THE SENIOR’S BIG-THREE WORKOUT

As a rule, senior citizens should perform the same baseline program as

anybody else. Then again, there are bound to be exceptions. For those who
find the program too taxing, we’ve had good results with trainees who
perform no more than three exercises in a given workout. Here’s an example:
Seated row Chest press Leg press
Many of these same seniors train no more frequently than once every seven
to fourteen days. Don’t worry that this is “not enough.” It is. If you think of
an elderly person as someone trapped inside his or her body with diminished
mobility, then it follows that as soon as enough strength has been produced to
restore mobility, the person’s activity levels are going to increase
simultaneously.
In summary, we recommend the basic Big-Five routine outlined in Chapter 4
as an ideal training program for senior citizens. However, if mobility issues
or other factors preclude that approach, doing a basic Big-Three routine and
aggressively focusing on progression on these basic movements will get the
average senior citizen a lot of bang for the metabolic buck.
A REVOLUTIONARY STUDY
In closing, we would like to share with you a study that can only be described
as “revolutionary” in its impact in regard to strength training and senior
citizens. As unlikely as this may sound, it revealed that strength training can
actually reverse the aging process.
For the study, the results of which were was published in the online medical
journal Public Library of Science, researchers recruited twentyfive healthy
seniors (average age seventy) and an equal number of college students
(average age twenty-six). All of the subjects submitted to having muscle
biopsies performed, and 24,000 genes were compared for each participant. It
was noted that 600 genes were markedly different
between the older and younger subjects. Prior to the study, the senior and
younger groups were found to have similar activity levels, though the young
people, as one might expect, were considerably stronger than their older
counterparts. The seniors then took part in a strength-training program for six
months. Afterward, the researchers found that the seniors had gone from
being 59 percent weaker than the young adults to being only 38 percent
weaker. More important was the change in the seniors’ genes. The gene-
expression profile (or genetic fingerprint) of the seniors changed noticeably,
looking a lot more like that of the younger trainees. The researchers
concluded their study by stating:
Following exercise training the transcriptional signature of aging was
markedly reversed back to that of younger levels for most genes that were
affected by both age and exercise. We conclude that healthy older adults
show evidence of mitochondrial impairment and muscle weakness, but that
this can be partially reversed at the phenotypic level, and substantially
reversed at the transcriptome level, following six months of resistance
exercise training.17
Nothing else in human history has shown a functional reversing of age in
humans at a molecular level. When the drug Resveratrol was shown to
produce some reversal of aging in mice and worms, it flew off the shelves as
an age-reversal agent—without any proof that it had a similar effect in
humans. Now here, after millennia of searching for the “fountain of youth”—
anything that might extend life or objectively reverse aging in humans, going
back as far as our earliest recorded literature in The Epic of Gilgamesh—a
clinical study has essentially said, “Look, here it is—an actual functional
reversal of aging at the molecular level!” It is astounding that genes that were
functioning poorly at an elderly level could be returned to a normal level of
functioning in elderly people.
But it’s not surprising to us, nor to anyone who performs the type of training
that we advocate. It’s not unusual to see an elderly person start working out
with minimal weights and then, in a short span of time, see the person’s
strength be equal to or greater than that of the average twenty-five-year-old.
We have seventy-five- and eighty-year-old clients training at our facilities,
and routinely when we bring in a new twentyfive-year-old client, the weights
at which we start the young adult do not approach what most of our older
established clients are currently using.
Having said this, the most amazing thing that happened after this study came
out in 2007 was—nothing. That news of this magnitude should come out
during our lifetimes and not be on the front page of every newspaper and on
every evening news program was inexplicable to us. Perhaps it failed to
garner much attention because people are more than willing to take a pill,
thinking it’s going to reverse their aging, and it’s only the exceptional
individual who would hear such news and say, “I can do something for
myself, by the sweat of my own brow; by applying my own effort and my
own work ethic, I can achieve this for myself!” Perhaps.
For this benefit to occur, an individual of any age must be willing to train
with effort, a rare find in our society. The beautiful thing is that the ones who
understand and apply this principle are the ones with whom we get to work—
and the ones who are reaping all the benefits we’ve covered in this book.