Don't Be Afraid to Experiment

Don't Be Afraid to Experiment

I’ve trained steadily with weights for 7 years now. And at age 66, I think there is little chance of my adding any more muscle than I already have. Am I depressed about this? Not at all . . . well, maybe just a tiny bit.

I was almost 59 when I began a weight training “comeback.” After two or three years of consistent training, I had probably reached my full strength and muscle growth potential. But I’m still able to lift about the same amount of weight in most exercises that I used five years ago. Holding my own while growing older is reason to be grateful. My mission now is to maintain a high a degree of fitness and retain as much muscle as I can for as long as possible. But, like it or not, aging happens.

Part of the fun at my stage in life and training is simply rearranging and experimenting with workouts that present small challenges. For a while, I mixed pull-up and chin-up ladders into my workouts. I had read about using ladders for increasing pull-up capacity in one of Pavel Tsatsouline's articles and decided to design a version to fit my routine.

Before long, with an all-out effort, I could squeeze out 17 consecutive chin-ups. That's not a record, I'm sure; but it’s not bad for an old goat. Twenty is a perfect score for chin-ups on the USMC’s fitness test for young Marines.

Unfortunately, I developed sore elbows from all the chinning and have had to set aside pull-ups for a while. When I develop an overuse injury, I work around it until it goes away. So far, the National Football League hasn't offered to pay me for "playing hurt." So I simply move on to another small experiment. And I can always return to the pull-ups later.

My new experiment is a challenging workout combining some concepts from two prestigious sources, Dave "The Blond Bomber" Draper and coach Charles Staley. Draper is a great advocate of supersets, where you alternately exercise opposing muscle groups. For example, chest and upper back might be worked by alternating bench presses with cable rows, back and forth, resting only long enough to move from one exercise station to the other.

I’m paraphrasing now, but Staley explains his Escalating Density Training (EDT) this way: Select a body part, let's say arms, and work them exclusively for 15 minutes. Nothing new in that, of course. But here's the rest of it:

Select a weight you can curl for 10 good, clean reps. Do the same for triceps extensions.
For the next 15 minutes, superset the two exercises, doing 5 reps (not 10) in each set. Use a stopwatch.
Rest when you have to, but do as many as you can.

When you’ve finished, record your total reps for the 15-minute period.

Now here is the challenge: At each subsequent workout, keep doing sets of 5 reps with the same weight, but try to achieve a higher total during the 15-minute period. How? Well your rest periods must get shorter. After you have gotten so you can do 20% more reps than your beginning workout total, increase the weight by 5% and start over. I should add that there is a little more to Staley's EDT than I've explained here; so anyone wanting to try it in its purest form should read Staley's material.

But either way, EDT is tough stuff, so the remainder of your workout should be designed for maintenance only. Use the 15-minute EDT period to really zero-in on one body part. In Staley's original, you rest 5 minutes after the first EDT session, and then do another 15 minutes, working the same body part but with different exercises. But once around the block is enough for me, and I suspect it is enough for most people over 50.

In my version, I'm doing preacher curls alternated in superset fashion with seated triceps extensions on an Icarian machine. The pump is great and I've experienced some rep/weight capacity improvement. Will my arms grow another half-inch as a result? That's highly unlikely at my age and after 7 years of steady training. Still, I'm having fun and pleased with my modest gains. (Young people with more growth potential and on the same schedule should realize significant increases in strength and size.)

The rest of my upper body workout is for maintenance and consists of 3 sets per body part, reasonably tough-to-get reps, but certainly nothing heroic. I workout this way once per week, and at a second upper body day during the same week, I do a maintenance only workout for my arms and the rest of my upper body.

As usual, my leg workouts are Tuesday and Thursday nights teaching cardio kickboxing. They include high rep Hindu squats, kicks, lunges and sumo squats, all with bodyweight only. On Saturdays, I get in a set of Hindu squats and a hike in the hills.

Note that mixing and matching workout concepts isn’t for beginners. Beginners should first develop a solid fitness base with a program such as the Gray Iron Fitness Guide for Senior Men and Women. But after that, experimenting with different methods and programs makes all the sense in the world. In fact that’s when the fun really accelerates. But don't start improvising before you've gotten down the basics. Whoever said, "You've got to walk before you can run" had it exactly right.

--Logan
3/1/03

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