Elite Physique The New Science of Building a Better Body

Strong and Lean for Life
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who are lifelong gym-goers and they’ll tell you that everything vital to recovery
slows down with age.
Protein synthesis is less efficient, which means it takes more protein to build
new tissue (Burd, Gorissen, and van Loon, 2013). But because of your slowing
metabolism, it’s harder to consume enough protein from food without gaining
excessive body fat. Fat, in turn, triggers inflammation, which can be either good
or bad for a lifter. Acute inflammation after a workout is an important part of
the recovery process, sending chemical signals that trigger muscle hypertrophy
(Chazaud 2020). But an aging body is more likely to have some degree of chronic
inflammation, which impairs muscle growth and repair (Furman et al. 2019).
Furthermore, this inflammation is associated with increased levels of abdominal
fat (Cabral et al. 2019). Sleep is also important to recovery for a number of reasons
we discuss in chapter 3. And, yes, both sleep duration and quality decline as you
get older (Dzierzewski, Dautovich, and Ravyts 2018).
Biomechanically, there’s a price to pay for years of lifting hard and heavy.
The small aches and pains you gladly tolerated in your 20s and 30s, when your
body had unrestricted range of motion and little inflammation, were a warning
of bigger problems to come. By ignoring them, you wore down cartilage in your
shoulders, knees, and hips. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Most areas of cartilage have
an extremely low blood supply, which inhibits regeneration (Hardingham, Tew,
Murdoch 2002). As a doctor of physical therapy, I assure you there’s no way to
replace it, and probably won’t be for a long time. Without cartilage, your bones
begin to grind against each other, or the tendons attaching muscles to bones
become inflamed. And that age-related chronic inflammation we discussed earlier
might negatively affect your cartilage as well (Berenbaum 2013).
Structurally, some bodies simply aren’t designed for the most popular lifts.
Some of us, for example, have deep hip sockets that aren’t suited for deep squats.
If you have deep hip sockets and force yourself to squat below parallel, two things
will probably happen:
1. You’ll wear down the cartilage in your hip joints that allows smooth movement
and provides a cushion between your femur and pelvis.
2. You’ll shift your lumbar spine out of the neutral position to achieve the
range of motion, wearing down the tissues protecting the discs in your
lower back and irritating the nerves (McGill 2015).
Extending from the shoulder blade is a bony structure called the acromion
process. In about 40 percent of us, this bony protuberance is shaped like a hook
(Shah, Bayliss, and Malcolm 2001) that literally digs into your tissues as you lift
overhead. This causes damage that can, with enough time and volume, make it
painful to lift your arms above parallel to the floor (Nyffeler and Meyer 2017).
And that’s just one of the many ways your training can irritate, inflame, or injure
the tangle of muscles, connective tissues, and bones that make up your shoulder
joints.
The lower back, similarly, shows a range of structural and functional variations
that can affect your lifting form and be affected by it. Larger lumbar vertebrae
can provide a strong base for heavy squats and deadlifts but also make the spinal
discs more vulnerable to injury from twisting movements in anything from core
training to yoga to golf (McGill 2015). Conversely, someone whose lumbar spine
more naturally accommodates rotational movements might be at higher risk
when an exercise requires high tension to stabilize the core.