Lifting at 50+ - Avoiding a Painful Learning Curve

Allow me to introduce myself. I am not a doctor, or physio therapist or even a licensed trainer for that matter. I am just an oldish dude who has spent the better part of a decade finding every way to injure myself doing sound programming designed for somebody much younger than myself. How old am I? I clearly remember my friend's sister crying while listening to Telephone Line which just debuted by ELO. This seemed so far out in left field to me at the time because she was usually bouncing around the room listening to KC and the Sunshine Band. She was also, at least to me, smokin hot. Now I was in grade 6 so a quick Google search will tell you what age category I fall in today. Not old enough to be considered geriatric, but not young enough to be excluded from the lecture when I talk to my doctor about doing anything other than water aerobics. The price of exercise equipment isn't the only thing getting more expensive either, as I also noticed the premium for my life insurance renewal has also taken a hefty jump dammit.

About 7 years ago, I decided to get serious about working out. In fact you could call it training as I decided, in my head anyways, that I wanted to compete in powerlifting. Mainly because my age falls in the Master II class which sounds pretty damn cool. So I headed to York Pennsylvania to the York Fitness museum and store and purchased a used barbell and a bunch of well used iron plates. These were the 2 inch "Olympic" style vs. the standard 1 inch version which most of the kids I remember were buying in high school with the beige sand filled plates. Anybody who knows me also knows I live in Ontario, Canada. So why the hell would I drive all the way to York, PA to buy a pile of used plates and a bar? Luckily for the argument of me not being a complete imbecile, I just happen to report into an office in Baltimore, MD and occasionally drive there for a week worth of meetings. Driving through Harrisburg and continuing south on 83, I pass the above mentioned York museum and store.

Getting back through customs was simple since I had neither smokes or booze to declare and Canada customs seems they could care less about anything else. Arriving back home I unloaded everything from the suffering car into the garage. Eager to get started, I loaded the 45 lb plates on each end of the bar and looked at it. It looked awesome. It is hard to apprehend how such a stupidly basic thing could stir such emotion but I almost put on some ELO and cried. My wife then came out and in her usual directness told me not to do 'anything stupid' because we were going to a BBQ the next day and she wanted me to help her friend's husband set up some portable gazebos or something because it might rain. I assured her I wouldn't and she wisely did not believe me.

I now realized that without a set of uprites or a bench, the only thing I could really do was deadlift. Now deadlifting, believe it or not is a very basic movement that when shown correctly how to do it and with the right cues, is pretty easy to practice and master. Unfortunately, if you have ever watched people deadlift at a local gym, it is also pretty easy to massacre yourself when you have not. I sometimes think safety glasses to protect against flying vertebrae discs might be a good idea. Anyways, cue my entrance onto the scene.

Looking back, it was not so much that I overestimated my mastery of the lift, it was that I sorely underestimated the effect of repetitively lifting 200 lbs on an untrained posterior chain. You see, there are a lot of muscles that go into deadlifting and 99% of them are invisible when you look in a mirror. I knew they must be there because how else would you keep your pants up? It was just that I may not have given a lot of thought into how they might be useful for later requirements, like walking and breathing.

The problem with beginning lifting is it feels so amazing when you start. You go through the workout, continuously adding weight because your so mindful not to overdo it on the first set or 2. Your back and hamstrings get tired which tells you how wonderful the results are going to be and you can't wait till Monday to do it again. Yeah right. About an hour later after showering and sitting for a bit, I felt stiffness in the back of my legs and a slight twinge in my lower back. I just figured I better correct my posture. My wife however, who has the same ability lions do for spotting any irregularity that might signal lameness, looked at me with a deadpan glare.

"You didn't over do it?" she asked. Of course not I replied. I might be a bit tired but I will be OK for tomorrow. Well, tomorrow came and so did the DOMS. Oh yeah. My hamstrings felt like they were going to rip apart when I did anything but breath. My lower back felt like it was going to spasm anytime I didn't walk around like I had just crapped my pants. Sneaking down into the kitchen and grabbing both coffee and some pain killers, I sat at the kitchen table. Actually, more like I dropped like I got hit by lightening onto the chair. The gig was up. "Are you OK?" followed by a well deserved lecture of how I had shirked my responsibilities etc. all of which were 100% true. However, they also signaled my bad choice of timing when deciding to do what I did. If I had waited until Sunday to start and took it easy, I would have gotten away with a lot less grief. This point has served me well in the years since.

Concerning the BBQ? It rained in biblical proportions right after I got up and the BBQ ended up being a bunch of us sitting in the kitchen and living room and enjoying ourselves. I walked around like a robot while receiving the expected ribbing from my friends which inside made my happy. The beer helped as well. I made sure to drink a lot of water on top of it which mean't I made way more trips to the can than I really wanted to but overall it was fun.

My wife, in a testament to why we are still married after 17 years asked me why I just got the barbell and no other stuff. No room in the car was the real answer but I mumbled something about budget and finances and how, I do not know, ended up getting the blessing to expand my inventory of equipment. My next purchase was a solid bench and a used set of squat uprites I picked up from a yard sale for 30 bucks. They had adjustable safety bars for both squatting and benching and were just the thing I needed.

With the added abilities comes the added chance of injury and I made sure to get more than my fair share. Reading about working through injuries and maybe even how to avoid them is one thing, but your body is another thing altogether and has it's own plans. Most of which it does not fill me in on. I remember wondering how people I read about in blogs managed to avoid getting hurt and if they did, recovered so quickly afterwards. Then I recognized a pattern. Larry Broadlats and his buddies always seem to have been born in 1990 something, not 1966. Now using age as an excuse can seem pretty lame if you can excuse the pun, but there are realities here that cannot be ignored. The programming for the Master class lifter will by necessity look different than the programming for somebody 20 or more years younger at the same development phase. The main difference is in scheduling and I will look deeper into this on my next post. I believe that allowing for your individual recovery needs is probably one of the key aspects of getting to where you want to be in X amount of time, rather than 2X or more with the added X filled with soreness and frustration.