Elite Physique The New Science of Building a Better Body

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one day and back the next day, you aren’t working the same body parts two days
in a row. You are.
Your pecs, lats, biceps, triceps, and deltoids all act on the shoulder joints. If
there’s a weighted object in your hands, your forearm muscles are involved. You
can’t avoid using your elbows if you’re pushing or pulling those weights. Your
traps work to move or stabilize your shoulder blades in almost any exercise worth
doing. Same with your core muscles.
Older lifters typically do well with three full-body training sessions a week,
alternating two workouts that focus on different movement patterns. Here’s an
example:
Workout A: horizontal push, horizontal pull, knee-emphasis movement
(squat, lunge, or leg press)
Workout B: vertical push, vertical pull, hip-emphasis movement (deadlift
variation)
If you have the time and ambition to work out more often, try some low-impact
cardio—walking, cycling, swimming. Those activities speed up recovery without
beating up your muscles or joints and have been shown to elicit an anti-aging
effect on your arteries (Seals 2014).
Exercise Selection
Older lifters often want to cling to their youth by continuing to push their bench
press, squat, and deadlift, no matter how much their bodies protest. It’s the
weight-room equivalent of buying a new Harley. But if a barbell bench press
makes your right shoulder ache, or a back squat causes radiating pain down to
your pelvis, or a traditional deadlift from the floor tweaks your lower back, you
have to stop doing them and seek council from a reputable physical therapist
who can determine which pains can be fixed. If you don’t get help from a qualified
professional, those exercises will likely never become less painful, and the
pain you feel may actually understate the damage you’re doing to those joints.
I’ve already mentioned how structural differences in your shoulders and hips
can make some exercises easier or harder for individual lifters. But it’s actually
more complicated than that. Human bodies aren’t perfectly symmetrical. The
same person can have significant differences in the shape and positioning of their
hip joints. Your shoulders may be wider on one side, and your arms may have
more or less internal or external rotation. Ignoring those anomalies sets you up
for injury, especially when you’re training with a barbell that forces each side of
your body to work exactly the same way.
Here are some joint-friendly alternatives to three powerlifts:
• Barbell bench press: My favorite alternative is the standing one-arm chest press
with a cable, band, or tubing. Besides working your chest and shoulders, it’s
one of the best core exercises you can do. Mix those with dumbbell bench
presses with one or both arms, and experiment with different degrees of
incline or decline. Generally, a slightly declined bench is less stressful on
the shoulders.
• Barbell squat: You can get results with goblet squats with a dumbbell or
kettlebell or front squats with two kettlebells. These variations allow you
to adjust the exercise to your anatomy and achieve a full range of motion
with less strain on your lower back. The most back-friendly variation of
all is a belt squat, which is terrific for building lower body strength while
sparing your lower back.