Ageless Bodybuilding for the Young?

Should or COULD younger bodybuilders use my Ageless Bodybuilding System?

 

This morning, I was sitting at my computer and working on my next installment of my "Ageless Bodybuilding" System, when I received a curious email.  Now, I check my email every day, and try my very best to answer my mail, but it sometimes take a little bit since I'm typically "backed up" in responses. (By the way, if you have emailed me and I haven't responded, always give it a week or so—I do eventually get around to a response.)  However, with this particular email, I thought it would be best if I wrote the general gist of my response to the questioner for the rest of my readers.

In a nutshell, this young man said he was interested in what I had written about my Ageless Bodybuilding System, and wondered if there would be benefits—or drawbacks—to a young person in their 20s doing it.  (He specifically asked about young men, but I'm going to include women here in my response, because there are differences to both that need to be addressed.)

One of the main reasons that his email interested me is because I had already been contemplating this myself.  At one time, I even thought about calling my Ageless Bodybuilding System (AB from here on out) Yogic Bodybuilding because of its holistic, "therapeutic" approach to training that makes it similar to yoga.  However, because I wanted to focus specifically on bodybuilders my age (50 and over), I ultimately decided against this even though it may have had broader appeal (and, therefore, readership).

So, what was my answer to this young man?  It was in both the affirmative and the negative.

A young bodybuilder certainly could follow my AB System, but he or she would do better with certain changes.  The overall system could remain the same, in fact, as long as the younger bodybuilder made a few slight tweaks and modifications.

Younger bodybuilders can—and most certainly should—take advantage of two KEY things.  (There are certainly going to be other things, as well, but these two are top in my mind.)  The younger bodybuilder can recover faster—and, therefore, train more frequently—than the older 'builder.  He or she should take distinctive advantage of this.  Remember the "Russian maxim" that I'm fond of: You should train as often as possible while being as fresh as possible.  And "as often as possible" is going to simple be more frequent for the younger bodybuilder who has a better recovery capacity.  Take my basic "break-in" program that I wrote about in Part 2 of my AB System.  If you are in your 20s, then you absolutely should perform that program 6-days-per-week instead of the 4 that I want the over-50 crowd to do.

The 2nd thing that the younger bodybuilder should take advantage of is his/her capability to lift heavy.  The younger bodybuilder, even if hypertrophy is the primary goal, should do several cycles each year of HEAVY training in the 3 to 5 rep-range.  This not only improves neural efficiency for when you return to "lighter" workouts, but many younger men will find that it also causes just as much muscle gain as more voluminous repetition workouts—despite what you may have heard from others who would dispute this fact.  I always gained my most muscle mass when I was young with repetitions around 5 reps.  (If you want to search out the perfect example of this lower-rep mindset for the younger bodybuilder, then read some of Bill Pearl's workout programs from when he was in his 20s—he regularly did 4 to 5 exercises-per-bodypart for 4 to 5 sets of 5 reps each.  High volume and low repetitions can be very efficacious for younger male bodybuilders.)  This is where I would part ways if you are a younger female bodybuilder.  Unless you plan on competing in powerlifting, very rarely should you do quite that low of reps.  But you should do several cycles each year when you train in the 6-8 rep range.  For whatever reason—and I could elucidate upon the "whatever" in more detail, but I would like to keep this post reasonably short—females respond better to higher repetitions then men do on average (there, of course, will always be outliers, but YOU are probably not one of them; that's what makes them outliers).

Those are the two major differences between the ageless bodybuilder and the younger one, but there are a couple of other things that need to be taken into account.  One of those—and you may have figured this out already—is exercise selection.  The older bodybuilder should use primarily dumbbells and bands instead of barbells, and "good" machines if he trains at a commercial gym.  (This is not the place for what kind of machines I recommend for my AB System—that will be an entire post/essay in and of itself.)  But the younger bodybuilder should primarily use barbells and dumbbells, with some additional machines for assistance exercises.  The younger bodybuilder (male or female) should do plenty of barbell squats, deadlifts, power cleans, overhead presses, bent rows, and all of the other good "stuff" I've been recommending here at Integral Strength for the last 10+ years!

Lastly, the younger bodybuilder should take advantage of his or her youth to eat their way to massive growth.  Younger bodybuilders can, and once again should, eat 5 to 6 meals-per-day spaced evenly throughout the day.  The ageless bodybuilder needs to be more concerned about health and longevity (what can be termed "health span" instead of just life span).  Taking myself as an example, although I will occasionally eat multiple meals per day, I prefer intermittent fasting with either one or (primarily) two meals-per-day; and I believe this to be ideal for all older 'builders.

That's it for this post.  If anyone has further inquiries regarding what I have written here, you can email me or just write in the comments below.  Until my next AB piece, good luck and good training!