Principles of Strength Training After 50

If you are over 50 and you haven’t done so, you need to take a hard look at starting a strength training program.

This is the case for both men and women. Yes, both men AND women!

The primary reason is this… the longer you wait, the more difficult it will be to build strength and muscle, which will be critical for living a high quality of life past age 70.

There are two issues at play here… sarcopenia and osteopenia.

Sarcopenia is the aging related process of losing muscle mass. It typically starts around age 40 and accelerates past the age of 60 if you don’t engage in strength training.

Osteopenia is the aging related process of losing bone mineral density. This mainly affects women past the age of 50.

Both eventually lead to weakness, lack of stamina and frailty in old age.

While modern medicine can keep us alive longer, it can’t build muscle and bone (at least not yet).

Strength training is the medicine you need to avoid both of these issues.

Let’s dive into the Principles of Strength Training.

Principles of Strength Training After 50

Legitimate strength training involves basic compound movements that mimic natural human movement patterns. These compound movements are performed with barbells.

Training these exercises with barbells will allow you to improve your strength faster than with any other exercises because they can be loaded with more weight.

For instance, you will improve your leg strength much faster by training the barbell squat than with leg extensions. The squat incorporates far more muscle mass and can ultimately be loaded with far more weight.

Unfortunately, most of the personal training and medical community advises trainees over 50 against training these exercises.

This is mainly due to ignorance and lack of knowledge on how to coach the movements so that the trainee can avoid injury.

The four main compound exercises include:

Barbell Squat
Deadlift
Bench Press
Overhead Barbell Press

All these movements involve multiple muscle groups and joints, and therefore, involve far more muscle tissue compared to such exercises as triceps pressdowns and dumbbell curls.

That is why performing these exercises with proper programming will allow you to build the most amount of strength over the shortest amount of time.

With that said, the squat, deadlift and overhead press are technical lifts that may require you to get some coaching to be sure to help you understand how to perform them.

If you are ready to start strength training after 50, you can’t go wrong with learning these exercises and how to train them.

How strength training works

Deadlifting in my garage

To build strength, we want to exploit the Stress-Recovery-Adaptation cycle. By holding the volume and exercise selection constant, and adding weight to the bar each workout, a new trainee will display an increase in strength EVERY WORKOUT.

A linear progression occurs when a trainee is capable of sustaining consistent increases in workload in successive training sessions for a period of time. This period of time is typically about four to six months but is different for each of the aforementioned exercises.

Training one day, appropriate rest until your next workout, and then loading the bar with more weight for the next workout exemplifies the Stress-Recovery-Adaptation cycle in its most basic form.

To build strength, we need to expose our body to intensity, i.e. heavy weight. As a result, we tend to train with fewer reps.

Starting out, our focus is on five reps.

Here’s why…

Consider the two ends of the spectrum when it comes to weight training.

At the low end is 1 rep, and at the high end, we’ll use 20 reps. 20 reps is often employed by the bodybuilding community, which is focused on muscle hypertrophy.

Powerlifters train to have the ability to lift a maximum weight for a single rep. This is effectively just a performance.

A true one rep maximum weight will likely require so much effort that the rep may take 5 to 7 seconds to complete.

After completing that rep, it will be impossible to immediately complete a second rep at that weight.

At the other end of the spectrum is the 20 reps.

Now, after you’ve completed 20 reps, chances are, if you take a couple deep breaths, you can probably squeeze out another rep or two.

At this point, it is no longer maximum force production at work, but muscle endurance.

Bodyweight exercises such as pushups are great for building muscle endurance, but not great for building significant strength.

In between this rep range is a number that will result in the following training adaptations:

Increased strength
Increased muscle mass
Improved conditioning

That rep range is right around five reps.

In general, new lifters will make significant gains in strength over the span of a few months simply by performing three to five working sets of five reps.

A systematic approach

Training with these particular lifts provides a systematic approach to building strength.

The reason for this is that, once the weight on the bar starts to get heavy, there is a systemic response by the body to adapt.

It does so with added muscle mass, increased bone density and stronger connective tissues.

For people who start strength training after 50, this is exactly what we are looking for.

There is no real substitute for these lifts. You simply do not get the same systemic response from training with dumbbells, kettlebells and resistance bands.

Once a trainee gets through what we refer to as the novice phase, they move onto intermediate training.

What that effectively means is that the period of time between making new personal bests on your lifts will become longer.

The trainee must accumulate more stress in order to make new gains.

These new gains may then be spaced out over a period of a week to a couple of months.

Eventually, someone who continues to focus on strength training will only be able to achieve new gains in strength every few months, or even just once a year.

That type of lifter is now advanced.

Alternative exercises

Naturally, there are some people who start strength training after 50 who will unable to perform one or two of the four main lifts.

There are some alternative exercises that can be employed to help the lifter build strength and muscle.

These include…

Leg Press
Rack Pulls
Romanian Deadlifts
Dumbbell Press
Incline Bench Press
Narrow Grip Bench Press

These are good exercises but are simply less effective since they involve less range of motion and/or less weight on the bar.

Final thoughts

You now have a good idea of the general principles behind training for strength.