#170: Is It Safe to Start Strength Training After 40?

If the idea of strength training makes you nervous, bad knees, old injuries, being told you need to lift heavy, this episode is going to change how you think about it.

I'm sharing some stories in this one. Mine, my dad's, and a few others that might surprise you. And I'm getting into the one thing about strength training that makes it fundamentally different from every other kind of exercise when it comes to safety.

By the end you'll understand why this is actually one of the safest things you can do for your body right now, at whatever age and in whatever condition you're starting from.

Enjoy the show!

Resources mentioned:

Lift-IT! 10-Day Strength Training Kickstart >

Transcript

#170: Is It Safe to Start Strength Training After 40?

[00:00:00] Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach, helping women to build the bodies that they want to spend the rest of their lives in.

So I started this morning with my new habit. I'm testing this out as something to help my sleep Within an hour of waking up, I go for a walk outside, and it is actually quite beautiful out right now, so this has not been a hard thing to do. And the idea there is that it resets some of the chemistry in your brain and gets your biological clock back on track.

Because after the breakup, I have had some trouble sleeping, waking up at four o'clock in the morning. And instead of my body relaxing back into sleep, I've been kind of immediately on, thinking about work stuff, ruminating on what went wrong, all the things. And [00:01:00] good news is that the past two nights I've slept really, really well.

And I don't know whether it's a placebo effect from the walks or whether the walks have actually helped, or the fact that I'm training earlier in the day has helped, so you know. I'm not being super scientific about this. But I do encourage you, if you have 10 minutes in the morning, take a walk, especially if you have some nature around you.

It just sets a whole different tone for the day, so I am loving this. Of course, when it's rainy, I'm not gonna love it so much. And apparently, you don't even need to go for a walk. So it could be that you just have your breakfast outside or a morning cup of coffee or whatever. But I think it's nice to work in the steps at the same time. So that's my latest small life change that I've added.

Today, I wanna talk about the fact that a lot of women come to me convinced that strength training is gonna hurt them, [00:02:00] especially if they follow the advice to lift heavy

Bad knees, old injuries, and just, well, getting older. I get it. I get where that concern can come from. I mean, I had a knee that I could barely bend thanks to arthritis and an old hip injury that had come back to haunt me. But I'll tell you, strength training is what fixed them

And I've helped hundreds of women get started in midlife, many of them are in their 60s and 70s, and they've been able to ramp up to lifting heavy for them safely

So if you're sitting there thinking that strength training is somehow risky or just not for someone in your situation, then this is the episode for you

By the end, you'll understand exactly why strength training is safe regardless of what your starting point is

So the [00:03:00] reason that strength training is so safe is it can be completely tailored to you. You choose the exercises that work for you. You choose the weights that are appropriate for you. You go at the pace that works for you. You take rest periods according to what works for you. You recover for the number of days that works for you. It is completely customizable

And that is completely unlike a group fitness class or an instructor-led session where they're deciding what to do, they're dictating the pace, they're telling you how long you need to do something for and how much the rest periods are, and that is very much harder to adapt to your needs In strength training, you are completely in control

So first of all, you're choosing the exercises that work for you, and I think this is a very key component here because [00:04:00] you may have injuries, right? You may have some parts of you that don't work so well. For example, I have clients who have arthritis in their ankles and they can't bend their ankles, so certain exercises are just painful for them.

So we swap them out of their program for other exercises that don't require that kind of ankle mobility

And though you may see people online doing back squats, doing deadlifts, doing bench pressing, those exercises, you do not have to do them, okay? They're super popular, and social media will have you believing that that is strength training. You have to do those in order to get strong. Let me tell you something, I don't do any of those three, and I am super strong

When I'm choosing exercises is I don't want exercises that compress my spine, [00:05:00] which is what barbell back squats will do, And deadlifts, conventional deadlifts don't work with my arthritic knees. So I don't do them, and I have been able to get super strong even without them

And you train at the speed that works for you. And this is something that I've heard over and over again from women who have joined my programs. They're like, "Oh, I've been going to these follow-along things, and the pace was just too fast for me. I couldn't be sure that I was doing the exercises properly, that I was maintaining the form."

And I mean, I've struggled with that too. I remember I did CrossFit for a while, and we would be doing these, timed workouts where you had a minute, and you had to do X number of reps, and then you could rest for the remainder of the time, right? And then when the next minute started, you needed to start your next set.

[00:06:00] Well, I'm a stickler for form, so I was doing my reps really carefully, making sure I was doing full range of motion properly, not skimping. And so I was ending up with this problem where I really didn't have much rest at the end. And the instructor, I, I told her after, "I end up with, like, no rest period." And she said, "Yeah, but that's 'cause you're doing the exercises all so correctly." And I was like, "And why would I not wanna do them correctly?" I mean, really, like, that just increases the risk of injury when you try to rush through an exercise instead of paying attention to form and doing it in a controlled manner.

So in strength training, you are doing reps at the speed that you do your reps, not at some predefined speed that somebody else is, like, leading you through that exercise in. And your rest periods can be shorter or longer [00:07:00] depending on you. So sometimes it might be a minute, sometimes you might need three, and that's something you can completely define for yourself when you're strength training

And let's not even get started on the weights. So the beauty in strength training is that for every exercise, you choose the weight that works for you. And that means that for every single exercise, you're picking a weight that challenges you, but that isn't going to break you, right? And you ramp up on the exercises. That's the whole thing when you start strength training, is that you're given a set of exercises... Well, I'll use my Summer Shape Up, uh, ladies as an example. So we're doing eight weeks of the same exercises, and in the beginning, they're just learning those exercises and practicing how to do them properly. They're increasing their weights as they get to [00:08:00] the point where they can do 12 reps in each of their sets for that exercise. Then they will increase the weight a little bit and move forward and move forward and move forward. It is not like that on day one you're suddenly picking up something huge. If you see me online, you're looking at somebody who is four years in. So yeah, I'm gonna be lifting a lot more than you, who is in week one, right? Or in your first year of lifting. And that's the way it should go, right? And when you hit year four, you may be where I am, or you may be in a different place than I am, because our journeys are going to be very, very individual, depending on how consistently you train, how much you're applying progressive overload, whether you have to take breaks, whether you, you know, get sick, whether you're eating enough protein, whether you're on a diet, [00:09:00] all kinds of individual things. Strength training is just so, so, so individual

And then recovery, that is individual too. So you want at least a day of recovery between training the same muscles. But for example, I've noticed, and some of my other clients have noticed, that having two days off works better. You come back in more recovered, and you're able to train harder in the next session.

So as you can see from, like, every aspect of your training session, you completely customize it to you. From the exercises that you do, the weights you're lifting, the speed of your reps, the length of your pauses, your breaks between reps, and your recovery days, it is all about you,

Injuries, okay? Injuries and age-related things, those are not a problem either. Our bodies aren't 20 anymore. We have old injuries, may have [00:10:00] arthritis. We may have done something to ourselves, right? We may have fallen or whatever, and something has happened. And the beauty of strength training is that you can adapt your training so that you keep working the things you can work, and you adjust away from the things that you can't do.

So for example, when my arthritic knee blew up, I wasn't able to bend it, so I adjusted my training so that I was doing smaller range of motion work. And little by little, as my leg got stronger, my knee was getting more support, then I was able to do greater and greater range of motion. And yeah, my knee is still something that I can't just swap to a different exercise just like that. I have to slowly build up to that, and that's something I know about myself. And I'm able to do that because I can adjust my training to suit me[00:11:00] 

And then I had an old hip injury from way back when I was, like, a little girl and I dislocated my hip. It had come back to haunt me, and it turned out that the answer to it was really to strengthen my glutes and my hamstrings in particular. So once I started strength training, I got rid of that weakness in my body too.

I had surgery, so I wasn't able to train my upper body a couple of months, but I continued to train my lower body. So there's always modifications you can do,

and if you do have an injury, something that's niggling, then please do see a physical therapist, because they'll be able to tell you where you need to lay off of it for a while and where it is something that you need to train it in a specific way. And then you can add those exercises [00:12:00] into your programming.

So for example, one of my friends has dislocated her shoulder twice in group fitness classes doing, like, side planks and these kinds of things, and the solution there was to start strength training to strengthen her shoulder muscles. But she had specific shoulder exercises that her physical therapist gave her to do.

So please do not let injuries, arthritis, these kinds of things stop you. It's not like it's a yes, you can strength train everything or no, you should do nothing. You can find some happy mediums and be able to at least strengthen the parts of your body that can be strengthened.

But there are a lot of injuries where it is a good idea to train I mean, I remember back in high school when people would tear their ACL, it was like, nope, they had to be immobilized for a long time. But by college, they had their knee surgery, and the next [00:13:00] day they were on the sideline working out with our physical therapist so things have really changed over time, and a lot of times movement and strength is medicine for those injuries that we have. But speak to your doctor or physical therapist if you have any injuries or any kind of issues with your body before you start strength training that part of your body, okay? So you wanna make sure it's okay. I've had my knee checked by an orthopedic surgeon and my hip by a physical therapist, so I did my due diligence before starting to train to make sure

And age, age is not something that should stop you either. You can start strength training at any age, from being a child nowadays, they really have done more research, and it is safe for children to strength train, all the way until, you know, the oldest adults. I think a great example and such an inspiration is [00:14:00] Joan. Train with Joan. Look her up in social media. She is a woman who started strength training, I think she was in her 70s, and she is... She looks amazing. She has totally turned her health around and her life around, and I think she's such a great example of how amazing being stronger and strength training can make you feel,

I also think about my ex-husband's grandmother, who lived to be a little over 100, and she was living on her own. Can you imagine this, like, little skinny old lady who lived in this big house in the middle of some fields in rural Finland alone, 'cause she was a widow. And we would go visit her 'cause her house was near the summer cottage, and the reason why she was able to continue to live all by herself, was that she was maintaining her strength. She would get [00:15:00] out her little dumbbells every time we went over there, and she would show, the little exercises that she was doing to maintain her strength so that she could lift the plates down and put them back up into the cabinets, and she could get off the toilet seat, and all the things that you have to be able to do.

You know, get in and out of bed, and she was well into her 90s. And let me tell you, she was not strength training from youth. She started as an older woman,

and I've had plenty of women in my programs who have started in their 60s and 70s, and the thing is that you start where you are and you ramp up from there. You don't start at my weights. You don't start at my pace because I'm ahead of where you are. You start where you are at. Whether you've been an athlete your whole life or whether you have been a self-proclaimed couch potato, it is safe to [00:16:00] do because you control the stimulus that you're giving your body, You have so much control

All right, and I totally get that this may still feel really scary. My father, who is 85. He's a former athlete, He always ran. He would go to the weight room at his workplace, and now he's had trouble walking, and I've been encouraging him to start strength training. We went to see a physical therapist who gave him some exercises, which are literally the same exercises that are in my program, and I was like, "Dad, you need to start doing these." And he's like, "Well..." So, so, so much hesitation. I mean, and this is from a guy who has been an athlete his whole life, and he was even feeling like, "Oh, this, this is too scary. Strength training, I'm gonna hurt myself. It's, it's gonna be too much for me. I'm, you know, 85." So I went to his house, and I was like, [00:17:00] "Okay, let's do these exercises together." And I demoed the exercises, and then he did them, and he was like, "Oh, okay. These, these aren't bad at all. I can do these." Because they were literally, like, sitting down at a chair and getting up. That is a box squat. Doing these Superman things on the floor to strengthen his back. So they are not crazy mysterious, but somehow it may be that you, just like my dad, have in your head that, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's scary, it's scary, no, I'm gonna break myself. No, no, it's for younger people and for those guys, you know, that are in the weight room.

And that is why I have Lift-IT, which is a 10-day kick-start into strength training. It's got short workouts so you can experience strength training, and see that it is 100% something you can [00:18:00] do. It is not scary. It is not overwhelming. It is not out of your, like, realm of things you can do. So if you're interested in that, the link is in the show notes, and give it a try.

Honestly, give it a try so that you can get over that mental block that strength training is dangerous, that this is gonna break me somehow, because really, you are in control.

All right. And the reason that I really am up here talking about this so, so, so much is that it is so important for us to take care of our muscles and our bodies, and strength training is taking care of not just our muscles, but also our bones, our tendons, our ligaments, our posture. And so many health benefits as well, like getting rid of visceral fat and increasing our insulin sensitivity so we don't end up with type 2 [00:19:00] diabetes. So, so, so, so many benefits. So please, if you've been hesitating, give it a try with Lift-IT and see that it really is not that scary.

If you have any questions, then just reach out to me. Probably the easiest place is in my Instagram DMs. I check those fairly regularly. and with that, I leave you till next week and wish you happy training