Train each major muscle group twice weekly through full-body or split workouts. Muscular power predicts longevity better than body size. For older women, plyometric jumps, medicine-ball throws, and explosive push-ups build strength, power, balance, and agility.
What would be your perfect, perfect resistance training prescription? If someone listening is like, I want to be the A student here, what should I be doing?
So I would approach that through a physique perspective. So not necessarily, hey, I'm trying to run an ultramarathon or a marathon, or I'm playing— Yeah, I think that's this audience.
This audience is not in that big athlete sector. These are people who are wanna be healthy, they wanna play full out, they wanna be able to do things as they age. What do we need to do to keep it going?
So, basing this on a body part perspective, so we have quads, we have chest, we have lats, our back, rhomboids, glutes. My advice would be to stimulate each muscle group 2 times per week. So that can be done a lot of different ways. But at a minimum, lift weights 2 times per week and each of those would be a whole body routine. Or if you can work out, let's say, up to 6 days per week, and I don't lift 6 days per week, but then you can start getting into a lot more options. So 3 days per week, you might do an upper body day, a lower body day, and a whole body day. A very common split for 4 days per week is push-pull, upper day, lower body day. So in general, try to make sure you are training each body part twice per week. And that can be done 2 days per week up to 6 days per week.
Now, for women, when we look specifically that we want to have strength and power, I have a great study. I don't know if you've seen this study. Rhonda Patrick published it in FoundMyFitness showing that, that power is like one of these big determinants of longevity. And they were looking at skinny people with low power, you know, people with higher power and It is way worse to be thin and, you know, not have the power than to be obese and have the power. Yeah. So, but when I look at like, what do we need as we age where, you know, I'm thinking balance and thinking agility and power, muscles, muscle mass, and also strength. What would be some specific things, some specific exercises that you think are just awesome for this age group.
Yes, and let me just say strength. So when you're lifting weights, half of the power equation is strength. So you are actually training for power even if you don't realize you are by lifting weights. But when I think of power production, and I recently— I know we talked about this before— in the last year and a half, I started— I'm almost 50 years old— I started being very specific. I need to do pow training. So I look at lower body and upper body activities. So the best forms, and again, these are more advanced, but I'll just say them, would be like plyometric jumps. Can you explosively jump from the ground up onto a box? Or can you explosively just jump and try to touch the ceiling, even if the ceiling's 20 feet tall? So just what can you do explosively? So jumping is an easy thing to do. Another one for the upper body that's relatively easy would be a medicine ball and just throwing it as hard as you can against the wall. So anything explosive. If you can do like push-ups, you can do like— now don't just do push-up, but try to actually push yourself and maybe clap in between. Now again, these are more advanced, but these are the things— this gives the concepts of training for power and explosive activity. And I may have mentioned this before, but when you think of— and I actually, I did this, maybe this was during one of my wife's doctor's appointments. We were at, we were next to a geriatric medical facility and I was waiting in the car and just one thing that I noticed, everybody going into the facility was just moving slowly. They weren't well. So that really impressed me. Now I teach my university students. If you're not well and as you age, everything about aging is slow and snail turtle. So the opposite of that is power training, explosive. So as much as you can, do that.
