Training Considerations for the Aging Powerlifter – EliteFTS

The average powerlifting career only lasts between five and ten years. There are many reasons for this, be it family or work obligations, injuries, or a loss of interest. In this article, I’d like to offer up some solutions to keep you going as life slows you down. But first, let’s define aging because there is a significant difference between your actual and true age. 

We all know what our true age is; how many years we’ve lived on this earth. Many people, however, are unaware of what a training age is. Simply put, training age is how long you’ve been training for a competitive sport. In many ways, your training age is more significant than your actual age. The main reason for this is sport-specific wear and tear that leads to imbalance, impingement, and injury. After tens of thousands of reps on any one movement, you can be sure that certain structures in your body will begin to fail. For some of us, this will take decades, and for others, just a few years. What I’m going to address here is how to maintain progress in powerlifting with an advanced training age. 

Your first five years of powerlifting are the most fruitful. The gains come quickly, your body composition changes rapidly, and the associated confidence is intoxicating. This often spills over into other areas of your life, causing a net gain in quality of life. To be certain, you will experience plateaus and setbacks in this training phase, but they are infrequent and quickly addressed.

As you enter the second five-year period of training, you will more than likely find that the adversity increases. This is the period that typically catapults people to a higher level of competition. Most people will take a considerable amount of time to build a high level of absolute strength; this is why everyone at the top level will tell you they’ve been competing for ten or more years.

There is a ton of information out there for people in this training age bracket, but not so much for the aging lifter.

This is where we pick up: ten or more years of competitive lifting. At this stage, you’ve developed a very respectable amount of strength and muscle. However, you’ve also probably accumulated your fair share of wear and tear, perhaps even some not-so-minor injuries. This is where training really starts to become problematic.