Hail to the Dinosaurs!
(NOTE: Today's email is addressed to older
trainees -- age 35 and up. If that's YOU,
be sure to read it. If it's NOT you, read
it and share it with anyone and everyone
you know who falls in the age 35 and up
group. You just might save someone's life
by doing that -- or help them add many
great years they otherwise would have
missed.)
If you're anywhere near my age (I'm 54),
or you know people my age, you know that
staying in good shape gets harder and
harder as you get older.
You also know that most folks just give up
and let it happen. They stop exercising,
they stop being active, they eat too much,
and they drink too much.
As a result, they lose strength, muscle and
power -- they lose their flexibility and
mobility -- they get stiff -- and they get
fat.
And after that, all kinds of bad things
start to happen.
But it doesn't have to be that way. With
the right kind of regular exercise, you
can smack Father Time right in the nose.
You may not stay young forever, but you
can look and feel a heck of a lot younger
than your age -- and a heck of a lot younger
than your peers.
To do it, you need to clean up your diet,
and you need to keep training -- but you
need to train in ways that work for an
older lifter.
I cover training (and diet) for older trainees
in detail in Gray Hair and Black Iron. If you
have a copy, go back and read it again. If you
don't, grab one triple double ASAP (which means
RIGHT NOW.)
The key to successful training for older lifters
is to train hard enough and heavy enough to
stimulate gains in strength and muscle mass
WITHOUT going so hard and heavy that you can't
recover from your workout or you end up so
stiff and sore that you can't move right for
a week.
In other words, it's a balancing act.
Some things that work for me -- and that will
work for YOU -- include the following:
1. As noted before -- clean up your diet. Strong
and lean keeps you young.
1A. After a certain age, the Get Big Drink just
doesn't do it any more. What really matters is
health and fitness and strength and looking and
feeling many years younger than your actual age.
1B. The above is a way of saying you need to
keep your weight -- and your gut -- under
control. And that requires a shift in priorities.
If you're over 35, gaining 30 pounds of muscle
in 6 weeks is NOT your number one priority.
2. Get enough sleep every night. Lack of sleep
will age you faster than a snowball melting in
the July sun.
3. Drink water. Stay hydrated. Staying hydrated
helps keep your joints lubricated.
4. Train regularly and consistently. Be obsessive
about making your scheduled workout. After a certain
point in your life, one missed workout leads to two,
and two leads to three, and suddenly you're a couch
potato like everyone else.
5. Use abbreviated training. It's the best thing
you can do to promote recovery and avoid
overtraining.
6. Use perfect form in all of your exercises. As an
older lifter, it's not enough just to lift a weight --
you need to lift it in perfect form.
6A. When you're age 50 or older, you don't have as
many reps left in your training career as you did
when you were age 20 -- so make them count!
7. If an exercise hurts, don't do it. Period. Find
a different exercise that doesn't hurt.
8. Dumbbells, dumbbells, dumbbells. They're much
more forgiving on your joints.
8A. That goes double or even triple for bodyweight
exercises. (Which is one of the reasons I wrote
Dinosaur Bodyweight Training.)
9. Do cardio training in addition to your strength
training -- but do the RIGHT kind of cardio training.
See Gray Hair and Black Iron for details about how
older strength athletes can use barbells, sandbags,
rocks, and other heavy stuff for cardio training
that you'll enjoy a heck of a lot more than doing
an hour on a treadmill or a step machine.
10. Do things that you enjoy. If you like what you're
doing, you'll stick with it. If you don't, you won't.
The bottom line is this -- the Iron Mines are the
Fountain of Youth. Be sure to keep working in them!
Yours in strength,
Brooks Kubik
P.S. Here are some great resources for older trainees:
1. Gray Hair and Black Iron
http://www.brookskubik.com/grayhair_blackiron.html
2. Dinosaur Bodyweight Training
http://www.brookskubik.com/dinosaur_bodyweight.html
3. For older beginners -- see the programs for
beginners in Chalk and Sweat:
http://www.brookskubik.com/chalk_and_sweat.html
4. My new dvd, Going Strong at 54:
http://brookskubik.com/goingstrong.html
5. The Dinosaur Files newsletter -- which is loaded
with articles by, for and about older trainees and
what REALLY works for them. Note that you can order
all 12 issues from year no. 1 of the Dinosaur
Files here:
http://www.brookskubik.com/dinosaur_files.html
And you can order a subscription for year no. 2
of the Dinosaur Files here:
http://www.brookskubik.com/dinosaurfiles_renewalpage.html
P.S. 2. As always, thanks for reading and have a great day. If you
train today, make it a good one!
