The BEST Way to Train for Strength As You Age (NON-NEGOTIABLE!)

0:00 When it comes to longevity, do you want to just live longer, or would you rather live longer, better? Well, when we talk about strength, there's a difference between just being strong and having the right type of strength to carry you through the rest of your life in a much more high quality way. Today, we're going to start breaking down something we call the unbreakable laws of longevity and focusing mostly on strength. Now, this right here represents a lifetime dream of mine, a milestone. I had a chance to work with the exact team that I grew up rooting for, the New York Mets. But I've got another milestone here coming up and this is the big 5. And this is me enjoying my carrot cake. Yes, once a year I have my carrot cake. You can be damn sure I'm going to be doing it again. Now, when we talk about getting stronger, you have to understand that you want to get as absolutely strong as

0:46 possible. Right, Jesse? Absolutely. Now, I'm talking about absolutely strong. Do you know what that means? That means being as strong as absolutely possible. Well, that means that there's two different types of strength. There's relative strength and there's absolute strength. Absolute strength is your ability to simply move things in a in a better way than other people. You can move heavier objects more effectively than other people. You're pretty absolutely strong. Yeah, I would like to think so. Relative strength brings into play a lot of things like this, like a 100 humans versus one gorilla. I'm taking the gorilla in that situation for me. Um, I'm not saying who I think is going to win, but I'm going to tell you who I would rather win because I think humans pretty much suck a lot. And you're an animal lover. Now, but when we talk about my world of sports, these are the kind of things that the relative strength arguments start to come into play. In other words, is Jon Jones the

1:34 best pound-for-pound fighter or is someone like Max Holloway at just 145 lbs? There's a 100 pound difference between these two. However, in the world of nature, we have someone that's much stronger. This is the dung beetle. Smelly. Yeah. They can pull 1,141 times their body weight. That's pretty strong. Okay. Now, I got a question for you and for you. Okay. You're trapped under a car. Okay. Would you rather the dung beetle come and save you? Okay. Or Thorby? Thorby. Absolutely. Just make a choice here, guys. Now again, really, really, really relatively strong for their body weight. But again, the only thing that's going to save me or you in this situation is someone that's

2:21 absolutely strong. Now, these represent the most basic of absolute strength numbers. I want you to look at these and say, "Damn, I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that." And the good thing is you wouldn't be alone. There'd be a lot of people who have the same inability to reach these numbers. But there's something really fascinating. Stick with me here for a second. We're talking about a 100 lb chin-up, a 200lb overhead press, a 300lb bench press, a 400 lb squat, and a 500 lb deadlift. Oh, squat and deadlift. My specialties, right? And you have both the squat and the deadlift. But what these represent are just a set of absolute strength standards that guess what? Even someone the size of Max Holloway has been able

3:08 to achieve. There are Olympians out there who can do these things at those low body weights of 160 lbs. Yeah. So, it's not that they're impossible. I would never show you something here that's impossible. Are they probable for most of you? No. But again, let's talk about it. If you wanted to instead talk about more of the relative terms of strength, this is what we're talking about here. Have you ever heard of the different ranges for an exercise? Right? So, for a bench press, they'll say if you could bench 1.25 to 1.75 times your body weight, you're doing good. Yeah. Okay. If you could squat 2 to 2 and 1/2 times your body weight, you're doing good. How much you weighing? 165. So, 165 * 2 is 330 lbs, right? Yep. 330 on

3:53 the low end to another half of that on the high end. All right. Dead. Yeah. Deadlift. 2.55 to three times your body weight. You actually surpassed that, too. Yeah, I did. Up to 560, right? 560. But look what happens. Whether we're talking about relative or absolute strength standards, there's still an urging of progression, right? If you're not at those 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 numbers, can you push yourself further up towards them? Or if you are at the bottom end of this range, can you push yourself up towards the high end of this range? There's nothing saying like in your case that you can't exceed the top end of the range, but it's still always urging progression. This is Jesse right here. What is that? Five 560. 560. What is

4:39 this here? 430. 430. So really good numbers at 165 lb body weight. We talk about people being incredibly strong. Now, stay tuned because again, how did somebody like Jesse who isn't the biggest man in the face of the earth, let's face it, get to be as strong as he did? Because he knew how to train strength with an eye towards longevity. Even if he was only in his late 20s and early 30s when he did it, cuz I want to share the same thing with you guys. Now, I have a push-up question for you. If you do a push-up and you weigh 160 lbs, you're actually lifting 120 lbs of body weight. So that means you're lifting 75% of your body because your feet are in contact with the ground when you do that push-up. If you started out being able to do only six push-ups and then you could do 12 and then you could do 15 and

5:24 then you could do 20, are you getting stronger? Yeah. The answer is yes, you are getting stronger. But are you building strength? I wouldn't say so. See, there's a difference. You might be getting stronger at an exercise or you might even be getting a little better at the exercise, but are you building strength? Your goal, no matter how old you are, is that you need to be able to build and maintain strength because every decade that you live, you're going to lose strength. You actually lose more strength and you lose muscle size. But once you start hitting your 40s and 50s and 60s, you're losing about 5 to eight or 9% of your strength every decade. That's a lot. Yeah, it sucks cuz I can actually tell you that it's happening with me and it also happens with muscles as well. You lose some of your muscle mass. So, your goal is to be as strong

6:09 as possible, and the only way to do that is to continue to lift heavier weights. Because if I told you 120 lb push-up, and we equated to a bench press, 120 lb, 120 lb bench press, is that that impressive? Not really. But if you told me, well, I could do it 12 times. Okay, I could do it 20 times. Okay, I could do it 40 times. Like, it's fine, but it's not that impressive because the again the strength load, the amount you're actually lifting is not impressive. So whether you lift more and more reps doesn't really represent absolute strength. Would you say that's muscle endurance more? It becomes more muscle endurance. Yeah. Yeah. So I'd rather see you learn how to get stronger. One to eight. This is where the tension is strong enough to apply that stimulus to

6:55 keep you gaining strength even as your body wants to lose strength. Okay? You got to be in this range. But for longevity, watch what happens. As you train in this range, there's always going to be something we call the zone of risk and then the safety net. So, when we're talking about one to eight, when Jesse was just starting out in his 20s, this safety net was pretty wide and this zone of risk was really sort of reserved for just the single rep efforts here. Why is that? Because whenever you're near your max effort, anything can happen. What we just had Swede Burns speak at our event. He dropped a 550 lb bench press on his chest, broke his back. Like there's risk when you're lifting anything that heavy, that close to your max. So no matter how old you are, you're always going to have that risk. But for the most part, those doubles, triples, four, five, six,

7:41 seven, all those rep counts are going to be pretty safe for you to do. But as you get older, this is what happens. That zone of risk starts to broaden, creep up. It creeps up. The safety net is still here, though. There's plenty of opportunity for you to lift five, six, seven, eight reps, which is really good for stimulating that tension overload that creates strength and muscle size, by the way. But that zone of risk becomes a little bit broader. So the singles, doubles, and triples start to become a little bit more difficult for you to handle, especially in your 40s, 50s, and 60s. Mostly because the amount of stress that that could put on your joints to handle that type of weight becomes a little bit sometimes hard to recover from. Now, I'm not saying that there's not people out here who did what we're going to talk about to prepare themselves for those weights. They can

8:27 handle those a lot better than others can. There's certainly people out there that can handle these rep ranges for a lot longer period of time. But in general, if we're talking in generality, this becomes a little bit more problematic. That being said, while strength is everything, it's not the only thing. And this is the difference when we're talking about training for longevity and keeping your strength and building your strength. There's only one way to do it. And I want you guys to pay close attention here because this is something that we use a lot in athletics. It's called the strength pyramid. And here's how it goes. At the bottom of everything we do is strength, right? It's the bottom of the pyramid. It's the base of support. How do we keep and build as much strength as possible because everything above that improves. If you're looking at what's next, we talk about hypertrophy. That's the building of muscle. We just talked about how

9:13 important both of those are in terms of longevity, especially as you're aging. Especially as you age, because you're going to lose both of them. as we hit our 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, it starts to really rapidly decline. Well, the good thing about hypertrophy and strength is that they feed back and forth to each other, right? If you build muscle, you generally can build more force producing capabilities, so you increase your strength. Usually, as you increase your strength, there's some carryover to an increase in hypertrophy. So, they feed back and forth to each other. Next up the chain, though, is something called power. And power by definition requires your ability to exert force but over a faster period of time. In other words, you can more quickly explosively exert your power and and demonstrate your force capabilities. Well, obviously if you increase your strength, you're

9:59 feeding directly into that equation. So, you're increasing your power. So, we know that focusing on strength will have an increase on power as long as you're training for that. And you should your SAQ, you know what that is? Strength, agility, and quickness. Speed, agility, and quickness. Ah, almost. But it does benefit from strength, right? That strength feeds right into this. Because if we're talking about being fast, running speed, I can run faster if I can exert more force into the ground to propel myself into that next stride. And that comes from strength, getting stronger legs. Yes. I could actually maybe produce more force to increase my stride length to make me appear faster. Also, again, through strength, agility, and quickness. If I want to plant and go into this direction, if I'm weak, right? If I go and I plant my foot and my leg

10:44 and my quads are not that strong, as I start to move my momentum in this direction, it takes too long for me to absorb that cuz I can't quickly turn around and explosively push back in the other direction. Or in that case, with momentum, you'll actually move too far. Too far, and then my body's lost control and I can't get back there. So speed, agility, and quickness all improve when I'm strong because I could get in there, have all the strength in my leg to quickly push back in the opposite direction. Yeah. Skill work. Now, when we talk about the highest level of the pyramid for me, let's talk about baseball. I don't care if you have the greatest skill and have great hand eye contact, be able to make contact with every pitch that's thrown your way. Batting 100. Well, well, you'd be batting a thousand. Thousand, right? You're off on your percentages here, Jess. The fact is though, if you only roll the ball the second base because

11:30 you have no strength to get it into the outfield or, god forbid, over the wall, no one's ever going to put you on their team. Right. Right. You need to have strength to be able to hit the ball far and hard. However, all this is a lie. And if this is how you've been training and if you're looking at an eye towards longevity, I'm going to hammer away at strength and I'm going to do some hypertrophy work and I might even be training like an athlete like Jeff says and looking at these other things too and trying to improve. It's all a lie because we're not talking about a pyramid. We're talking about a tree. And the only thing that maintains the strength of the tree is the root system that sits under the surface that no one ever sees. I don't care how big that tree is. If the roots are damaged and dried out and rotted out, at some point

12:16 that tree is going to fall over. And often times the biggest tree is the one that makes the most damage. Yeah. Right. Because it was built on a shaky foundation. That tree got huge, but it had no strength and foundation. And therefore, when it got injured, it was pretty bad. Yeah. So, the only way to build real strength with an eye to longevity is to make sure that you're focusing on this because your flexibility, your mobility, and your stability are the true foundation of where you want to focus if you want to build lasting strength. How do you test that? If you take a 400 lb squatter and you put them on a Bosu and tell them to do it again, the likelihood that they could do that exercise safely is likely

13:03 very very low. Why? Because I've taken your stability away. If I can take away your strength by manipulating one thing that's not based on just your strength, then I haven't really gotten to the foundation of what I need to focus on. your foundation is in these things because as long as I can cut out some degree of flexibility or mobility or stability and your strength suffers, then you aren't really truly that strong. Here's another example. If your thoracic mobility sucks because your posture is like this, how do you overhead press? How do you get to the 200lb overhead press? You probably can't. you're never going to be able to because if I can't extend through the thoracic spine to give myself the leverage to realize that full strength, then I'm not going to be able to get to

13:50 those numbers that maybe my body's capable of, but I'm undermining it because I don't have this. So, when we talk about what your real strength is, that realized strength, the thing that you see every time you go to the gym, it is your absolute strength minus the weak roots. How much mobility do you lack? How much stability do you lack? How much of that flexibility are you lacking that's taking away from your absolute strength and leaving you with a realized strength that's less than it is? You go back to these numbers, the 100, 200, 300, 400, 500. I bet you that 98% of you went can't hit these five numbers, maybe even 99%. But if you focused on those three elements of flexibility, mobility, and stability, you could get way closer

14:36 to these numbers than you are right now. In other words, that strength is in you. It just necessarily isn't being realized because you're having an inattention to the stability, flexibility, mobility. Now, people ask again, how did Jesse get to those numbers? Go ahead. Well, first thing that we did was we worked on flexibility, mobility, and stability to build a strong base to where but specifically your posture sucked. Oh, that was terrible. Right. So, Jesse came in, you saw his posture was horrible. We worked on posture even when it was skinny Jesse. Like weak skinny Jesse when people are like, "He needs to get stronger. He needs to put on size." I understand that, but he needs to put it on the right way. And same thing for you. You can't just rush to push heavier and heavier loads if you don't pay attention to the cracks in the foundation. What else did you do? Uh,

15:23 mobility wise. Oh, mobility. We worked on my shoulders and we worked on my hips. Those were the two big biggest areas that I was lacking. And then stability wise, your core training. He wasn't just doing crunches. No, we were doing anti-extension, anti-rotation. So, the the ability to prevent your body from moving in space. So, if you were to, let's say, hold a band and step out, it wants to pull you back in that direction. We worked on allowing Jesse to maintain stability and control without letting his core be controlled for him. All these things came together to produce a stronger version inside because no one was seeing anything that impressive at that point which allowed for a straight linear path up pretty much in terms of your strength gains. Yes. And those strength gains happen over a pretty brief period of time when you look at the big picture. And now when you look at his levels of strength,

16:09 they really rival people that are much bigger than him. Again, exceeding a three and a half times bodyweight deadlift at his body weight of 165 pounds. So, the point here, guys, is if you do this, these numbers might be a lot more realistic than you think. If you want to see some exercises and mobility drills that can go a long way towards correcting some of these stability, flexibility, mobility losses, you're going to want to make sure you check out this video over here. I also have another one that does that that you can do just with a series of exercises in your own home that you can watch over here. And also, we have full programs and supplements available over at athletex.com. All right, guys. See you soon.