Get Back in the Game Now: Recapturing Your Glory Years

elitefts™ Sunday Edition

Authors: Josh Bryant and Joe Giandonato, MS, CSCS

Maybe you fall within the sect of folks who are taking aim at resurrecting their athletic careers, or perhaps you want to own the Boot N’ Scoot Roadhouse on Kilgore Highway as you two-step and longneck the night away with your new found physical prowess.

As each New Year approaches, people assemble a laundry list of resolutions which aim to improve a number of facets in their lives, most notably financial status and physical health. Thus, people zealously cut extraneous spending, start socking away money, and begin contributing more to their retirement fund in the beginning of the year. On New Year’s day, many also search out a gym or begin a road work regimen that would put Rocky Balboa to shame, even despite their arthritic knees!

The bottom line: few people stick with their goals. Saving money and getting in shape doesn't jive well with instant gratification and entitlement.

Most of the well-intentioned “resolutionists” scrapped their plans sometime in February. Why? People don’t know where to start and don’t know how to set discernible goals.

Are you the former baseball player, say a year or two removed from college ball or the minors, who’s looking to play again? Or are you the under-sized former high school football standout who's looking to walk on the local college team in the  fall? Or perhaps you are the banged up 40-year-old ex-powerlifter who’s attempting to take to the platform one final time before walking away on your own terms. Or maybe you are simply the washed up meathead with something to prove to those keyboard warriors, forum trolls, and half-squatting commercial gym goers of the world?

Heck, even if you’d be considered somewhat of a reclamation project–you know, the guy in his mid to late 20s who once boasted a herculean physique before entering college, joining a frat, graduating, getting a well-paying yet stressful job, and ballooning into a doughy pile of flesh–you’d be well served to read on and acquire the knowledge and tools to recapture the glory of your past.

Getting Back in the Game

Several things may have entered the picture since you last dominated the gridiron or sported a six pack. You know, things such as educational, occupational, or familial responsibilities. Juggling these can prove to be an enormous challenge for even the most seasoned multitaskers and time managers, but juggling them is pivotal to your eventual success. Those jumping back into the game should determine what in their daily lives is important and what is not.

Unnecessary stress should be avoided at all costs, along with those who bring it. If your social circle is dragging you down and inviting you to calorie-costing happy hours and time-eating, testosterone-suffocating Warcraft LAN parties on a regular basis, then you need to ditch them and spend your time and energy on things that truly matter–like your family and becoming the strongest and most muscular badass you were or are capable of becoming.

Common Mistakes that New Trainees or Returnees Make

Far too often, people explode out of the gate with guns blazing, rife with unbridled fervor. They join the first gym they see or enlist the services of a personal trainer off the bat without doing their homework. Worse yet, they immediately buy into fad diets, training programs, or join one of the many box gyms out there (which have helped pay off medical school loans for orthopedic surgeons  for the past half-decade). Some catch the running bug with the intention of running a half or full marathon, essentially sacrificing any chance of building a chiseled physique or recapturing a semblance of their former athleticism.

1. Set Goals

Setting goals that are tangible and clear is of paramount importance. We’ve all heard the washed up meathead at our local gym say that he’s trying to get as strong as he once was, yet he fails to provide any numbers of his yesteryear. We’ve all heard our closest friends, family members, and coworkers routinely state that they’d like to lose weight, but they never end up quantifying those goals or holding themselves to a timeline. Most of us are aware of the SMART pneumonic (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) that  is commonly used for setting goals. If any of these are absent before you take action, you’ll end up disappointed.

2. Game Plan

Develop a game plan that includes strategies to help ensure your success. Write down your long-term goal and the short-term goals that you’ll accomplish along the way in lockstep fashion. To get there, you should break down your daily activities to measure your progress. This includes creating a daily schedule and keeping a detailed journal, which includes daily challenges and workouts. Analyze it each day and then make any necessary adjustments to ensure that you stay on track.

3. Discover What Works for Your Body

Your experience, competency level, athletic goals, anthropometry, and injury history will impact what activities and movements are appropriate for you. For example, if you've never performed an RDL, chances are you won’t be able to do a hang clean off the bat. Also, if you've suffered from back or knee pain, or suffered an injury in the past, some squatting and deadlift variations may not be an ideal fit for you. The initial challenge of discovering what movements are good for you contribute to the learning process and keep things fun.

Whether you’re reentering the iron game after a layoff or you're a new kid on the block, it’s essential that you master the basics before progressing them in load, volume, movement difficulty, or including them in monstrous YouTube-worthy circuits. Learn or relearn how to hinge, squat, press, and pull. Seek out an experienced professional in your area if you desire to get good at the Olympic lifts or powerlifting movements. If you don’t have room in your budget, peruse the immense resource of free articles on elitefts™ at your disposal.

At first, you’ll want to keep the load very light and limit the repetitions to a handful per set in order to establish and refine motor engrams. This practice is in opposition to the conventional "bro science" practice of “repping out” with lighter weights on compound exercises. Although it may increase your lactate threshold and establish muscular endurance over time, it will acutely induce fatigue, thereby causing you to adopt faulty movement patterns when attempting to complete each set. Keep in mind that repetition fosters skill. Crappy reps, on the other hand, give way to crappy skills!

4. Work Smarter, Not Harder

Distance running, puke-inducing bouts of conditioning, and hoisting spine-crumbling loads are equated to working hard. However, driving yourself into the ground isn't the optimal way to reverse the litany of well-documented, age-related physiological effects (such as reductions in aerobic power, muscular strength, lean body mass, and flexibility).

Far too often, people engage in unnecessarily long or intense conditioning sessions that cannibalize muscle because they pay no mind to fueling themselves properly. Of course, this is often due to their preoccupation with the number on the scale rather than the way they feel or appear in the mirror.

Also, many new gym goers and returnees start their workouts with cardio. However, this only runs their fuel reserves dry–reserves needed to perform intense strength training. Training for strength is clearly more beneficial for older, lesser trained individuals since strength serves as the foundation for work capacity, conditioning, and each biomotor ability.

Carrying a 15-pound grocery sack across a parking lot won’t be so tiring if you have been working out with 500 pounds on the hex bar deadlift. Research has indicated that muscular strength begins to decline around the third decade, which is attributable to a marked decrease of high-threshold motor units. Muscular strength can be maintained and even improved throughout one’s life; however, sheer endurance training will sap strength gains like a mudslide swallows hillside west coast communities.

See those pavement-pounding pursuits? You know the person on the side of the road you see running/jogging/walking/projectile dying with a hobbled gait? Well, his or her crappy music-powered “ultramarathon on the sidewalk of his or her cookie-cutter development" eats up more than just muscle. Muscular imbalances and weakness contribute to an abnormal running gait that will inevitably lead to injuries. For instance, breakdowns in the impact (sustained in the terminal swing/early stance phase of one's running gait) tax the knees, shin, and plantar fascia since the muscles of the posterior chain and the rotators of the hip are likely not developed enough to act eccentrically and absorb landing forces. Being overweight will overload the non-contractile structures and joints to a far greater degree, further eroding the finite supply of articular cartilage within our joints.

Joining a box gym or performing a workout-of-the-day is typically associated with working harder. However, ascribing to the beliefs shared by masochistic zealots, where the large majority of them don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to exercise physiology, is not the smartest option. If you use these trainers, be ready to become acquainted with the staff at your local emergency room.

*In order to deflect the inevitable onslaught of hate mail, it should be stated that some of these facilities do a great job of assessing and leading their members in a program that often features movements based on a series of progressions. However, this is often the exception, not the norm.

5. Don’t Overlook the Powers of Progressive Overload and Deloading

In the same vein of working smarter, it would be wise to subscribe to the tried-and-true ideologies set forth by the forefathers of exercise science and coaching. Progressive overload is paramount for both short and long-term success. Regardless of what form of periodization you employ (whether it's linear, undulating, or conjugated, or any at all), a cohesive and clear-cut program based on progressive overload, which includes incremental increases in load, volume, frequency, etc., is the name of the game.

Additionally, you should deload, or decrease loads, that have been acquired throughout the program. Overzealousness will ultimately bite you in the ass if you don’t toss in a deload period between tough training weeks. Deloads help the body restore itself by limiting the stresses imposed on the musculoskeletal structures and Central Nervous System.

Deloads shouldn't be viewed as vacation weeks. Instead, they should reinforce technique. Deloads call for a reduction in load, but technique should be kept crisp in order to further establish and cement proper motor engrams. Additionally, deloads can consist of compensatory acceleration training, which entails moving submaximal weights with maximal force. This enhances the recruitment of high threshold motor units to help you stay explosive during your off weeks.

A simple deloading guideline is to use 50 to 70% of your 1RM for your work sets, and to reduce the volume of your typical workouts by a third. Deloads are usually recommended every three to six weeks, but that all depends on a person’s ability to recover, work capacity, strength, and recent injury or illness history.

6. Juggling the Competing Demands of Strength Training and Cardio

How to handle concurrent strength training and cardiovascular exercise has stumped coaches, researchers, and athletes for ages. Confounding information regarding the interference phenomenon has been circulating for decades. Some coaches oppose any cardiovascular exercise, whereas others, especially those with a background in working with track athletes, support it. There is some literature out there that involves untrained individuals engaging in concurrent strength training and endurance training who elicited gains in maximal strength, hypertrophy, and muscular endurance. In many cases, however, rate of force development was inhibited in those groups compared to the untrained individuals who engaged in strength training only.

The way in which you manipulate each depends on your goals. Athletes and newcomers alike would be better served by spending the first part of their workouts in the weight room rather than on the cardio floor. They’ll be fresher and save the requisite fuel resources (i.e. glycogen) for the more intense work while relying on fat stores later (during lower-intensity cardiovascular exercise). However, as an athlete’s competitive season nears, it would be wise to incorporate more skill or sport-specific energy system work prior to strength training in some cases.

7. Utilize the Lightened Method to Reduce Injuries

Using the bands in a reverse fashion is actually known as the lightened method. 

Taking a look at the bench press: attach the bands to the top of the power rack instead of at the bottom. The higher the rack or the thicker the bands, the more they will assist you on the press up–the raw bench press has an ascending strength curve ( in other words, as you press up, leverage improves so that you can lift more).

If you’re returning to the game with shoulder or pec issues, odds are the most difficult and painful portion of the press is out of the bottom. Fortunately, this is where bands help. So instead of chopping that range of motion down Lorena Bobbit-style, get that full range of motion with reverse bands. The same method the pros use can work for you and allow you to keep on pressing. This provides the right overload where you can handle it.

We explained earlier how reverse bands work, so you can adjust the amount of assistance provided via rack height or band strength. A good starting point is a 25-percent reduction off the chest–you might need more; you might need less.

Here is the bottom line in your most difficult position: the band will help you the most, and as you press the iron back to the starting position, the band will help you less and less. This is the same accommodating resistance concept in reverse order.

Even for the injury-free lifter, the reverse band style on squats can force you to explode through the entire rep. If you decide to put on your cruise control as you finish a squat, your ass is grass and the squat bar is the lawn mower! Additionally, the quads and hips will get a better overload because of the increased force they are required to produce.

With more muscular overload, greater force is produced for a greater amount of time throughout the entire ROM. Plus, looking likes a stallion with more weight on the bar=the gateway to an anabolic paradise is opened!

Now that we gave you seven decrees of recapturing your glory years, let’s take a look at a four-week strength template designed to help you recapture your glory years.

Four-Week Strength Training Day 1

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Four-Week Strength Training Day 3

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Below is a video of co-author Josh Bryant box squatting 700 pounds to a nine-inch box. You do not need to use a box this low–at parallel to slightly below parallel works.