Strength and repetitions used

supercpa999

As I get older I find that my body can’t handle heavy weights. I Have everted to a program of 40% cardio, 30% weight training and 40% yoga. For my weight training I am doing 15-20 reps per set with an effort to stay closer to 20.

I find myself enjoying this approach more but I am wondering will I gradually lose strength using this approach.

Any thoughts welcome.

zebasschick

you aren't less strong because you're older - you're less strong because our muscles get weaker if we don't use them for heavier tasks.

how much effort do you put into those 15 to 20 reps? that's the key. to build muscle, you need to work the muscle, then eat enough protein to rebuilt it.

i warm up with a set of 16 to 20, increase the weight for my second set so i can do around 12, then for the third set, i increase the weight so i can do about 8 reps; if i can do more, next time i up the weight 2 1/2 to 5 pounds for that last set. btw, i'm 63, and i've just increased to weight for a couple of my exercises again, which was so cool

claireychn074

There are experienced coaches on here that may well drop in and reply, but it depends on what you mean by lose strength. Ultimately the best way to train for a heavy deadlift (for example) is to lift heavy. But high reps of lighter weight can be great for hypertrophy, and if you feel heavy weights are not for you, then lighter weights are so much better than no weights.

Dogmom1978

As said, lighter weights are better than 0 weights, BUT if I can do more than 10 reps of anything, I know it’s time for me to up the weight. I push myself as hard as I can without injury (and harder if my hubby is around to offer a spot).

If your goal is strength, then you should lift heavier. Higher reps, low weight is good for muscle endurance, BUT if you are trying to get stronger/build more muscle, lower reps higher weight would be the way to go. SO... it depends on your goals...

That said, as already mentioned, if trying to build muscle, you will also need to make sure you are getting sufficient protein to build muscle.

watts6151

zebasschick wrote: »

you aren't less strong because you're older - you're less strong because our muscles get weaker if we don't use them for heavier tasks.

how much effort do you put into those 15 to 20 reps? that's the key. to build muscle, you need to work the muscle, then eat enough protein to rebuilt it.

i warm up with a set of 16 to 20, increase the weight for my second set so i can do around 12, then for the third set, i increase the weight so i can do about 8 reps; if i can do more, next time i up the weight 2 1/2 to 5 pounds for that last set. btw, i'm 63, and i've just increased to weight for a couple of my exercises again, which was so cool

Please explain sarcopenia

Dogmom1978

watts6151 wrote: »

zebasschick wrote: »

you aren't less strong because you're older - you're less strong because our muscles get weaker if we don't use them for heavier tasks.

how much effort do you put into those 15 to 20 reps? that's the key. to build muscle, you need to work the muscle, then eat enough protein to rebuilt it.

i warm up with a set of 16 to 20, increase the weight for my second set so i can do around 12, then for the third set, i increase the weight so i can do about 8 reps; if i can do more, next time i up the weight 2 1/2 to 5 pounds for that last set. btw, i'm 63, and i've just increased to weight for a couple of my exercises again, which was so cool

Please explain sarcopenia

Lack of activity is a key factor in sarcopenia. It is not that you CANT build muscle when you are older. Just like weight loss, it becomes HARDER as you age, but that is NOT the same as something being impossible. Also, the OP didn’t even say how old they are. They could be 30 or they could be 70.

As shown by the poster who is in their 60s, you can still build muscle and get stronger when older...

You might want to check out this link that talks about the direct correlation between activity level and sarcopenia:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4269139/#idm139717159739168title

supercpa999

Hi there
Thanks for the feedback
I’m 50.
I want to be lean and have muscle tone but not big muscles. So I am wondering if I will end up losing strength and have smaller toned muscles with this type of regimen.

Dogmom1978

supercpa999 wrote: »

Hi there
Thanks for the feedback
I’m 50.
I want to be lean and have muscle tone but not big muscles. So I am wondering if I will end up losing strength and have smaller toned muscles with this type of regimen.

Well, if it was easy to get big muscles, way more men would be huge lol.

I wouldn’t worry about getting “big muscles” at all. You might not gain any noticeable muscle tone either with such a high rep workout. I would definitely still recommend lifting heavier/less reps. Obviously that doesn’t mean if you do 15 lbs 20 reps now to attempt 50 lbs 6-8 reps tomorrow. It’s take some trial and error to find a weight that is challenging without it being too heavy. Then as it gets easier, you increase the weight.

I promise that you won’t get big muscles. 😜

supercpa999

Ha I better not 🤠

zebasschick

supercpa999 wrote: »

Hi there
Thanks for the feedback
I’m 50.
I want to be lean and have muscle tone but not big muscles. So I am wondering if I will end up losing strength and have smaller toned muscles with this type of regimen.

don't worry - working out with weight won't give you big muscles unless you spend a LOT of time at it and lift very heavy. i have a friend who's a huge female bodybuilder. she works out HARD about 30+ hours a week to build and those huge muscles. i didn't build muscle like that even when i was at the gym 6 days a week.

Dogmom1978

zebasschick wrote: »

supercpa999 wrote: »

Hi there
Thanks for the feedback
I’m 50.
I want to be lean and have muscle tone but not big muscles. So I am wondering if I will end up losing strength and have smaller toned muscles with this type of regimen.

don't worry - working out with weight won't give you big muscles unless you spend a LOT of time at it and lift very heavy. i have a friend who's a huge female bodybuilder. she works out HARD about 30+ hours a week to build and those huge muscles. i didn't build muscle like that even when i was at the gym 6 days a week.

Your body builder friend also has to eat a lot of protein and very carefully balanced meals to get large muscle. It isn’t just about lifting. Again, if it was, huge men everywhere 😜

supercpa999

Good I don’t want to be big lol

AnnPT77

I'm not going to try to give you expert advice, because I'm not an expert, just a regular duffer. So this is just my experience/opinion.

Very generically,

You speak both of strength, and of wanting to have "muscle tone but not big muscles".

I agree with dogmom that you really don't need to worry about getting big muscles. I won't make assumptions about what "big muscles" means to you, because I've known women who pointed out other women they thought had unatractively big muscles, and I didn't see those women as having particularly big muscles at all. So, I don't know what you visualize when you say that.

But I would say two things:

1. If you're thinking of female bodybuilders, posing oiled-up in competitions in bikinis, when you say "big muscles", I'd comment that even *they* don't look like that except when pumped up and close to competition time (when they've lost as much weight as needed - quite extremely - so the muscles really show). For most folks' tastes, quite muscular women look "toned" when they're at normal (not competition) weight, just walking around non-pumped and in street clothes.

2. No matter what, and especially if you're not taking dangerous/illegal performance enhancing drugs, muscle gain for women (for anyone, actually) is really, really slow. No routine you can do will make you suddenly wake up one morning with big muscles that appeared by surprise overnight. If you're working out regularly, and find that you're getting to the maximum muscularity that's a happy place for you, you switch to a muscle-maintaining routine: Pretty straightforward. (You can even lose a little muscle mass on purpose if you overshoot, but that overshoot won't happen, I swear.)

So don't worry. You're in control.

I'm not a serious lifter, never have been, but it's something I've done off and on for a couple of decades, sometimes consistently for a few months and up to a couple of years at a time.

As I get older (64 now) and experience various physical problems that are maybe a little more common statistically with aging/overuse, I find I do better with high-rep, lower weight routines, from an injury-avoidance standpoint. Those are generally regarded as more about muscular endurance than about either fastest muscle mass increase or developing maximum raw strength, but there are definitely strength and possibly mass improvements possible (they just happen much slower).

I think those higher-rep programs can deliver what I *think* most people would mean when they say "toned looking" but not "big muscles". ("Toned" is another term different people define differently. Usually it's some combination of some muscle development plus being lean enough for those muscles to show, in the combination you prefer.)

To make *strength* progress, you have to keep increasing the challenge of your workouts, gradually, over time. Certain rep ranges and weights will maybe tend to maximize strength gains, but that doesn't mean other combinations have *no* strength benefits . . . as long as you keep increasing the challenge by increasing some combination of weight, reps, sets, time under tension, and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting.

The trouble with high rep work in this regard, is that if we keep increasing reps forever, the weight training time requirement keeps growing, and that can be impractical. So, loosely, oversimplifying, I tend to increase reps/sets until that gets close to annoying time-wise, then increase weight and drop back in reps/sets to keep the total workload just a little ahead of where I was at the lighter weight. (For purely raw strength progress, some of the increased challenge should sensibly be weight increase, so it's nice in that respect, too.) Then I start working up in reps/sets again. Rinse and repeat.

Is this an optimal program, theoretically, for any paticular outcome? No, no, no. But it's a congenial program *for me* that I'll actually do, and that seems to help me minimize the problems that send me to physical therapy and enforced rest from certain exercises. It's about personal balance, IMO: *My* goals, what time I have, my injury vulnerability issues, etc.

There's a good thread here about strength training programs:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10332083/which-lifting-program-is-the-best-for-you/p1

A possible route is to read that thread, maybe ask specific questions there, and pick a program to start. (A well-designed program like that will give you better results than "roll your own".) If there's something you dislike about it, ask more questions on the thread, or in the bodybuilding part of the forum, and people will help you with alternatives and adaptations. Again, rinse and repeat.

As far as losing strength, sacropenia, etc.: Eventually, at some stage, most people actually do lose strength as they age. If you continue strength training, it will happen more slowly, and to a lesser degree, and later. For me, that's good enough. I have a friend who just turned 74, been strength training regularly since her early 30s. Her body looks maybe 50s-ish, max. Her strength is excellent, better than most women I know who are decades younger.

So, working to avoid losing strength is a Good Thing. Beyond that, there's no use in worrying about it, because you're doing everything you can to avoid/delay it. Worrying just makes the time pass more unpleasantly than if you'd done the same things, but not worried while you did them.

You'll do fine. Progress will be gradual, but with consistency, it'll happen. Don't worry! 😉

Apologies for the essay, and best wishes!

supercpa999

Thank you for such a kind well-thought out reply

sijomial

@claireychn074 asked a very pertinent question which I didn't see an answer to.

What do you mean by losing strength?
What does strength mean to you - strong enough to do what?

(The thread seems to have taken a detour into muscle size / muscle gain / muscle loss which wasn't part of the original question.)

There's two strong personal trainers at my gym. One is a power lifter and one is a body builder. While both in general population terms would be regarded as strong their strength is very different (as is their training).
My son works in construction and can run wheel barrows of aggregate all day long but he wouldn't impress in the gym lifting extreme weights for a few reps.

"As I get older I find that my body can’t handle heavy weights."
Can you expand on this too?
In what way, what happens?
Under what circumstances?

I have found as I get older that I need to train smarter and old joint injuries need more care, recovery is slower but low rep / heavy weight is still part of my lifting at 60YO.

zebasschick

Dogmom1978 wrote: »

zebasschick wrote: »

supercpa999 wrote: »

Hi there
Thanks for the feedback
I’m 50.
I want to be lean and have muscle tone but not big muscles. So I am wondering if I will end up losing strength and have smaller toned muscles with this type of regimen.

don't worry - working out with weight won't give you big muscles unless you spend a LOT of time at it and lift very heavy. i have a friend who's a huge female bodybuilder. she works out HARD about 30+ hours a week to build and those huge muscles. i didn't build muscle like that even when i was at the gym 6 days a week.

Your body builder friend also has to eat a lot of protein and very carefully balanced meals to get large muscle. It isn’t just about lifting. Again, if it was, huge men everywhere 😜

she eats mad protein - probably 200 grams a day, and she eats some every couple hours.

supercpa999

"As I get older I find that my body can’t handle heavy weights."
Can you expand on this too?
In what way, what happens?
Under what circumstances?

When I was younger (late teens to late thirties) I lifted heavy weights and used low reps (never really going above 5 reps usually often using a pyramid approach with one set per exercise going to failure).

Now whenever I attempt to lift heavy I usually end up either frustrated or getting injured. Lol I have aches and pains often that remind me I’m not in my twenties anymore. Hence, this approach to training isn’t interesting anymore. I really don’t care about my strength. I want to feel physically good and have good flexibility and mobility.

That’s why I want to train with high reps and low weights. So I was wondering in that context if I would see some decreases in muscle size and strength over a long period of time while I am still actively using progressive resistance but using it in a much different way.

Thanks for any feedback.

sijomial

supercpa999 wrote: »

"As I get older I find that my body can’t handle heavy weights."
Can you expand on this too?
In what way, what happens?
Under what circumstances?

When I was younger (late teens to late thirties) I lifted heavy weights and used low reps (never really going above 5 reps usually often using a pyramid approach with one set per exercise going to failure).

Now whenever I attempt to lift heavy I usually end up either frustrated or getting injured. Lol I have aches and pains often that remind me I’m not in my twenties anymore. Hence, this approach to training isn’t interesting anymore. I really don’t care about my strength. I want to feel physically good and have good flexibility and mobility.

That’s why I want to train with high reps and low weights. So I was wondering in that context if I would see some decreases in muscle size and strength over a long period of time while I am still actively using progressive resistance but using it in a much different way.

Thanks for any feedback.

Going to failure too often is far more likely to be the cause of the aches and pains rather than anything else.
age can be a factor in that when you are younger you can tolerate and recover from a bad training style, excessive stress/poor load management better - the alternative of course is not to train badly in the first place!
When I did a custom program to get my bench press back to where I was in my 20's I went to failure once every 6 weeks.

High rep can be effective for hypertrophy, perhaps at the cost of some training efficiency - bearing in mind the training volume and stress required for muscle maintenance is a lot less than for muscle building you shouldn't see muscle atrophy. My experience in my 50's was that avoidance of injury became far more importnant as recovery from injury is longer and loss of strength quicker when unable to train. Definitely don't keep hurting yourself and yes you should enjoy what you are doing but flipping to high rep only training is just one possible solution.

Will you lose low rep strength (1RM to 3RM for example) by not training in those rep ranges - probably, purely not practicing that skill has an effect. But that doesn't seem to be a concern to you.
There's other options open to you but the fears over muscle loss shouldn't stop you trying this option is you think it will make it more enjoyable for you.

HeidiCooksSupper

I live in a seniors community with a fitness center, pool, and trainers. The trainer has me doing two reps of 12 (24 reps) of each exercise on five machines (total 6 x 2 x 12 total). She has me adjusting the weight so that the last of each 24 should seem almost too hard to do but not painful. With just these few minutes (about 10-15) of doing this and a 1/2 hour of water walking on alternate days I am feeling a heck of a lot stronger than I was. (Oh, and the walk back and forth to the fitness center which is about 0.7 miles round trip.) I'll be 70 in January. No danger of big muscles.

kshama2001

Dogmom1978 wrote: »

watts6151 wrote: »

zebasschick wrote: »

you aren't less strong because you're older - you're less strong because our muscles get weaker if we don't use them for heavier tasks.

how much effort do you put into those 15 to 20 reps? that's the key. to build muscle, you need to work the muscle, then eat enough protein to rebuilt it.

i warm up with a set of 16 to 20, increase the weight for my second set so i can do around 12, then for the third set, i increase the weight so i can do about 8 reps; if i can do more, next time i up the weight 2 1/2 to 5 pounds for that last set. btw, i'm 63, and i've just increased to weight for a couple of my exercises again, which was so cool

Please explain sarcopenia

Lack of activity is a key factor in sarcopenia. It is not that you CANT build muscle when you are older. Just like weight loss, it becomes HARDER as you age, but that is NOT the same as something being impossible. Also, the OP didn’t even say how old they are. They could be 30 or they could be 70.

As shown by the poster who is in their 60s, you can still build muscle and get stronger when older...

You might want to check out this link that talks about the direct correlation between activity level and sarcopenia:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4269139/#idm139717159739168title

Yes, I'm 53 and have done high reps/low weight, low reps/high weights, pyramids, bodyweight, etc., and the biggest factor for me losing strength is long periods of no strength training at all.

supercpa999

Thanks for all the helpful feedback, I appreciate it.