I often express how lucky I am to have competed on a high level for so many years. Although my body might not be in complete agreement with that statement. What it has provided for is awesome relationships and access to many great minds in strength and conditioning.

I'm especially grateful to be able to hit up none other than Dave Tate. He and I are in a pretty exclusive club, not that many want to be here necessarily. We have stood the test of time of heavy lifting for what I would guess is more than 60 years between us. And, regardless of what we have been through, we both still like training really hard.

Dave and I have seen lots of people come and go. That's fine. I don't think you need to strength train for the rest of your life to be a good person. Well, maybe that's actually open for debate. That said, there are not that many of us pushing the envelope into our 50's and beyond.

Being in this select group, a lot of the information regarding strength and conditioning may not apply as written for us. Our bodies can only take so much. I started addressing this in my blog from last week You Can't Handle The Volume - https://www.elitefts.com/coaching-logs/you-cant-handle-the-volume/

While training the other day I focused on keeping my warmup volume very low and only taking one hard set for each exercise. I kept them on the heavier side with the reps between 5 to 10 stopping just shy of failure. A true RPE of 9. I felt worked, but not destroyed.

That's actually an area I need to get a better grasp on. You don't need to feel destroyed while training. Or perhaps, the older and more beat up you are, you can't afford to feel destroyed while training. At the very least you can't feel that way all the time.

That brings me to the title of this week's blog. I was texting Dave about my revelation after training and I got this gem back "PICK YOUR HEAVY REPS CAREFULLY AND MAKE THEM COUNT." Seriously, that was a nugget of absolute brilliance. Some of us don't have the capacity to recover as we used to, no matter how much we work at it. With only so much left in the tank, we have to be particular about how we spend it.

This doesn't mean I can't train hard. It just means I have to be a lot more selective than I used to be. I can't afford to do too much. Just because I want to train hard all of the time doesn't mean I can. I have to treat each exercise, set, and rep like gold now.

I was able to glean a lot from Dave's short text. I hope many of you can as well.