In my early 20s, week after week, I could focus on beating the logbook every workout and train with high levels of intensity. This worked well. I got decently strong and a lot bigger.
Now that I’m in my 30s, taking the same approach inevitably leads to a minor injury, requiring a couple of weeks off from time to time.
So, I’ve changed my strategy: I no longer aim to beat the logbook every workout or go all-out every time. Sometimes I stick with the same weight and reps for a few sessions before increasing the load or the reps. This approach has consistently kept me in the gym, and so far, I’ve avoided the minor injuries I used to deal with.
Is this something others have experienced?
What strategies do you use to avoid injuries as you get older?
Bingo. This is a sign of maturing in the iron game. Unless your life or your mortgage depends on beating the logbook: 1) Consistency is King. It’s a rolling average for us non-mutants.
A lot of lifters over decades and decades have mentioned the value of “owning a weight” before moving up. Just because you didn’t beat (or even match) reps/sets from last session does not necessarily mean anything.
What if you did the same reps/sets but you did slower eccentric on all reps? Or maybe you incorporated pauses. Or hell, maybe none of those.
I wish I was where you are mentally in my 30s. My near 44 year old carcass has tsken a beating
I started lifting when I was 19 years old. I lifted pretty much injury free until I was 27, and like you, getting stronger was the aim every workout. But unlike you I didn’t take off working out at all. I just worked around the injury.
My first injury was a shoulder injury I got doing barbell bench presses. I found that barbell incline presses didn’t hurt that shoulder, so I switched to inclines. It took about three months for my shoulder to heal. I switched back to bench presses.
As the years progressed, I got stronger yet, but the injuries also progressed. Other areas got hurt. The one I recall best was my elbows that I aggravated doing my favorite triceps mass exercise, skull crushers. Ultimately, I had to drop skull crushers altogether. By the end of my 20’s, I was beginning to be trying to heal from two injuries at the same time. It only got worse in my 30’s. I was pretty much working around multiple injuries much of the time.
I wised up a little in my 40’s, but much damage had already been done. I was still working around injuries. I was plenty strong. Probably much too strong for my attachments. I felt that I could hurt myself a lot worse than anyone could hurt me.
If I had it to do again, I would not push the limits as much.
Yeah I used to be really progressive overload minded as well but I’ve recently dropped a lot of my weights to really focus on form and mind muscle connection. Going to failure is more important than the absolute load on the bar and using a weight that allows for great mind muscle connection can help make sure you’re keeping tension targeted on the appropriate muscle and not altering your form for the sake of more weight or another rep.
I don’t know. I’m nearly 52 and outdoing the workouts I did in my 20’s and 30’s. You have to be smarter with recover and nutrition, but you can still push it pretty hard.
Interesting replies here. It seems that we typically have to spare our increasingly injury-prone bodies as we get older, and that there are several ways to do this:
Own the weight before you move up in weight
Focus more on keeping tension in the correct muscle
Slow the tempo down
I seem to struggle the most with going to failure while keeping strict technique and the load on the muscle. It is sometimes just too tempting to introduce some body English. I think this is partly from the days of focusing on beating the logbook. To address this I typically do a drop set or two, making sure the technique is on point while stimulating the target muscle.
How about exercise selection? I would guess that isolation exercises carry less injury risk than compound movements, but maybe this only applies when going to failure?
I’ll come back to more of this later, because it’s a topic I really like, but I’ll say a couple quick things:
I don’t think intensiveness should drop (how hard you push), but maybe intensity (absolute pounds) should - higher rep ranges seem to do a lot of good things
I very much believe in finding exercises that work for you. Some dudes can bench press until they’re 60; some of us feel better with dumbbells
I like “cheater” bars (SSB, trap bar, etc.)
I think exercise sequencing is underrated
I do think nutrition becomes more and more important - and beyond just how many calories and grams of protein. It drives so many aspects of recovery and inflammation, and we seem to get more sensitive as we gain mileage
Lifting with intensity and progressive overload does not mean lifting like an idiot. You are supposed to execute reps correctly and always keep that standard. That does not mean you cannot train to beat the logbook. There are many ways to do that.
All the top guy’s coaching/training this way have always emphasized that. It was never about just putting more weight on the bar.
I’m a big fan of putting heavier compound movements later in the workout, so that some of my accessories can also serve as warmups. It also reduces the absolute load you can use on the big kid moves and it takes my ego out a bit (like I don’t have a reference for what makes me strong when squatting last). A lot of this I got from Meadows, so I’m a plagiarizer (ready for tenure!):
Leg curls before squats or any compound leg movement have been awesome all-around - everything feels better. Adductor work here is pretty nice too.
Dumbbells or machine presses before barbell presses are cool, but mostly as a warmup/ pre-exhaust to me.
I don’t notice much when I do rows before vertical pulling, as he’d suggest, but I do like any low back intensive work (deadlifts, hypers, etc) to be last just because it wrecks the day. Dante Trudel was onto this too. I do like straight-arm pulldowns early in a back day - seems to loosen everything up.
“Stretch” movements last (Skullcrushers, flyes, preacher curls, etc.) seem to reduce joint discomfort and make mechanical sense.
Doing rope press downs before other triceps work is very friendly to my elbows.
I’m sure there’s a lot of other great thoughts, but (for pure hypertrophy) the gist here is preserving your training day can make a difference in how your joints feel.
