other form/mobility/orthopedic issues of course though too.
Iām 58 and have been doing various 5/3/1 programs for a number of years now.
I found that any program that has me doing 2 of the main lifts in one workout is not workable. As the other poster suggested, I do one main lift per workout. In addition, I do three workouts per week, so it takes me 9 days or so to complete a āweekā of training. This way I get plenty of rest between main lifts.
Iāve had three knee surgeries (medial meniscus surgeries, caused by running not lifting) and have found that a really good warmup (bike or elliptical) followed by stretching, especially stretching of the quads and hip flexors before the workout as well as afterwards helped a lot.
I donāt know how you deadlift, but I have found (and some of my friends with knee problems have also found) that sumo style deadlifts stress my knees and cause pain so I am staying with conventional, even though I can lift more sumo style.
I also struggled with shoulder pain for a few years but was able to almost completely eliminate it with strengthening exercises such as plenty of rows, chins, rear delt flyes, pullups, face pulls, and dumbell Cuban presses. āThrowing inā some assistance is not going to cut it. You need to be doing 2x or 3x as many pulling reps as pushing reps. It has to be a focus.
Stretching exercises that really helped were shoulder extension, shoulder flexion, and shoulder dislocates, as well as the classic doorway pec stretch that helps my shoulders more than anything.
Shoulders especially are complex structures and your issues are likely different from mine. The key takeaway is to persist and to experiment, and you will eventually figure out what helps you. It took me about a year or more of experimenting to get things under control.
Of course, if your problems do not respond or if the problem is acute, make sure to get professional help. When my son had an issue as a high school athlete, we struggled getting him the right physical therapy until we found a PT who had been a strength coach in a former life and then progress was rapid. More recently, when he had a problem while a college student, he called up his athletic department and asked them where they took their athletes for therapy, and those folks were able to help him quickly. Most PTs are focused on helping grandma recover from her surgery so she can get out of a chair without help. You want a PT that spends their time getting athletes back in the game, even if you are 60 (or 58 like me).
Good luck and keep plugging away. Youāll get there if you are persistent.
While Iām not as old as you or wfd, I have similar issues (multiple knee surgeries and shoulder injuries). I second nearly everything that wfd said: warm ups are key, shoulders need tons of attention paid to them to help them stay healthy, especially if theyāre already in tough shape; sumo aggravates my bad knees. I do have a training day where I deadlift and OHP, and havenāt had issues with multiple main lifts on a day, but I would say that spreading them out over four days is going to make it easier on you, recovery wise.
I have made it a point to make sure that I try to eliminate any lift that bothers my shoulders. Pull ups hurt, so I do chins. I also bought a swiss bar to have alternate pressing options for days when my shoulders arenāt feeling that great. My warm up is heavy on VERY LIGHT shoulder related band work; I even warm up my shoulders before I go for a walk. Seriously.
At your age, thereās no need to perform any exercise that is truly doing damage, but you do need to look at all the factors that might be causing your pain. How is your form on lifts? Are you training light enough? Are you allowing yourself enough recovery between workouts? Can you choose alternate lifts that might allow you to train without pain? There are a lot of options to train around or through knee and shoulder pain, so you need to both evaluate the actual cause of the pain and the options to deal with.