Youth can afford to make such mistakes. But as we age it behooves us to get more bang for the buck when we do weightlifting. We need maximum results with minimum time invested. And it’s not just because we lead busy lives and can’t spend hours in the gym. It’s because every workout represents a certain amount of wear and tear on the body and there is no good reason to deplete ourselves by performing more exercise than necessary to achieve our goals.

Warm Up

Twenty years ago I used to jump right into an intense workout and hoist hundreds of pounds without the slightest warm up. That’s pretty dumb in your twenties but it’s downright dangerous later in life. A proper warm up increases blood circulation to the muscles, elevates respiration to improve oxygen absorption, and improves viscosity in the joints.

Before you start your weight lifting workout do 10 to 20 minutes of brisk walking on the treadmill or use a stationary bike, stair stepper or other aerobic machine. Then before you perform each lift, do a few reps with about half of the weight you’ll be shooting for that day. For example, if your goal is 8 reps with 250 pounds, warm up with 8 to 12 reps with 125 pounds. If you’re doing static contraction training and are shooting for a 5 second hold with 400 pounds, do your warm up reps for 5 seconds with 200 pounds or so.

Fewer Exercises

One of the biggest mistakes you’ll see in the gym is people who do many exercises for each muscle group. This is not necessary. Muscles grow though an adaptive response to the intensity at which they are forced to work. Intensity is measured by the amount of work done per unit of time. You will actually achieve better results in less time if you perform one very high intensity exercise per muscle group. For example, some people will work their chest by doing 3 sets of cable crossovers followed by 3 sets on the pec dec and finally 3 sets on the bench press. Our studies have shown that 90% of trainees will actually receive better results by performing one set of all-out, super high intensity bench presses of either 8 reps or 5 seconds of a static hold.

This is great news to everyone but it is particularly good for those of us who are over forty because performing multiple sets of multiple exercises is very depleting. Yet it is just not necessary.

Fewer Workouts

The three biggest lies in strength training are “Monday, Wednesday and Friday”. Fixed strength training schedules don’t work for very long. The goal of every workout should be to increase the intensity of work done compared to your previous workout. As intensity increases your body needs more time to recover (especially as we get older.) so workouts have to be spaced farther apart. This is more good news to everyone except the exercise addict.

When you begin a strength training program you might be able to work out on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, provided your body can fully recover with just one day off. But as you get stronger and start hoisting some really heavy iron, you WILL need more time to recover. So your third or fourth week might allow you to train on Mondays and Thursdays. Two weeks later you might only be able to see increases in intensity if you train one day per week. After a month of that you will need to train only once every ten or fifteen days. I work with advanced trainees who now lift weights once every six weeks and they see improvements in every exercise on every workout.

The truth is you can achieve your optimum muscularity by working out with precisely engineered workouts that contain clear goals about as frequently as you get a haircut. That’s very welcome news to those of us who just want results and don’t use the gym as a social gathering place.

Muscle Equals Youth

Have you ever seen two people who were both 60 years old but one of them looks 70 and the other looks 45? Age can’t be measured by the calendar alone. There are several well established “bio markers of aging” that are used to give more accuracy to the assessment of physical age. Guess what? The amount of muscle your body contains is one of the principle bio markers. The more muscle you have, the younger you are. Another bio marker of aging is bone density. Guess what the number one method is of increasing bone density? Heavy, weight-bearing exercise.

Those of us over forty years of age can greatly slow down aging processes by performing rational, efficient strength training that increases muscle mass and bone density. The really great news is that it can be done without hours of exercise performed week after week. Less wear and tear on the body, fewer workouts and increased youth. Hey, it’s great to finally be old and wise.

Train with your brain,

Pete Sisco

Of course this analysis is not meant to imply that training to failure is the only legitimate way to lift weights. There are certainly many competitive lifters, athletes, and even bodybuilders that find they can accomplish their goals best by stopping their sets a rep or two short of failure. However, the vast majority of lifters focused primarily on gaining significant muscle mass will achieve their best muscle-building results by focusing all of their training energy on a few all-out sets of a few exercises per session. Here are five reasons why training to failure will help you build muscle:

1. Maximum Strength Gains

Lifting a relatively heavy weight to positive failure (until you cannot complete another full rep) for one, sometimes two sets will generally produce the biggest stimulus for strength gain, and thus, the biggest muscle gain. The lifters with whom I have trained and I have all found that every time we stray from this philosophy and start doing a higher volume of less-taxing sets, we only end up stagnating or even getting weaker.

2. Adequate Muscle Stimulation

Muscles in the human body can only benefit from a certain amount of stimulation in one session. Once you have reached this point for a particular muscle or movement pattern, further stress is essentially wasted energy.

For example, think about two bodybuilders of equal strength training chest. One works up to an all-out set of 315 for 10 on the bench press. The last rep was a do-or-die effort, and his chest is still feeling it ten minutes later. The other works up to two or three sets of 315 for 7 or 8 reps and THEN proceeds to do dumbbell presses, machine presses, flyes, and cable crossovers in a similar fashion. The first bodybuilder did plenty to stimulate his pecs, and provided that he eats and rests properly, they will grow. The second bodybuilder, despite his lower-intensity sets, did far more work than was necessary and wasted a great deal of energy.

3. High Training Frequency

Since training one or two movements for one set to failure provides only the appropriate amount of stimulation for a given muscle, it will also lead to decreased recovery time. This means that the cycle of stimulation, recovery, and growth can be safely repeated more often in a given time frame than with the higher volume, lower intensity method.

This concept can again be related to the previous example of two bodybuilders. The bodybuilder who performed one all-out set on the bench press will certainly get sore and require time to recover, but he will most likely be fresh and ready to train chest again in just a couple of days. The other bodybuilder, however, will experience extreme soreness and fatigue in his chest for several days and will not be ready to train that muscle again for nearly a week.

4. Time Efficiency

Observing the previous training examples, it is obvious that performing a few exercises to failure will take far less time than performing many exercises with lower intensity. This is highly beneficial not only because of the extra time you will have, but because you do not gain muscle while you are in the gym training. It is when you leave the gym to eat and rest that your muscles begin to repair and grow larger.

5. Injury Prevention

It may seems counter intuitive that forcing your body to work harder at lifting heavy weights would lead to less injury, but this has been the case for many bodybuilders and other weight lifters. The reason for this phenomenon is that doing any movement repeatedly will lead to wear and tear on the joints over time. The bodybuilder who worked up to one all-out set on the bench press certainly pushed his body to the limit, but he only performed those 10 reps of one movement, plus warm up sets. The other bodybuilder, however, did hundreds of reps of pressing and fly movements and created enormous strain on his joints. Personally, my knees, elbows, and shoulders feel best when I am doing a low volume of very hard, heavy training.

In conclusion, those of you working to gain the most muscle mass possible in a given time frame would do well to perform a few all-out sets of a few exercises per session. Assuming you are eating and sleeping enough to gain weight, you will experience larger strength gains, faster muscular gains, and decreased fatigue and joint pain. Training to failure is the best method for muscle-building success.