. e ability to recover from injury, at least at a physiological level, is usually
greater for younger people. But an experienced and wise trainee should be
more knowledgeable about how to hasten recovery than is a much younger
but lesser experienced person. (Consider my experiences described in Chap-
ter .) So an older but savvy person may be able to recover faster from injury
than a much younger but naive trainee. What a shame it is that wisdom and
youth rarely coincide.. With age you must be even more sure to perform adequate warmup work
prior to doing work sets. is is just one example of the “less room for error”
maxim that applies to older trainees. Never skimp on warmup work, and
never make poundage jumps of more than pounds between sets of a big
barbell exercise as you work up to your top set(s) for the day. Whenever you
feel that an extra warmup set seems like a good idea, always do it. Never be
in such a rush to finish a workout that you take shortcuts. Take your time,
and get it right, always. If the first rep or two of a set feel(s) wrong, stop the
set, discover what was amiss, correct it, rest a few minutes, and then do the
set properly. And always keep yourself warm while you train.. It is not just warmup work specific to a given exercise that you need to give
more attention to as you age. ere is the general warmup work prior to
touching a weight. is becomes increasingly important as you age. Take
– minutes to gradually raise your temperature and heart rate, and break
into a sweat. Do not skip this important period in order to reduce your total
workout time.. With age usually comes a reduced ability to sustain full-bore training for
long stretches, and possibly an increased need for intensity cycling.. You may find an increasing preference for medium and high reps as you
move into your late thirties and older, rather than lower reps. Especially
in the barbell squat, for example, you may move away from both low- and
medium-rep work, and elect to use very high reps with a fixed weight. Rep
progression would become your primary focus, not weight progression.
Whether or not this move could apply to you will, at least in part, depend on
your structural individuality, overall training experience and expertise, and
whether or not, in your youth, you abused your body through overtraining,
excessive use of singles and very low reps, and poor exercise technique.