Strength Training After 50: Are You Actually Doing Enough?
If you've ever looked at a 20-minute strength workout and thought...
“Can that really be enough?”
You're definitely not the only one, I used to think it myself!
We're surrounded by messages telling us we need to do more.
More exercise. More sets. Heavier weights. Longer workouts. Harder workouts.
And preferably finish in a sweaty heap on the floor so we know we've actually achieved something. 😂
But what if getting stronger isn't really about doing more?
What if it's about doing enough of the right things, consistently?
I recently listened to a fascinating episode of a podcast all about the latest thinking and research around building and maintaining muscle.
It was quite technical in places (I had my exercise-geek hat firmly on! 🤓), but underneath all the science was actually a really simple and reassuring message.
And as I listened, I kept thinking...
This is pretty much what we're already doing😁
So I thought I'd save you the 1 hour 42 minutes of technical, biomechanics explaination and break some of the important bits down into plain English.
First things first: why are we strength training?
This is really important.
For most of the people I work with, we're not training to become bodybuilders, athletes or competitive weightlifters.
We're training because we want our bodies to continue working well.
We want to get out of a chair easily.
Carry our shopping.
Climb stairs.
Get our suitcase into the overhead locker.
Get ourselves up from the floor.
Keep doing the gardening, walking, travelling and generally living our lives without constantly having to think about whether our bodies can cope.
And as we get older, maintaining our muscle and strength becomes increasingly important.
So our training needs to reflect what we're actually trying to achieve.
How much strength training do we actually need?
This is where I think the research becomes really reassuring.
Because more isn't necessarily better.
One of the points discussed in the podcast was that the first sets we perform can give us a large proportion of the benefit.
Adding more sets can potentially give us more benefit, but the return gradually gets smaller.
In other words, going from doing nothing to doing a couple of good-quality sets can make a big difference.
Going from two sets to six, seven or eight doesn't necessarily multiply those benefits in the same way.
But it certainly multiplies the amount of work you've done!
And importantly, you then have to recover from all that extra work too.
This is one of the reasons I'm such a fan of short, achievable strength sessions.
Twenty minutes of purposeful exercise that you actually do regularly beats an enormous workout that you dread and consequently avoid.
But there is a catch...
Before we all celebrate and put our dumbbells away after three minutes 😂, those sets do need to challenge your muscles.
We're trying to give the body a reason to maintain and hopefully improve the strength and muscle we have.
That means the muscles need to experience enough resistance to think:
“Oh... apparently she still needs me. I'd better keep up!”
It doesn't mean every exercise needs to be horrendously difficult.
It doesn't mean lifting the heaviest weight you possibly can.
And it definitely doesn't mean exercising until you collapse in a heap.
But those muscles do need to know they've done some work.
I'll come back to exactly how hard is hard enough in Part 2, because that's probably one of the most useful things we can learn from this research.
Do I need to ache afterwards?
No!
And I really want to emphasise this one because I think we've been conditioned to believe that aching muscles are proof of a good workout.
The “I can barely sit on the loo today, so yesterday's workout must have been brilliant!” philosophy is no longer necessary😅
Muscle soreness isn't a reliable indication that you're building more muscle or getting a better result.
Sometimes you'll ache after exercise, particularly if you've done something new, returned after a break or challenged your body differently.
That's normal.
But soreness isn't something we need to chase.
I'd much rather you finish a strength session feeling like you've challenged yourself and then still be perfectly capable of getting on with your day.
Because remember...
We're training to make life easier, not recovery from our workouts harder.
What about training every day?
Again, more isn't automatically better.
Your muscles need the exercise stimulus, but they also need an opportunity to recover and adapt afterwards.
One approach discussed in the podcast is whole-body strength training two or three times a week.
Rather than completely exhausting one muscle group in a huge session, we can work the major muscle groups and movement patterns, recover, and then train them again a few days later.
For many of us, particularly in midlife and beyond, that's a really practical way of doing it.
And there's another enormous benefit...
It's actually achievable!
You don't have to live in a gym.
You don't have to find an hour every day.
You don't need dozens of complicated exercises.
You need a sensible amount of resistance, enough challenge and perhaps most importantly.....consistency.
We don't need a brand-new workout every week either
This is another area where social media hasn't necessarily done us any favours.
New exercises look exciting.
They're interesting to watch and they're great for content.
But our bodies don't need constant entertainment.
They need an opportunity to adapt.
Repeating exercises gives us a chance to become better at them, improve our technique and gradually increase what we're capable of doing.
If we change everything constantly, it's actually much harder to see whether we're progressing.
So yes, variety has its place.
But sometimes a bit of repetition is exactly what we need.
Boring can actually be rather effective. 😂
So... are short strength workouts enough?
They absolutely can be.
The important question isn't simply:
“How long did I exercise?”
It's:
“Did I give my muscles enough of a challenge?”
A short, well-planned strength session that works the major muscle groups and is repeated consistently across the week can be incredibly valuable.
And that's something I found particularly reassuring while listening to this podcast.
Our Flexpress strength sessions are deliberately short.
We train the whole body.
We repeat the important movement patterns.
We generally perform a small number of purposeful sets rather than endless repetitions.
We allow recovery between our strength days.
And we gradually increase the challenge as our bodies adapt.
So although our sessions might look quite simple...
There's actually a lot of science sitting behind them.
And that's exactly how I like it.
You shouldn't need a degree in exercise science to exercise effectively.
That's my job.
My job is to keep learning, keep reading the research and keep adapting what we do as our understanding changes.
Because science does change.
In fact, one of the things I particularly liked about this podcast was hearing an experienced exercise scientist openly talk about areas where newer research has changed his thinking.
That's what being evidence-based should mean.
Not saying:
“This is the way we've always done it.”
But being prepared to say:
“This is the best information we have at the moment, so this is what we're going to do.”
And if better evidence comes along?
We'll change with it.
For now though, I'm rather pleased to say...
We're already doing an awful lot right. ❤️
Coming next: How hard should strength training actually feel?
In Part 2, I'll tackle one of the biggest questions I get around strength training:
How heavy should your weights be?
We'll look at how to know whether you're working hard enough, when it's time to increase your weights, why you don't need to push yourself to complete failure and what progressive overload (a term you may haver heard being thrown about) actually means, without all the complicated terminology.
Because, thankfully, it's much simpler than it sounds.
Thank you for reading.
I am always happy to answer any questions so please reach out if you'd like to learn more or are interested in working with me to get stronger or simply avoid getting weaker.
Alison x
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