PROGRESS AND YOUR AGE
- Oliver Sifkovits
- Aug 6
- 7 min read
You have so far figured out that being strong is important. Whether you are new to strength training or have been bending iron for a while, understanding that hitting new PR’s in your training is the only true reflection of progress. Because - truth be told – there is no point treading water and staying at the same level you are at right now. It is like turning in a circle 360 degrees and thinking you end up in a different place. The ultimate goal, therefore, is to keep getting stronger.
Some of my clients who have been training with me for a while have asked me ‘how far this can go’, how strong they can get in absolute numbers, and whether there is cut-off point – especially in relation to one’s age – where progress is not possible anymore.
The following article shall answer the above and shed some light on the intricacies of making continuous progress on your strength training journey.
A model explaining training
When we attempt to explain how our body responds to barbell training and makes progress the way it does, we can look at various models explaining this kind of process.
The first person to come up with an explanation on how organisms respond to stress was Hans Seyle, a Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist. In 1956, he described the so-called General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) with its three distinct phases.
In phase one, the body experiences an ‘alarm’ situation in which it uses up its energy stores to respond to the ‘threat’ of a stressor. In weightlifting terms, this means that our body uses energy in the form of ATP and other substrates to create muscular tension for lifting weights through space (not with Elon Musk, but on the platform). The longer the training session lasts, the more our energy stores get depleted, the more our performance drops.
In the second stage of the GAS, the body enters a ‘resistance’ phase in which it aims to return to equilibrium: energy stores are repleted, muscle damage is repaired, bones produce more minerals, and connective tissue produces more collagen fibers. In short, this second phase is where the body says ‘Hang on, this guy is serious about weight training. We better make all preparations necessary in case he comes back again to lift heavier next time.’ In a way, we can see it as a survival mechanism to prepare the body for a potentially greater stress in the next workout.
In phase three, the body enters the stage of ‘exhaustion’. We are not too concerned with this stage, as when a program is appropriately designed and recovery managed accordingly, we can avoid falling into the abyss of physical annihilation. For the purpose of better understanding, we can call the third phase of the process the ‘adaptation phase’: At this stage, the body has finished its repair mode and has reached a higher level of functioning by having adapted to the previous stress it got exposed to.
In summary, we can simplify the GAS into three distinct stages for the purpose of our training: In stage one, a stress is applied in the form of barbell training. In stage two, the body recovers from that stress. And in stage three, the body will have adapted to the previous stress and reaches new levels of functioning. This is what we call the Stress-Recovery-Adaptation cycle (see Figure 1).
Some biological truths
If we draw a link from the GAS to how it pertains to our ability to get stronger across our life span, experience has shown us that the Stress-Recovery-Adaptation cycles are somewhat prolonged and take longer to complete as we get older – meaning you take longer to recover from workouts. For example, if you apply the same workout with a beginner at the age of 20 and a beginner at the age of 60, the younger individual will recover from it faster than the older individual.
Why is that?
It is the brutal reality that our biological clock is on a decline with every second of our life. It doesn’t matter how many times you hear an ‘expert’ say that we can reverse ageing. We can’t. But we can choose to make ageing a more productive and fruitful process with achieving a higher quality of life than not. For example, our hormonal profile is not the same in our 70’s compared to our 20’s or 30’s. Testosterone levels decline, our connective tissue loses quality, cortisol goes up (and with it does inflammation), our sleep is disrupted more frequently, and we find building muscle harder than before.
Does this mean that we cannot get stronger or build muscle as we age?
Absolutely not. And this is the main reason why I wrote this article.
Get older. Get stronger.
We have observed in our gym that people keep hitting PR’s well into their 60’s and beyond. In fact, our oldest client is 76, and he has kept adding weight to the bar since starting training with us in April 2024. We have a number of females in their late 50’s and 60’s who have kept getting stronger after nearly three years of training – pressing in the thirties, benching in the forties, squatting in the seventies, and pulling in the hundreds.
How can we explain this?
If we go back to the earlier part of the article, I have mentioned the Stress-Recovery-Adaptation cycle. This very fundament for explaining how we get stronger applies to people of any age.
Humans are incredibly good at adapting to stress – provided that it is neither too high, nor too low in the long run. Too high of a stress applied over long periods without recovering from it will mean overtraining and a drop in performance. Too low of a stress is pointless as it does not force the body to adapt to higher levels of functioning. The latter is what see in people who keep lifting the same weight over and over again without ever asking the body to adapt to greater levels of stress. They have traded progress for comfort, so to speak, which is rather counterproductive in the world of barbell training.
When the stress applied in training is appropriate, and the lifter pays attention to his diet and sleep patterns, then progress in the weight room can be achieved at any stage of life.
Yes, there is a genetic maximum on how strong one can get. But, let me ask you this question: what kind of genius are you to actually know where this point is? The answer is: you can’t. No one can. No matter what the doctor says (I am bringing this up because this has happened before).
What about gaining muscle mass?
As we age, our body’s ability to build muscle is hampered. It is assumed that older people have an impaired rate of muscle protein synthesis, and at the same time a greater rate of muscle protein breakdown. The net effect is an impaired ability to add significant amounts of muscle mass to your frame – a scenario described as ‘anabolic resistance.’ It suggests that with any anabolic (i.e. tissue-promoting) stimulus we put into the body, the greater the ‘resistance’ to that stimulus as we age.
Evidence to the contrary, our named 76 year-old client has previously reported that his shirts and trousers now fit tighter than ever before – seemingly being a result of his increased strength and muscle mass acquired through training – despite his ‘old’ age. In the field of strength training, we have to operate under the assumption that human biology is too complex and individual to make accurate predictions sometimes. As in the above, our 76 old client has somewhat defied the state of being ‘anabolically resistant.’
Furthermore, we see that female clients in their fifties and sixties add an average of 4-6 kilos of body weight to their scale within their first six to eight months of training, despite the fact that females have on average 28 times less testosterone than males do (most of this extra weight is muscle mass - before you get paranoid). This is something totally unheard of in the mainstream fitness and medical industry – but nevertheless a great achievement and proof that the ‘religion of science’ and conventional wisdom can indeed be wrong.
The solution
I would like to give some pointers to your own training on how to keep getting stronger and add muscle mass at any stage of your life.
Keep intensity high
In this regard, ‘intensity’ means weight on the bar. Do your singles, doubles, triples, and fives. Lower reps mean heavier weight. Heavier weight means greater force production. Greater force production means better strength gains. Better strength gains mean a better ability to build muscle mass. It is as simple as that.
Go easy on volume
We refer to ‘volume’ as the total amount of work being done in a given exercise or workout. For example, if you do 3x3 in the squat, your total volume is nine reps in that exercise. If you do the same with another two exercises, you add it up to 3x9 reps which is 27 reps in total. If you did 5x5 on all of the three exercises, your total volume would be 75 reps.
As we get older, our ability to tolerate high amounts of training volume is impaired.
High volume means high amount of muscle damage created through repetitive straining of muscle fibers. As our ability to recover from workloads is blunted, doing high amounts of sets and reps will beat the p*** out of you, which means you’ll be battling constant soreness. In such a state, high force production (and therefore getting stronger) is not possible. Stick to your triples, doubles, and singles – with occasionally adding sets of five – and keep the amount of sets relatively low.
Double up on protein
As a rule of thumb, if you have never paid attention to how much protein you are eating, double the amount you are currently ingesting on a daily basis. We figured out earlier in this article that older people have a reduced ability to synthesize muscle protein and are increasingly prone to a higher rate of protein breakdown. To buffer this effect and ensure that progress is made in the gym, go all out on your favourite sources of protein.
A final thought: getting stronger is never a matter of age, but of your willingness to engage in the process and strive for PR’s every time you train. 50% dedication will give you 50% results, 80% will give you 80% results.
You do the maths yourself.
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