Your doctor told you to start strength training. Then the appointment ended, and nobody said how often, how much weight or which exercises.
You already exercise, so you might assume you’re covered. But what your doctor meant and what you’re doing now may be two different things.
Key Takeaways
- Your doctor’s job is to tell you that you need strength training. A screen of how you move is where you find out how often to train, how much weight to lift and which exercises to do.
- Twice a week is enough, and in research on women over 50 a third day added little.
- The weight has to be “appropriately challenging” for you today, and it goes up as tolerated, never on a schedule.
- Strength training for your whole body covers five movement patterns: push, pull, rotation, shifting your center of gravity and single-leg work.
Contents
Why Didn’t My Doctor Tell Me How to Strength Train?
Your doctor did the part that was hers to do. She looked at your health and decided strength training would help you.
A doctor’s appointment doesn’t have room for the details of a training program. And “strength training” can mean almost anything, from a set of resistance bands to a barbell.
The rest of this post covers the two questions you walked out with: how much, and what.
How Often Should You Strength Train?
Twice a week.
That can sound too easy, especially if you already exercise four or five days. But two days is the amount that was actually tested, and it worked:
Morganti CM et al., Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 1995. PMID 7658954.
A third day doesn’t add much, either:
Pina FLC et al., International Journal of Exercise Science, 2019. PMID 31156757.
So if you want more results, a third or fourth day is usually not where they come from. The weight in your hand is.
How Much Weight Is Enough?
The weight has to be “appropriately challenging.” That means challenging enough to get results, and still well within what you can do.
In practice, the last few reps of a set should require real effort. A weight you could keep lifting long after the set ends is too light to change anything.
“Heavy” is relative. The women in the Morganti trial worked at an average of 84% of their own one-rep maximum over the twelve months. That number was their own limit, not a weight on a rack, and they didn’t start there.
The load goes up as tolerated. It never goes up because a certain number of weeks has passed.
Which Exercises Count as Strength Training?
Every program at 29 Again is built with Stephen’s 3-4-5 Total Body Strength System, which he developed and published in a fitness journal. The “5” is the five movement patterns your body uses every day:
- Push
- Pull
- Rotation
- Shifting your center of gravity
- Single-leg
Shifting your center of gravity means work that moves your whole body up and down, or side to side. Lunges, squats and step-ups are the best examples.
What doesn’t make the list is isolation work that trains one muscle at a time. Isolation and bodybuilding exercises are overused. You need the movement patterns first.
Does What You Already Do Count?
It might count for some of it. Yoga, Pilates and group weights classes keep you moving, and they can build some strength.
But a class is planned for a room full of people. It can’t set the weight for your body, and it can’t raise that weight as you get stronger. So a year later, you may still be using the same dumbbells you started with.
That’s the gap between exercising and the strength training your doctor had in mind. The exercise counts. The load is what’s usually missing.
Keep Reading
Where to Start in Timonium
You have the go-ahead from your doctor. What you don’t have yet is your own answer to how much and what.
That answer starts with the Smart Start, a screening of how you move before anything gets loaded. It’s part of the free 1-week trial at 29 Again Custom Fitness in Timonium: the screen plus up to two coached sessions, so you can see how your own body responds before you decide anything.
After that, it’s twice a week, on a program written around your own screen.