Training and Programming Considerations for Powerlifters 35 and Over

Trying to navigate what works and doesn’t work as a powerlifting coach is difficult enough with all the conflicting information and variation in successful training styles when you are younger (tl;dr – everything works if you work hard and stay consistent).  Then just as you think you have started to figure things out, even starting to understand that the more you know the more there is to know, then father time starts throwing curveballs at you.  Programs that used to work for you don’t provide the same result anymore.  Progression models you have used before ending up wearing you out.  You don’t have the itch to train as often.  The ache doesn’t disappear as quickly anymore, if anything you are more likely to notice when your body is feeling good because that occurrence is rare.  Your elders warned you about this when you were younger, but you have been refusing to admit that it is happening to you.  The time under the bar is adding up, and you are feeling it. 

For reference, I am currently 35 years old, I turn 36 in July.  I started playing sports when I when I was 5, full body contact hockey started at 10, football started at 13, I started lifting weights for football and hockey at 14 and have been consistently training ever since.  I can remember hockey related knee pain (Osgoode-Schlatter disease) starting when I was in grade 5. I tore my right biceps tendon playing football in grade 11. I stopped playing hockey when I was 19, continuing football through university until I was 22.  SI joint problems started in second year.  I blew my right shoulder in the second game of 3rd year and intelligently decided to play the remainder of the season. I should have listened to my dad when he told me “You can play hurt when you are a professional.”  We used to do silly things in the off season like run, jump, sprint and throw 3-4 days a week, lifting weights 4 days a week, and then avoid sleeping on weekends by going out drinking and partying.  How on earth our bodies recovered over the weekend to progressively overload the following week is beyond me.   I am very confident that 35-year-old Taylor would not be able to handle that training and recovery regimen.  During season we would lift weights 2-3 days per week, practice 3-4 days per week, and play games on Saturday.  Also following proper recovery modalities by going out drinking after games.  “win or lose, you booze.”  Followed by Sunday 8am flush runs to force us out of bed.   

I graduated from Acadia University in 2011, started work as a personal trainer, and quickly decided that I needed to compete in something new.  My football shoulders weren’t about to Snatch very well any time soon, as much as I enjoyed doing cleans, the overhead work was just a no from me.  So powerlifting was the next logical choice.  I had been using 5/3/1 for about 18 months, and things had been going well.  In university my friend and I used to use the smolov squat program base cycle to get our squats back up after football season was complete.  Naturally, running the complete smolov program into my first meet seemed like the best way to dive into the sport.  At the time I had only used a belt once or twice, so I survived doing the intro and base cycle beltless using a beltless max.  Testing with a belt after my switching cycle led to my first 605lbs gym squat.  When I plugged this number into the intensity cycle I knew that the numbers would kill me, so I think I used 93% for my max for the final cycle and it still nearly killed me, but it yielded a 290kgs high bar dive bomb squat in my first meet. 

I have competed 22 times since then.  I have squatted 600+ in 21 of those meets, loaded 700+ in the deadlift too many times to not have locked it out, bench has always been the rest between squat and deadlift, but I will bench 400 before I die. 

I program hopped for several years after my first meet.  Juggernaut, Cube, a week or two of Sheiko here and there, Juggercube, eventually entering my high frequency, high volume, submaximal practice phase of 2015-2017.  Here’s a copy of my squat program that led to my first 300kgs squat in 2015.  Please note that this is only the squatting, my benchpress and deadlift workloads were similar.  These workloads would destroy me today. 

I am physically and mentally incapable of recovering from the workloads that I could when I was younger.  Step one is accepting this.  Just skip the denial, anger, bargaining, and depression.  You can avoid all those feelings, have more fun training hard, experience less pain, and lift heavier weights, if you are able to accept that you are not who you once were. 

Inguinal Hernia surgery occurred in the fall of 2019.  Since then, I have not replicated my best performances in the bench and the squat, only in the deadlift.  More noticeable is my inability to train the way that I used to.  Any time I drive up either volumes or frequencies to high I overdo it, either hurting something or simply training hard but not getting any results.  I tell you all of this to try to paint a bit of a picture of the amount of wear and tear I’ve accumulated over the years. 

My comeback meet was in the fall of 2021.  I was able to squat 280, bench 147.5, deadlift an all-time PR of 312.5, hitting a 93kgs weight class total PR of 740kgs (all time total is 787.5kgs), also giving me my best score ever regardless of dots, wilks, or GL (470, 464.81, 96.81). Since that meet, I was kind of stuck around that 740 range at 93 until March of 2024.  Training would either wear me out and I would have to take steps back, or I would survive training only to hit the same weights I had at another recent meet. I recently got my total moving in the direction that I wanted this past march with a 752.5 post injury total PR (285, 157.5, 310).  If I could hold on to a 3rd deadlift, I would have totaled even more. 

My goal is to provide some strategies that have helped me to finally moving the needle on my total after a couple years of feeling like I was spinning my tires. 

Frequency

            Train on less days per week than you rest.  Max 3 days per week. 

            This one was a tough one for me.  I love to train.  I love going to the gym. The gym has always been a place I feel comfortable.  I know this is not the case for everyone, many are intimidated by the gym, and I understand why this would happen.  It just isn’t my experience.   It doesn’t matter if it is a CrossFit box, Globo Gym, your favourite bodybuilding enthusiast gym (blacked out walls and all), an S+C facility, or a dungeon powerlifting gym, it all feels good to me.  In the last 20 years I have probably spent more time in gyms than I have in any other place, except for maybe my bed, even then there were times when I was at a gym more hours of the day than I was not.  I still get a lot of anxious excitement on days I get to go to the gym, anyone who knows me knows I get stir crazy and impatient when it is time to train.

Starting back up post-surgery this manifested itself as 3x per week full body SBD sessions.  Once loads were heavy enough that became too much and I dropped one squat and one DL so that it became SB/DB/SBD.  For a while I played around with an 8-day microcycle (4x every other day) spreading 4 full training sessions over 8 days (SB/DB/SB/DB) Even that seemed like too much at some points so it turned into 4x/week SBD/B/SD/BB.  Keep in mind that a lot of this experimentation was done during a time when we weren’t really allowed to go anywhere or do anything.  I was just working from home, training at home, eating, sleeping, and repeating.  I even had access to a hot tub, pro powerlifter life. 

            The inherent beauty of the 3x/week training frequency is that it forces you to spend more time recovering and adapting to the hard training, than training hard.  One suggestion that Dave Tate makes is that whatever your training frequency is, it should leave you itching to get back into the gym.  It is hard for people to admit when they are feeling it, or when they are not necessarily itching to get back into the gym. 

            Absolute load matters.  If an extra day of rest allows you to lift heavier weights, over the long term this will yield the improvement you are looking for.  Remember that we want adaptation, not just recovery. 

            I avoided a 4x Upper/lower 9 day split as long as I could. 

It will take 36 days to get through 4 microcycles of training. 

I am pretty sure Jim Wendler put this split into the original 5/3/1 book and if I remember correctly, he said something to the effect of “if you are old, busy, don’t recover well, or some combination of these things, you should do this split.” I think more recently I heard Swede Burns talk about this frequency when discussing his 5th set method.  Then I heard Chad Aichs talk about how he had a lot of success himself, and with several teammates spreading the traditional westside conjugate system over 9 days as well.  After one of my most painful and frustrating training cycles, and subsequently performances, I finally decided I would try this frequency.  I never wanted to let myself train either lower body or upper body once per week.  6 months later I got my total to move 15kgs.  8 months later I am still trying to stick to this frequency, although some weeks I get greedy and try to push 4 training sessions in, depending on my schedule.   My training and consistency have not gone this well in many years.  Although I still feel the impacts of training, I am not chronically injured, and numbers are going up. 

Volume

You can probably get away with less training workload.  If you are 35 and older and have been training a long time, your ability to tell your muscles to contract hard has improved over time.  This means that every single contraction, every single rep, is more stressful than it used to be.  On top of that, your joints have endured more and more wear and tear.  To some degree it is impossible for all of that not to add up.  And as symmetrical and balanced as we may try to be, there are always imbalances that will create more wear and tear in some areas than others. 

            If you are familiar with Dr. Mike’s MEV, MAV, MRV concepts, think about trying to find your highest quality MEV. You want to be recovered and stronger when you get to the gym.  Training at your MRV is useless because even if your muscles are recovering, you ended up here because your joints were getting worn out.  MAV is the place where you get the best bang for our buck, but again it might force us to get greedy chasing workload rather than chasing adaptation.  So, what does this become? A couple hard sets per movement, literally 1 or 2 sets, possibly after an over warmup, not even a top single. 

            Honestly, your MEV and your MRV are probably the same, or very close.  I think it is useful for us to start with this assumption, and work to find the lowest possible workload that allows us to train hard from week to week, and progress from block to block.  It may not seem like much on paper, but when you get over that quick when you are recovering, and weights start going up in the gym. 

Intensity

One of the best things I have done for my recent success is going heavy less often.  Weekly training singles between RPE 6-8 have become quite popular, and effective, in powerlifting training.  I have had a lot of success with these as a coach myself.  But since 2021 I have not got the return out of this strategy that I had hoped for.  I have a gut feeling it was this weird dichotomy where my training singles were never heavy enough to stimulate the strength gains that I needed, while simultaneously too chronically heavy for my joints to recover from week to week.  The weights were not heavy enough to force me to adapt, but they were frequent enough that they wore me out.  That on top of the fact that my backoff set volumes were probably too high as I previously discussed.  The biggest change I made was not doing heavy-ish singles every week, but my peak absolute intensity for every block was probably higher.  E.g. I used to touch an RPE 6-7 every week for a full block.  Now I might touch not touch those weights every week, but 1 of every 4-5 weeks I will touch something close to an RPE 8-9 single.  So on a block-by-block scale I would say I have higher absolute loads more often, while from week to week I do not.  Something as simple as a week-to-week progression like this:

From block to block you could either slowly progress intensity, RPE, or let RPE regulate your loading over time.  At this point in my training career, it is easier for me to stay light if I plan to just slowly progress intensity ahead of time.  This helps me take my time and build momentum from block to block.  I say this knowing and being able to argue all the merits of using RPE to prescribe load and thinking it is a better system for those who know how to use it.  This just helps me force myself to stay light.  The top single on the lighter weeks acts more as an over warmup that hopefully potentiates some performance on subsequent sets. 

            It has been my experience that some classic weekly undulating programming does wonders for older lifters.  The combination of reduced axial loading, giving your nervous system more time to recover between bouts of your heaviest lifting, but still allowing people to train their muscles hard and practice their technique on the lower intensity week does wonders for keeping older lifters healthy and progressing in the right direction.  I never really enjoyed moderate intensity low RPE work anyways, but low to moderate intensity, high RPE work scratches the itch for me.  It is probably more effective at growing muscle in the right places, given the high motor unit recruitment at the end of a set taken close to failure, and if taken close enough to failure it will still allow you to practice straining against a weight that is moving slower.  Forcing you to learn patience, control, and focus under the bar while your lungs are exploding, and your legs are on fire. 

Exercise selection – get strong through all ranges of motion. 

            If you are anything like me, you probably started avoiding or removing movements that caused pain over time.  Classics like overhead/incline work, deep single leg knee flexion exercises, DB presses, dips, they start to get thrown away because they are too painful to train hard.  The original problem was probably total workload, and/or load selection.  You have justified your decision using the principle of specificity.  In the meantime, you don’t do shoulder or overhead work, you get pitifully weak through those angles and ranges of motion, and your shoulders just end up becoming less robust to the forces of training anyway.   Your shoulders don’t handle training better by avoiding these movements, they become fragile to any small misgroove or grind. 

            If you are weak through a range of motion, or on one leg, or anything like that, you need to lean into that movement.  If you are pitifully weak and unstable, then use less weight.  Seriously, just use less weight.  No one cares how much weight you use for a contralateral single leg deadlift, anyway, do the movement properly to a high standard.  Most rehab exercises are rehab exercises because they are regressions that force people to stay very light and practice moving through a range of motion without pain. Use graded exposures to slowly build up your tolerance to the range of motion, and eventually you’ll be able to train it hard enough that it will transfer to the lift you want it to.  One strategy that has helped me is using machines.  For most of my career as an athlete, trainer, and coach, I have been very much of the mindset that I don’t need to use machines, I am the machine.  This is flawed thinking.  If using a machine to increase stability allows you to train a muscle hard through a range of motion, and it is pain free, then this is a very valuable tool.  If we are already operating on the assumption that a bigger muscle has a greater potential for strength, and the biggest people in the world use machines to grow their muscles, then maybe we should include some machines in our hypertrophy training. 

Tempo your Accessory work

Yeah, you should probably just tempo the eccentric of everything after your main SBD training.  Forcing people to slow down, feel muscles work, limit loading, and really focus on hard contractions is going to be valuable in building strength through full ranges of motion.  Learning how to really squeeze out of the bottom of a movement does not come naturally to everyone.  It is very possible that your wear and tear was created by absorbing loads with your joints, rather than your muscles, at the bottom of certain movements. The load limiting nature of tempo work will also be valuable because every strategy we have used so far has been put in place because we were not recovering, or we were too beat up.  It also has the added benefit of increasing the time that our muscles are under tension.  Does increased time under tension mean we will create more hypertrophy? No, not necessarily.  But throwing weights around that end up jacking up our elbows doesn’t lead to more hypertrophy either.  Dave Tate has a very apt description of this, he calls it muscle fucking it up.  Getting more reps doesn’t mean better quality contractions.  But it does mean more wear and tear on your joints at higher peak forces. 

Control the descent, squeeze smoothly out of the bottom, and accelerate the weight in a controlled manner, really trying to squeeze the targeted muscle at the top.  You will probably have to check your ego and lower the weight.  That’s ok, we want to flex our muscles, not our egos.