Most Seniors Lift Weights Wrong. How to Do It Right.

You will find articles that tout the benefits of weightlifting for seniors accompanied by photos of smiling silver-haired men and women curling tiny silver dumbbells.

For good reason. A growing flood of research has found that weightlifting produces health benefits for seniors, lessening rates of osteoporosis, heart disease, and even cancer.

There's just one problem: Most seniors who lift weights are doing it wrong, according to a growing group of trainers.

Ignore those cliché images: The big benefits of weightlifting don't come from doing dumbbell curls with light weights, those experts say. The benefits come from doing total-body exercises like squats, dead lifts, or overhead presses with as much weight as can be safely handled. These movements strengthen the major muscle groups used in everyday activities in retirement, such as walking, lifting household objects, or playing with grandchildren.

Squats and dead lifts also are the best exercises for building bone density in your hips and spine, the most dangerous places for a fracture in elderly women and men.

"Most everybody is lifting weights wrong," says weightlifting author Mark Rippetoe, who owns the Wichita Falls Athletic Club in Texas. "If you want to get strong, there's one way to get there. That's to lift heavier weights."

In 2005, Rippetoe wrote the book Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, which prescribes a three-times-a-week program of heavy squats, dead lifts, overhead presses, bench presses, and power cleans for anyone trying to get stronger as quickly as possible.

These days, Rippetoe's gym in Wichita Falls is increasingly oriented toward older lifters, and he is prescribing the same barbell lifts (usually minus the power cleans) for them as he does for younger lifters.

Seniors can't tolerate the same volume as younger people, Rippetoe says. While he has younger lifters do three heavy sets of five squats three times a week, a 65-year-old might quickly advance to doing a single heavy set of three or five squats twice a week. Rippetoe, himself a 67-year-old former competitive power lifter, only does a single set of squats every other week.

"We are concerned with strengthening normal human movement patterns," Rippetoe says. "Those patterns are squatting down and standing up, picking things off the floor, pushing things over your head, pushing things away from you, and pulling things toward you."

Other trainers are using dumbbells or kettlebells, instead of barbells, to target the big muscles in the hips and back.

Dan Cenidoza, owner of the Baltimore Kettlebell Club, trains a group of mainly older women to do dead lifts with a kettlebells, a round weight with a thick handle on top. "If you’re going to dead-lift something today, it might be a bag of animal feed or a sleeping grandchild that you’re lifting tomorrow," say Cenidoza, 44, who formerly competed in strongman competitions.

Jennie Boyer, a retired nurse living in Catonsville, Md., had a number of falls and injuries over a period of years before her son convinced her to begin working with Cenidoza two years ago. "As a retired nurse, I know that the frequent downward slope as you age is a fall and a broken hip," she says.

Boyer, 71, has since dead-lifted over 200 pounds. She sometimes uses barbells in addition to kettlebells.

She says her balance has improved, and she is more confident. "I noticed with carrying groceries, that I had much better balance and didn't have to grip the rail on my steps," she says. "Now I can carry groceries in both hands and go up the middle of the steps."

Added strength and balance is only one of the benefits of lifting heavy weights. Jonathon Sullivan, a former emergency room doctor who now trains clients in weightlifting at Greysteel Strength and Conditioning in Farmington Hills, Mich., says that more muscle mass enhances health in many other ways.

"The loss of muscle tissue in aging is a physiological catastrophe," says Sullivan, 62, who co-wrote The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40. "When you’re losing muscle, you’re losing mass from the largest endocrine organ in the body." Added muscle mass lowers blood pressure and insulin resistance, helping ward off diabetes, Sullivan says. It also helps reduce visceral fat, the unhealthy fat that forms around the organs.

Whereas many doctors formerly didn't recommend weightlifting or even recommended against it out of fears that it might be dangerous, that is changing, Sullivan says. "I’m starting to get people coming to my clinic with prescriptions from doctors for strength training," he says.

Research has found that weightlifting helps seniors prevent bone and muscle loss. and may even help prevent dementia. The Center for Disease Control recommends that seniors do strength-building exercises at least twice a week in addition to aerobic exercise.

Many seniors are nervous about handling heavy weights. Sullivan says dead lifts and squats are quite safe—safer than many other forms of exercise—if lifters are taught to perform them correctly. That's why it's important to lift with the help of a professional.

More trainers are targeting senior lifters. Dustin Jones, a 36-year old former college track and field athlete, started his career training young athletes. But Jones, who co-founded the StrongerLife gym in Lexington, Ky., finds it more gratifying to work with seniors. StrongerLife only accepts members 55 years and older; most are women.

Jones emphasizes squats and dead lifts, along with some variety of overhead press. He also likes burpees, which combine a push-up with a leap in the air, because he says that they help clients get up from the floor.

"If you are an untrained individual, even in your 80s, you are going to see such tremendous gains in such a short period," Jones says. "These people say, ‘Wow. I’m going to be able to stay independent for a long time.’"

Rae Brown, a retired 69-year-old pediatric anesthesiologist, is 5 foot, 7 inches and weighed 210 pounds when he began working out at StrongerLife a year and a half ago. He now weighs 188 pounds and has gained 10 or 15 pounds of muscle. His blood pressure has improved and his cholesterol has gone down.

"I never thought I would be putting a 100-pound barbell over my head, or dead-lifting one and half times my body weight," he says. "But I do it all the time now. And it's fun and it's safe."

Write to Neal Templin at [email protected]