Things to look for in a gym when you’ve achieved your half century - Or if you’re hoping to do it in style!

Most of my clients are between 45 and 65. I like to think that it reflects my superior maturity and wisdom (but in more sober moments I realise that its probably more because our training is suited to longevity and quality of life) and that my clients, perhaps due to their superior maturity and wisdom, have gravitated towards it. There aren’t many people on the face of the planet whose long term goals really align with beating themselves up on a regular basis in their training, but if you're over 50, then you almost definitely don’t want to be doing it. In the next few paragraphs I’m going to touch on some of the things that you should look for to optimise your training if you’re over 50 and eager to keep charging on well. Keep these things in mind because they are going to help to safeguard your long term quality of life!

More muscles, and more strength!

The first thing that people who are over 50 want to think about to get the most out of their training is to make sure that they are increasing their strength and muscle mass. Sarcopenia is a universal condition that people suffer as they transition through their 30’s unless they do something about it proactively. Sarcopenia is the loss of muscle mass, initially at around .5% per year, and then eventually cresting up over 1% every year. So that means that if you haven’t been deliberately doing resistance training since you were thirty, and you’re fifty now, then you may have already lost 15% of your muscle mass, with a nasty trend heading on. 

Alongside this, one of the best defences that we have against the scourges of arthritis and osteoporosis is also resistance training. If you have a family history of arthritis or osteoporosis, there’d be value in proactively doing what you can to ensure that you’re in the best possible situation! Lifting heavy weight (for you) responsibly and regularly using compound movements that involve large muscle groups is one of the most efficient ways to ensure that your lean mass doesn’t decrease and to ensure that it will, in all likelihood, increase.

A bit of zip!

Alongside the need for more muscle, it’s also important that you facilitate the right kind of muscle, and unfortunately sets of 20 bicep curls probably aren’t exactly what you need... As we age, the muscle fibres involved in explosive movement tend to diminish and this can have pretty negative outcomes. Our explosive muscle fibres are important for lifting heavy things, throwing, jumping, and all those athletic things, but they are also important for things like stopping yourself from falling or catching yourself when something unexpected happens, jumping away from a hazard and for generally averting unexpected disasters. When your type II fibres start to diminish, your ability to respond to the unexpected, and the ability to do wild things like stand tall and move quickly become greatly decreased. 

So how do you keep this around? Explosive movements, or really heavy movements are typically the best way to do it. The trick is making sure that you do those in a way that leaves you room for error and ensures you come back healthy the next day. Most people in their 50’s don’t want to be doing as many box jumps as they can in 2 minutes (we can put, conservatively, upwards of eight times our body weight through our system when we jump off a box!), instead, at QKB we use swings. Swings allow us to generate significant amounts of force explosively without putting excessive pressures through our hips and knees, and, according to the world’s leading spine biomechanist, Stuart McGill, the way we swing is one of the best things that you can do for your lower back health as well.

Less Stress!

We’ve all seen the posture. Someone leaning forward, shoulders hunched, looking worried and in a hurry. It’s not a the posture of someone who feels in control of their life and enjoying things, instead, it’s the posture of someone who is suffering and trying to stay ahead of the rat race. There are a variety of things that lend themselves to this kind of look, but not knowing how to breathe and exacerbating the stress of life with ill considered training are two of the big ones!

Breathing is an incredibly important tool in the fight against stress. Our body mimics our emotions, and our emotions also mimic our body. So when someone constantly sits and is hunched at their computer, then their very body position tends to reinforce their stress. Good training will both teach someone how to strengthen the muscles that pull them out of that posture, and also, teach them how to use their breath throughout the day both to resist that posture and to diminish the stress that is reinforcing (and being reinforced!) by it. We use Original Strength at Qld Kettlebells to do both of these things. It’s an incredible system that uses our bodies natural reflexes to ‘reset’ our body to the way it was designed to be - it also feels really good, so our community enjoys doing it.

We also combat people’s stress by giving them a safe space where they can come and move around a little bit with people that like them and that have their best interests in mind (and I’m not just talking about our staff, the people who make up our strength community are pretty incredible!). We think that people having some our excellent coffee (made on Blackstar Coffee Roaster’s excellent beans!) after class is a super important part of what we do.

Definitely, no injuries!

Let's face it, the likelihood of you attending the gym in your 50’s or 60’s in order to win an Olympic medal or support a professional sporting career is pretty slim. In fact, most gyms don’t hand out Olympic medals, so pushing your limits on a regular basis in the gym or working through pain is pretty hard to justify.

We’ve been told that pushing your limits is critical to long term progress, but realistically, the best progress is made by working at a six to eight out of ten effort on a regular basis. This facilitates the skill of lifting and helps us to maintain and improve our quality of movement. We want to do things outside of this range periodically, but most of our training should live around here.

If you can tick off these boxes; maintain your muscle, keep the spring in your step, diminish your stress, and keep your body injury-free, then you’re going to facilitate so many good things for your long term quality of life. If you’re currently training somewhere that isn’t helping you to do some or all of those things, maybe think about what else you can do to supplement it, or consider going somewhere that does. 

We’d love to have you come and visit us and see what we do if you’re in our area and what I’ve talked about above appeals to you, our beginner kettlebell workshop is a great place to start, or reach out and we can organise a time to have a coffee!