Fellas – if you’re over the age of 35, it can feel like the strength and body you once had in your 20s and early 30s is long gone. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, rebuilding your strength is as simple as following a few principles day in and day out. And good news, if any of your joints or muscles are talking to you saying, “We’re not as young as we used to be,” you don’t need to worry. These principles will help you get strong no matter what you have going on.
When it comes to getting strong, I want you to think of it as an acronym – S.T.R.O.N.G.
S – Strength Train
This should go without saying, but if you want to get strong, you need to train your strength using weights, machines, dumbbells, cables, bands, or something along those lines. You HAVE to do strength training if you want to get strong. There’s no way around it.
Especially when you are over the age of 35, everything in your body is telling your body to slow down, don’t hold on to as much muscle, and let everything get weaker. So you need to actively combat these signals!
My recommendation is a minimum of three days a week of total-body strength training following the four Exercise For Life principles to make sure you stay safe and injury free.
If you are not sure what the four Exercise For Life principles are, download this free report here.
T – Tension
When you are doing your strength training, you need to focus on creating tension within your muscles. In other words, you need to prioritize contracting your muscles during every exercise that you do.
The muscle contraction is what is going to drive the changes in your body, so if you aren’t paying attention to your muscles and just flinging around weights, you are far less likely to build your strength while at the same time greatly increasing your risk for injury.
So keep your focus on the contraction. Prioritize creating and maintaining tension in your muscles throughout the entire duration of an exercise. This will be a game-changer for you.
R – Range of Motion
Typically, range of motion is thought of as something that there needs to be more of, but too much range of motion is actually one of the biggest causes of injuries and issues from working out.
Instead, you need to adhere to YOUR full, symptom-free range of motion. That means no pain, no pinching, no popping, no clicking, no nothing while you are doing the exercise, all while using as much motion as you can.
Stick within the motion that is symptom-free for your body and explore as much of it as you can while you workout and your body will respond significantly better to your workouts.
O – Optimize
In this case, optimize means to make sure your muscles are firing on all cylinders and are fully connected to and able to receive signals from your nervous system. Bar none, the #1 way to go about doing that is with Muscle Activation Techniques® (MAT®).
If you have never experienced MAT® before, it will be a complete game changer for your body, your health, and your workouts. At a minimum, I recommend doing one MAT® session per month, but if you are just starting out as an MAT® client, then once per week is far more appropriate.
As your system gets functioning better, you can slowly back off your frequency, going down to twice a month and then eventually to once a month. But start off with the mindset that you are going to commit to doing it at least once a week for six weeks. The improvements you will experience in your strength and mobility will be unreal.
You can grab a free 20 page report we put together on MAT® here, and if you are in the Chicago suburbs or downtown areas, you can book a consultation with me online here.
N – No Pain or Soreness
Forever we’ve been told ideas like “no pain, no gain” and “soreness is a good thing”, but it is time for those ideas to die.
When you are wanting to get strong without getting injured, and when you are wanting to stay strong without feeling broken, the name of the game is to stimulate your body, not annihilate your body.
There should be NO pain, soreness, achiness, zings, pinchyness, or anything else of the sort during or after your workouts. This is a HUGE concept that you must understand and buy into if you want to build and maintain your strength long-term.
I know you’ve been told that there is “good soreness”. I know that you’ve been told that you need to push through the pain. I am here to tell you that is all BS.
Instead of feeling sore after your workouts, you should aim to feel energized and connected to your muscles. You should feel like you can move better. You should even feel stronger after you finish, not weaker.
By switching your mindset around pain and soreness from “something to work through and carry as a badge of honor” and instead see it as a sign that something about your workouts was inappropriate for your body, you can start taking steps to not just build your strength, but be able to exercise consistently without issues or injuries because every workout you do becomes more and more dialed in to what your body needs.
G – Grow
In order to grow, you have to expand, and in order to expand, you have to challenge yourself.
Look, your workouts are not something to just check off your to-do list and call it a day. Your workouts are a way to challenge your body and your muscles to improve its health and function.
Too often, people get caught up on the “doing” and leave out the “challenge”. If you want to build your strength, you will need to challenge yourself during your workouts, and you will need to do so repeatedly.
Challenge is uncomfortable, and your mind will try to talk you out of it. But you will soon be able to distinguish between what feels uncomfortable and what feels painful or hurtful.
Exercising at a level that is highly challenging can be a really good thing, and when you combine it with our four Exercise For Life principles and everything else that has been discussed above, challenging yourself during your workouts is one of the surest ways to get and stay strong.
Strength is about more than just how much weight you can throw around when you workout. It is about feeling confident in the capabilities of your body. It is about being able to do what you want in life without being held back by your body. And it is about feeling like you have total ownership and control over your body, every single day.
The S.T.R.O.N.G. acronym will help you do just that. By following each of the letters, in addition to our four Exercise For Life principles, you will be able build and maintain your strength, your health, your function, and your physical freedom for decades to come.
If you would like guidance applying the four Exercise For Life principles into your workouts, I encourage you to sign up for my Men’s Training Program. It is completely free and you will get access to on-demand workouts that will help you implement all of this. Click here to get started today!
Charlie
