Exercise For Older Adults: General Principles
If you’re an older adult, and you want to start exercising - especially strength training - this article is required reading!
It forms part of an e-book I’m putting together on strength training for older adults.
I've deliberately chosen that topic (as opposed to just "exercise") because strength training is more complicated and technical than straight fitness training, and people feel the need for more professional help getting started.
There's more potential for injury, and people are confused about various things (How heavy? How often? Which exercises? etcetera).
In this blog post, I'll step out exercise principles which generally apply to both fitness and strength work but with particular attention to strength training in a gym context.
Here’s a list of principles which can inform your training practices as an older adult.
Principle 1: Your recovery from exercise takes longer
Every time you exert yourself physically, your body needs to spend some time and resources on repair and reorganisation. The repair takes place at sites where stress has occurred and the reorganisation takes place across multiple body systems - brain & nerves, muscles/joints/bones/tendons, blood vessels etc.
Essentially, your body assumes another similar stress is coming and will try to adapt to make you more suited to it next time. (Even if you ARE already suited to it).
As we get older, these processes can take longer. This is one reason why post exercise soreness may be slow to dissipate. Or why heaviness in your legs lasts longer than you'd expect.
The implication is that it’s harder to ramp up the amount you exercise when you're older.
You cannot increase your total weekly exercise too quickly without flirting with injury.
If you persist with training, you'll get fitter and stronger but the slope of adaptation is more gradual than when you were younger.
There’s no point trying to force it when your body can only adapt so fast. This is why patience is important. If you try to rush things, forcing your body to train hard again when you're not recovered enough, you run the risk of stalling your progress.
The good news is that your older body is still immensely adaptable. You can gain a great deal of strength and fitness, you just need to be more patient to allow the improvement to come.
Principle 2: Your injury risk may be elevated
For a variety of reasons, when you're older it can be easier to injure yourself.
It's interesting to ask, "why?" because maybe - in part - the elevated risk is because of inactivity? It could be that a highly active 60 year-old may be no more likely to get injured than a highly active 20 year old?
However, according to common sense, logic, and sensible intuition, the average person who's 60 years of age has increased odds of injury when they start an exercise program. Bones, connective tissue and blood supply are not what they used to be. Agility and balance is degraded - maybe a little, maybe a lot.
When you're older - even in your thirties and forties - "the heart and lungs are willing but the flesh is weak". You can have enough cardiorespiratory fitness and motivation to push yourself in excess of what your joints, tendons, muscles and ligaments can handle.
You need to ease into things and modulate your sense of competition. You may even have to stop yourself from working hard. This can be difficult because it’s counterintuitive. Normally intense effort really helps. But it’s not always so with exercise.
Remember - you need to be doing some form of training for your whole life, so there's plenty of time. You can't blitz your way to a strong, fit body in 10 weeks and then not exercise for 10 years. Doing so would produce utterly negligible results.
Principle 3: Your balance and coordination is inferior to your younger self
Age related changes affect your sense of balance. This occurs in your vestibular system (inner ear & brain), your musculoskeletal system (bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons) and in your visual system.
Which means you may have an elevated risk of falling over while you exercise. Plus, learning correct technique may take more time due to your body awareness or your sense of where you are in space (aka "proprioception") not being what it used to be.
It follows that you need to take a little more time to learn correct form when you exercise, and you need to observe a slow progression in terms of weight lifting.
It can also really help to slow down the speed at which you do resistance training exercises. Learning to feel the subtleties in technique can help you develop mastery in movement (weight distribution, effect of different hand/foot placements and stance width, effect of different postures & movement speed etc).
Principle 4: You need more protein than your younger self
Although recommendations for protein intake vary among different authorities, the consensus is that older adults need more - especially active older adults.
Loss in lean muscle mass is an unavoidable part of aging, but the rate at which you lose it can be drastically reduced by lifting weights and eating a healthy diet which is high in protein. Barbell Medicine, who I recommend on this topic have written this article about protein in a general sense and this article about "sarcopenia", which is the loss of skeletal muscle mass as a result of aging. I’d vouch for their recommendations about how much protein you should consume.
It can be hard to get enough protein, not feel intensely full and keep the total calories under control. I certainly find it hard!
For this reason, I like to use a whey protein supplement. I buy unsweetened Whey protein powder from True protein (or Coles) and mix it with low fat Greek yoghurt. That, with a sprinkle of granola or toasted muesli as a garnish (plus honey), is my standard breakfast.
Then, on top of that, I try to get one decent sized slab of lean protein - chicken breast, white fish, low fat mince - into my cake hole at either lunch or dinner.
Principle 5: Take it slow and be patient
For all the reasons listed above, it's important to take things slow and be patient when you start an exercise program as an older adult.
As I've mentioned above, the objective is to find a mode of training which you enjoy and can see yourself doing indefinitely. There's no finish line with fitness.
You may toggle between modes (I have mixed things up myself between open water swimming, running, power lifting, boxing, surfing, hockey and hypertrophy focussed strength training) but you always need some form of cardiorespiratory fitness activity (huffing and puffing) and some sort of resistance training (weight lifting).
And because "project fitness" will never end, you have plenty of time.
It is just like compounding interest in the bank - deposit small amounts frequently for outsized results.
Principle 6: Make it enjoyable and focus on intrinsic satisfaction
The degree to which you enjoy your training can make a massive difference as to whether you'll actually do it.
Here are some factors which I believe influence enjoyability from my personal experience and what I've observed with clients over the years:
Whether you can get into a flow state (or something like it) when you're training
Whether you can connect to a fun group of people around the activity
Whether you can access a fun sense of competition, improvement or progress by doing it (one of the most rewarding things about strength training - especially with barbells - is that it's extremely objective and you can readily observe your progress, which is OFTEN PROFOUND)
Whether you find the activity cathartic in some way (I personally find the intense effort then relief/release of hard running training to be quite cathartic)
Whether or not it relaxes you (many swimmers find the focus on breathing and the sensory deprivation of long distance swimming to be relaxing)
Whether or not you feel good afterwards (an extremely common experience - "I don't like doing it, but like how I feel when it's over!")
From my perspective as a trainer, if I can get a client to enjoy training (that is, enjoy it while they're doing it) , then I have achieved my objective. Job done.
This is the single biggest factor which will determine whether someone adheres to an exercise program.
And adherence is the holy grail: it determines whether someone can access the multitudinous benefits of lifelong training.
Principle 7: Reap the rewards of consistency & frequency
In training, consistency and frequency always trumps intensity and perfection.
Intense workouts performed with perfect technique and completed exactly as per the program, yet done so infrequently and in-consistently are not what gets results.
Slightly lazy workouts with slightly sloppy technique done on a frequent and consistent basis are far superior.
Strive for consistent and frequent training over intense, inconsistent and infrequent workouts.
I believe you may be quite shocked at how much fitter, stronger and heathier you could become if you did a short, moderately challenging exercise session six days per week for the next six years.
Principle 7: Rapid progress is not out of the question
You don't need massive muscles to be quite strong. Indeed, it can be really really hard to grow big muscles (if that's even your thing) and it takes a long, long time.
But profound strength improvement can come quite easily and really quickly.
This is because a large proportion of strength improvement comes from nervous system development, and this occurs really rapidly when you start lifting weights.
Your brain and nerves get really good at refining the signals to your muscles, sending stronger and more coordinated messages as you progress in your training journey.
Cardiorespiratory (heart and lungs) fitness can take a little longer to develop, but if you're coming from an inactive starting point, you could be pleasantly surprised how soon you'll start to feel less out of breath when you do things such as climb a steep flight of stairs.
The take-home point is: within a few weeks of starting a training program you may start to notice that everyday tasks, activities and endeavours start to become easier and feel better. Here's some examples:
More strength carrying the shopping
Less out of breath walking up hills OR less gassed when you play tennis/hockey
Getting into tight spots easier (such as changing a power adaptor under a desk)
Better able to shift heavy objects
Principle 8: Start with simple, supported exercises and move to more unsupported, complicated exercises
When it comes to strength training, it can be good to start with simple, well supported exercises.
Machine based exercises where only one joint is moving at a time are a good idea. Here's some examples:
You can then progress to machine based multi-joint exercises like these ones:
The next step in terms of complexity is single joint exercises using free weights:
Lastly, multi-joint exercises using free weights:
For the typical person looking to get fitter and stronger, there's nothing magic about any one exercise. You can get really, really strong using machines only if that’s what you want to do.
Whether or not you use machines or free weights is simply a matter of personal preference.
Unless you want to compete in a strength based sport such as powerlifting or you have specific strength related goals such as being able to lift a heavy suitcase into an overhead locker.
Bottom line is: the training needs to match the task you want to get better at, and you definitely WILL need to use free weights.
(NB: Sometimes using free weights can be more intense owing to the stabilisation needed, therefore it adds something from a time efficiency standpoint).
Principle 9: Start with light weight and progress to heavy weight
As we've gone over in this article, training needs to be a lifelong pastime. Assuming you've got more than a year or two to live, it makes really good sense to start with weights that may feel a little light for you.
When someone gets started with strength training, they can find they get intensely sore and/or fatigued. Injury risk is also higher when you get started.
If you take it a bit easy in the beginning, you allow your body to get used to the stress. You establish what you CAN do without getting insanely sore or really tired (to the extent that interferes with your life). This gives you a starting point to build from. You can use it as a launch pad to gradually ramp up the effort in a sensible fashion.