I’ve been reading and listening to Mike Boyle a ton lately as I immerse myself back into functional training. Mike was a discussing the differences in the training he programs for his athletes (from teens to adult professionals interested in maximizing their sport performance) vs. his “general population” clients (over 55, interested in overall health/fitness/capability and physique).
When I first starting following Mike Boyle’s back in 2008, his work was tailored to first group (young athletes). I was in my late 30s but since I was active and fit I was able to adopt many of his training practices with had good results.
Fast forward to today. I’m still fit, but as I’ve described before, not like I was 17 years ago. So Boyle’s insights into training older adults has been particularly eye opening for me. Below are some of my takeaways from him.
If it hurts don’t do it. Boyle ask his clients if something hurts. If they say “yes” you stop doing anything that makes it hurt.
Many of his older clients will say things like: My shoulder/back/knee/xyz always hurts but once I get going I can work through it.” Or “I took an advil/aspirin so it’ll subside in a little while.” Or “It’s just minor, I can handle it.”
Boyle says those are all yeses. It’s a binary question. If there’s an explanation that comes with it, it’s YES.
He said what would be a minor tweak for a younger athlete that heals in a few days could take 6 months (or more!) for his adult clients to recover from.
My takeaway – I am this guy. I’ve been working “through” tweaks and injuries my entire life. The difference is it now takes me weeks or months to recover. I need to heed his advice here.
We don’t do heavy bilateral lower body exercises or barbell work with our adult clients. Boyle uses man variations of one-leg exercises like lunges, step ups, step backs, one leg squats. In fact, he avoids doing bilateral leg training for even his athletes now. He said that he’s not training Power Lifters so none of his clients needs to squat with a barbell. He said the risk of injury and the load on the lower back are far too high when he can achieve identical (or better) results with one leg exercises.
My takeaway – I’m already with him here. I bought into this concept from Boyle and Coach Dos back around 2009. For his over 50 clients and most of his younger clients, he doesn’t program any upper body barbell exercises for the same risk/reward/result reasons.
What is your goal?
Boyle returns to this question over and over. He said people fall in love with a particular exercise like they do with a political ideology. They “believe” they must do Bench Press/Squat/ Deadlift, or they must increase the weight every workout, or Dips are the best upper body exercise, or 10 sets of 10, or … despite the fact that there the scientific evidence (and/or his 48 years of experience training athletes) proves otherwise. When he digs deeper to uncover his clients goals, he often finds a safer way to achieve them.
My takeaway – Guilty as charged. Once I progress beyond the “plain of suckitude” I get obsessed and locked into my current training program, exercises and schedule. I don’t want to “lose” whatever rI’ve gained and I fall into the “more is better” trap. I usually won’t deviate until I’m driven out by injury or unrelenting failure. This time around, I’ve already have a few unexpected injuries adopting my new program that have prompted me to ask myself what are my goals, why are they important and am I moving toward them. As a result, I’ve already eliminated a number of exercises, dropped to using embarrassing; low weights and have reduced my workout volume/time by more than 50%. There may be further reductions coming too.
You should leave a workout feeling great. You should feel energized, not whipped. You should be moving fluidly and pain free. You should not be in pain the next day from overdoing it or even worse from getting injured. The majority of his clients are not fitness hobbyists (unlike me).Their goals are sports performance, health span, freedom of movement, weight loss, mobility, basic strength, body composition. He said if a workout program is not helping you reach your goal, it’s not the right program. He also says it should never make you worse. If you regularly get injured, something is wrong with your program.
My takeaway –I cry “Uncle”. I lived with years of nagging shoulder pain punctuated with flare ups ranging from moderate to severe until I finally reached a point where I had to question “What am I doing?” and came back with “I don’t want to live this way, drained, compromised and in pain every day”, before I was finally forced to reevaluate everything I was doing and make a change. I will try not to repeat this.
What worked for you when you were younger will not work for you now.
Mike has trained some clients for their entire attic career from grade school to college to pro-athlete to retirement. He’s trained himself for 50+ years. He trains thousands of older adults. He says what you could get away with when you were younger you cannot as you age. You can’t push as hard, as frequently, as heavy, as intense. You can’t eat, sleep or recover the way you used to. You need to spend much more time on mobility, warmups, foam rolling, recovery and injury presentation. Your exercises will need to change. Some things you used to do that gave you great results will now cause you major problems. Focusing on new PRs or competing with your younger self are simply foolish. You can’t do it and your body will break down.
My takeaway – This is my achilles heel. My biggest competition is my younger self. I no longer compete with arbitrary goals from some bodybuilding magazine or with feats of strength I see on YouTube (I’ve injured myself countless times doing this – and failed to boot). Instead, my baseline is what I could do before – like when I was 38. I now realize that’s not realistic. I am 20 years older. Regardless of how fit I am, I cannot handle the volume, frequency and intensity of work I did 20 years ago. I want to. In my mind, I’m in peak physical shape and it’s a mind-over-matter issue. But in reality, it’s not. I hate cutting my workouts down by 50%. I hate using weights that used to be my warmups as my working sets. I hate that I know I can push myself to work harder and longer but that it often results in nagging pains, injuries or stagnation. it’s annoying as f***k to me. I’m a natural grinder. Now I have to intentionally check myself and hold back.
Some upbeat notes:
As far as I can tell I have not lost any of the fitness, endurance, balance flexibility or mobility that I gained over the past 7 years despite changing my entire routine and cutting my volume in half. I haven’t gained weight. In fact, I dropped a few pounds of flab and am ripped again.
My devastating shoulder injury from last month appears to be 95% recovered. It’s been so long since I lived with chronic pain I forgot how nice it is to wash dishes, walk the dog, sleep with my arm out the side and use my left hand to reach into overhead cabinets without sharp pain. It’s hard to believe I’ve recovered this much in a month.
Today, I did my shortest, lightest workout in a month. It was half the weight and half the volume I planned when I began this program in January. And you know what? I felt great afterward – loose, pain free, and energized.
The evidence that Boyle is right keeps smacking me in the face.
When I started following Mike Boyle again a few weeks ago, I was looking to refresh my knowledge of his training system, exercise choices and anything new he came up with during the years I wasn’t doing functional training.
I wasn’t expecting to learn how to deal with getting older. I didn’t think I had a problem or needed help with this.
I was wrong.
I do have problem and I do need help.
Boyle (age 63) and Dan John (age 68), both of whom I followed 17 years years ago for training advice have resurfaced as mentors who are helping guide me through this next chapter of life. It goes far beyond fitness – even though that’s how it started. I’m grateful they are both still around and give so freely online and in podcasts. I’ve got a lot to learn.