Tag: Over

Tip: Drop The Bro Splits If You’re Over 40

Grown Men Don’t Need Bro Splits You’re not 15 anymore. The traditional bro split where you train one body part each workout (usually 5 workouts a week) isn’t efficient or effective, especially for an adult with a job who actually communicates with real-live women in their non-pixilated form. Your muscles recover in about two days, so why let them go fallow for a whole week? Besides, what happens if life intervenes and you miss a day or two one week? That mucks up the whole schedule and you might not train the same body part for another 8 to 10 days instead of 7. A Split That Makes More Sense You’re much better off doing an upper body/lower body split where you work out 4 days (or even 6 days) a week: Monday:Lower Body Tuesday:Upper Body Wednesday:Off Thursday:Lower Body Friday:Upper Body Saturday:Off Sunday:Off As Charles Staley pointed out in his The Single Most Effective Workout Split, this upper/lower split does a couple of things: It makes the best use of time. Since muscles recover in about two days, muscles trained on Monday should be trained again on Wednesday. If you don’t, you’re losing ground. You get to train muscles more often with fewer workouts. With a bro split, you work out 5 times a week and each muscle gets hit once. With an upper/lower split, you work out 4 times a week and each muscle gets worked
Origin: Tip: Drop The Bro Splits If You’re Over 40

Tip: Over 40? Build Your Work Capacity

Conditioning Matters Even More Now I realize there are some differences between 25 and 40, and probably a lot of differences between 25 and 50, but not as many as you might think, especially if you have at least 10 years’ worth of training experience. But you can’t train hard if merely pulling your pants on makes you wheeze. You need to do cardio or metabolic conditioning or whatever term you feel comfortable with. How do you expect to work hard if your lungs don’t have the sass to carry on? Moreover, your cellular batteries – the mitochondria – start to wear out, get lazy, take extended vacations in Cabo, or die as you get older. They need a kick in the pants so they get to multiplying, and that’s what intense exercise provides. Fear not, though, because you don’t have to devote hours and hours to all that tedious, conventional aerobic training stuff where you sit on a stationary bike for an hour as your panini-ed prostate swells up to the size of one of those sand-filled Bulgarian bags. Options That Don’t Suck At least three times a week, get on the treadmill, rower, or yes, stationary bike for a measly 10 minutes for some HIIT-style training. Focus on all-out efforts of 20 seconds, followed by 60 seconds of “active recovery.” On a treadmill, that might mean setting the speed at a leisurely 3 miles per hour and then cranking it up as fast as your little stubby legs allow for about 20 seconds, after which you’d drop the level back down to 3 again for a minute or two before you do another round. You could do the same thing on a stationary bike or rower, or you might prefer short sprints followed by walking-recovery periods. Alternately, you can crank up the incline on the treadmill to the Himalaya setting, or as high as it goes, and trudge uphill, Sherpa like, for 30 to 60 seconds before zeroing out again. This type of training has been shown to increase mitochondria. That, coupled with the increase in endurance you’ll experience, will allow you to lift as hard as you need
Origin: Tip: Over 40? Build Your Work Capacity