Contrary to what you may have heard, you’re never too old or too young to start lifting. We have kids who lift with us and do amazing, and we have plenty of seniors who lift with us, and are making progress, getting stronger, and feeling better. While all the same general principles apply to younger and older lifters as for other adults, there are a few special considerations for these groups.
Youth Strength Training
Strength training for kids provides a ton of benefits in terms of building strong bones, good movement patterns, good proprioceptive awareness, and confidence. There are still a lot of myths out there about lifting being bad for kids. Lifting will not stunt your kids growth!
The biggest difference in how we approach lifting for kids as compared to adults is that we try to make it fun! Kids typically aren’t going to just hang out and rest between sets, so even when we’re taking turns with a movement, we encourage them to be cheering for their friends, or otherwise engaged in what is going on.
In our kids competitions, we’ve learned that it tends to be better to do max reps events for shorter than a minute. For adults, if you run out of steam, you tend to be able to make a decision about whether to keep trying for more reps or stop, but for our kids, they tend to keep going but with increasingly sloppy reps. Rather than giving them a lot of time where their form is getting progressively worse, we cap the time at 30-45 seconds to cut them off before it gets bad.
As with adults, we focus on getting good movement patterns before loading up with a lot of weight. Moving well with good body mechanics will help prevent injury, and also has good carryover to any other sports or activities your youth might do.
Senior Strength Training
We train a lot of seniors, and there can be a lot of variability in what folks can do. For some people, barbell training that is pretty similar to what we’re doing with any adult lifter is great. For some, we’ll focus more on lighter weights, maybe some resistance bands, and general skills to strengthen the movement patterns they’ll use in their activities of daily living.
There’s a ton of research out there on the benefits of strength training for seniors, and this research also shows that seniors can still make strength gains, and build muscle. Some people think that with the hormonal changes that occur with aging, that it is impossible to build muscle after a certain age, but this is just untrue. It might not happen as quickly, but it will still happen. Muscle loss in seniors is a major problem, and a big contributor to loss of independence. Putting some time in to building muscle at the gym can go a long way towards maintaining mobility and independence.
We can adapt our approach with older folks by using a slightly more gradual approach to periodization. We also sometimes use longer rest breaks between lifts. We might do more sets with less reps, so the lifter gets the same total number of reps, but they’re broken across more sets. All of these approaches will vary depending on the person in front of us. If we’re working with an older person who’s been lifting for their entire life, we might adjust things a little differently than if we’re seeing a person who is completely new to any type of exercise.
No matter your age, don’t let anyone tell you that you can only do bodyweight exercises. Unless there is some extreme circumstance, you are likely moving through your daily life with weight on a regular basis. That weight might come in the form of a backpack, groceries, or carrying your kids or pets, but if you can carry these things around that you have squatted or deadlifted to pick up, you can also squat or deadlift with weight in the gym. And that work in the gym is going to help you move better in your daily life!
Strength training really can be for all ages, we just have to adapt our approach a little bit for younger and older lifters. If you have a kid interested in strength training, you can check out our StrongKID program on Sundays. You can also schedule a free no-sweat intro to come chat about one-on-one training options, or see if small group strength training would be a good fit for you!
