Train

I am not a trainer and profess no expertise. The musings below are things I’ve noticed over the years, and are provided in the hope they will help others who are starting out as clueless as I did.

Fast Read:

Genetics isn’t destiny
Identified your ideal body
Be patient. Real results may take a long time, so enjoy the process
If you’re going to be active, it’s very likely you’ll get injured from time to time. Don’t freak out
Balance weight lifting with a posture-improving discipline like pilates
The core is key
Warming up before intense exercise and stretching afterward is integral, not optional
Vary your weight routine
More weight isn’t necessarily better
Embrace the special challenges of leg day
Vary your cardio routine
Take a rest day

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The Details:

I have been working out since I was a teenager, and have probably made every possible mistake in the gym. I started out with no knowledge of how to train but a lot of enthusiasm and energy to burn. I had no particular fitness goals, but wanted to look better.

As I got older and time became one of my most precious commodities, I started to work with a trainer who told me what to do and sometimes why. I enjoyed having an hour where I didn’t have to think and could defer to somebody I could trust. I also got stronger and healthier!

But I never achieved my admittedly shallow goal of having a body like an underwear model ;) and then when I reached the age of 46 my lower back failed and I destroyed my L3, L4 and L5 discs. Apparently that kind of damage isn’t unusual for guys in their 40s, and my damage was exacerbated by a lifetime of extreme sports (mountain biking, windsurfing, snowboarding…). Apparently, my generation was the guinea pigs and no-one knew how exactly all the extreme jumping and frequent injuries would manifest themselves as we aged.

After my back failed I literally had to learn how to walk again. My gym training had to completely change, and pilates, which I had always thought was a joke, was instrumental to my recovery (More on that below.) Perhaps more importantly, I realized that I couldn’t offload responsibility for my health to a trainer and had to take responsibility for my own body. So, I started to pay more attention to some of those muscles I couldn’t see (transverse abdominus? Iliopsoas? the entire back of my body…) and started to figure out what did and didn’t work for my body type:

-Genetics isn’t destiny: Many guys at the gym have been gifted with excellent genetics: tall, lean, great posture, etc. they look like the godlike result of generations of selective breeding. I too was given many genetic gifts, but not necessarily the visible physical ones I wanted to see. But once I learned to accept my body type for better or worse, it turned out that through consistent training and some critical thinking I could actually achieve my ideal body!

-I noticed that actors often transform their bodies to take on different roles. If they can do it, why can’t I? looked around the gym and identified my ideal body, regardless of the age difference. I started to watch what exercises those guys did to understand why they looked the way they did. Then I changed my exercise routine to change the proportional size of muscles. Trainers often establish a standard routine which increases the size and strength of everything. But sometimes to achieve the look you want you have to train some muscles harder and some muscles less. I wanted large shoulders relative to my waist, defined but not huge arms, and a strong distinction between my chest and my stomach. I didn’t want the inflated musclebound look gym rats often get, nor the over-developed pectorals and projected solar plexus that older guys often get.

To get what I wanted I experimented with different exercises to target different parts of muscles. For instance, I completely eliminated chest press but added decline press and multiple sets of incline press to get high but slim pectorals with a strong horizontal separation from the stomach. I’m still experimenting with the ratio of decline flies to pec dec to get exactly the vertical separation I want without getting too big a chest.

I applied that same way of making critical choices to other muscle groups like shoulders (big and defined), arms (defined but not big), legs (not too big a butt!) and stomach (a relaxed sixpack rather than a washboard that would look totally bizarre on a fifty year old)

Surprisingly, many of these decisions meant working with much lighter weights than I was used to. I often catch the confounded glances of my workout buddies at the gym when I grab the 15-pound weights for lateral shoulder raises and they grab the 30s. But I’ve found that I can’t maintain the form, nor achieve the definition I want with a higher weight, and I seem to get even better results.

-I had to be patient about perfecting my form before I could add weight. Adding weight too quickly only resulted in injury which, of course, then slowed down my progress. After my back went, I discovered that the backs of my shoulders were relatively weak compared to the rest of my upper body. 10 years later, I’m still working the backs of my shoulders with very light weights, but it’s enough to get them working properly again.

-Although I joke that I’m between injuries, they are a regular occurrence that I accept as the price for maintaining an active lifestyle. My once/week trainer helps to correct the inevitable imbalances that creep in over time, and challenges me with cross-chain and complex movements that I would not do on my own. Even so, accidents happen and parts age. Happily, when I do get injured (such as when I severed my Achilles tendon), I recover quite quickly thanks to my overall fitness level, and my willingness to work around temporary incapacities.

-Pilates has also been key to my fitness. I find that weights tend to tighten up muscles and that pilates helps stretch them back open, and correct imbalances. For me it’s like a weekly reset for my body. It also helps promote the strong ground-rooted posture that dancers often possess and which shows off defined muscles to great advantage. From pilates I’ve also learned to initiate every movement from my core, which not only allows me to access greater strength in my extremities (arms and legs) while maintaining a super stable centre, but also promotes a very sexy sixpack.

I had always heard about the importance of having a strong core and admired the beauty of defined abdominal muscles but had no idea how to achieve them. All the usual abdominal exercises did not get me any closer to my ripped ideal. Pilates however, with its extremely precise movements, was able to target the many different abdominal muscles that are needed to create the overall look we associate with a sixpack. Even better, creating a strong core set up a virtuous cycle whereby the stronger the core, the more I could do with my body, which in turn further strengthened the core and created even more defined abs. Having a stronger core has also allowed me to work around injuries, especially damage to my joints, from my younger, less knowledgeable, days.

I have 3 different workouts that focus on: legs; chest/back; and shoulder/arms. Although I like routine, I try not to get into a rut of doing the same exercises month after month. There are many different exercises to choose from for each muscle group, and while it’s perfectly ok to have favourites, it’s also good to challenge yourself to do the ones you really hate. For me, hating an exercise is often a signal that I’m weak in that muscle group and therefore have all the more reason to force myself to do it. Even when I’m repeating a routine for a few weeks, I’ll vary the order and the weights.

One muscle group I find particularly challenging is legs. The energy and intensity required to do leg day well as well as the challenge to flexibility and the inevitable post-workout exhaustion, lead many people to avoid leg day entirely. My solution is to work with a trainer on legs once a week, as I would never challenge myself as cold-heartedly as my trainer challenges me. I often want to kill him, but the results he helps me achieve are undeniable.

Some people do cardio before weight training but I prefer to do it after. I try to vary it between elliptical, indoor cycling, outdoor cycling, hiking, etc. I try to always do a minimum of 10 minutes, which is long enough to make me sweat and helps me to calm down from the intensity of weight lifting, but if my schedule includes sport of some kind I'll skip the post-workout cardio.

Another time-honoured piece of training wisdom I’ve come to appreciate is the importance of warming up before exercising and stretching afterwards. Like most guys, I used to think that both were nice things to do if you had the extra time, but never had the extra time. What I’ve come to realize is that both are not optional add-ons but are actually as much a part of the exercise routine as lifting weights and cardio. Aside from its injury-preventing benefits, the warm up allows me to begin my routine at a higher energy level and therefore be more efficient. Similarly, stretching after my routine actually sets up my muscles for the next workout.

As a result, I’m able to maintain a 6-day per week workout schedule with plenty of fatigue but almost no soreness or ache. I prefer to stretch in the sauna or steam as I find it helps me to relax, decompress, and reintegrate with the less intense world outside of the gym.

I am a pretty disciplined guy by nature, and therefore sometimes find it difficult to take a rest day. However, nearly every week, I try and force myself to skip a day working out either before or after leg day. Although I put a lot of effort into chest/back days and shoulder/arms days, leg days seem to take it out of my body in a whole different way. The day after my leg workout I’m often exhausted to the point of stupidity, so it’s a good day to take off , add in an extra nap, eat an extra meal, or do all three. As much as I may feel restless to get back into the gym, the forced rest makes my next workout much more powerful.

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