Today I’ll discuss the 3rd tool you can use and have control over when it comes to making change - Hypertrophy Training.
Here are the emails about
Tool #1 - Nutrition and Tool #2 - Strength Training in cased you missed them.
Hypertrophy - strength training for promoting or maintaining lean muscle mass.
I’m sure you’ve heard the statistics about losing X amount of muscle mass per year over X age.
It’s true, we do lose the ability to generate power and muscle mass as we age, but this can be stopped by lifting weights.
Strength training for muscle growth is truly the fountain of youth.
The longer we keep our bones and muscles strong, the less they deteriorate, improving our quality of life.
Now, I’m sure you're thinking, “but I don’t want to grow big muscles.”
They won’t because that is not your goal.
A goal of big muscles requires the desire to get big muscles which involves a large surplus of calories, many hours in the gym lifting heavy ass weights, plenty of testosterone and not doing a whole lot of anything else.
You, on the other hand, want to keep your muscles around and trim down. This requires keeping calories at or close to a specific amount, adequate protein and lots of movement besides just lifting weights.
Here at Breakthrough Fitness, the majority of our strength training falls into hypertrophy-style strength training or bodybuilding. We train mostly adults over 50 and frequent bouts of exercise seem to be more beneficial for building strength and preserving muscle mass.
I recommend 2-4 full body hypertrophy-strength training sessions each week.
These sessions should be 40-60 minutes, which include a proper warm up to prepare the body for more strenuous work.
There is no one way to strength train. That’s the beauty of it. We can “play” around with the different variables which will involve all the human movement patterns, but feel different. Those variables are:
- Repetitions - The number of times you perform an exercise without stopping.
- Sets - A group of repetitions.
- Weight - The amount of weight (load) being used.
- Tempo- The speed at which you do each repetition.
- Rest - Time between sets.
- Exercise Selection - The different exercises or lifts you perform in a workout.
- Exercise Order - The order in which you perform the exercises in a workout.
Playing around with the variables adds variety, making training fun, while staying true to principles of strength training.
If you want to begin strength training, but don’t want to think about any of this and need accountability so it actually gets done, our 8-Week Ageless Strength and Nutrition Program starts 1/23. Reply Ageless Strength and I’ll get you the details.
Keep moving,
