I have totally abandoned the notion of strength. The few times I’ve been injured lifting weights has always been when I was going heavy. I’m plenty strong enough for an old guy. Now I focus on physique goals. I want to be lean and muscular. So I am not a fan of your thought process.
I do think it’s important to have goals. For me, intensity and mixing up my routines have been the difference. I am also not a huge fan of steady state cardio like running because our bodies adapt pretty quickly to those activities and running is just too harsh on knees and hips. Having said that, my wife loves to run. Rather than increasing her distance, she focuses on increasing her pace. She runs about 10-15 5k’s a year and uses those as motivation.
I have also come to believe that recovery is very important. Especially as we age. Sleep, recovery and nutrition are critical to keeping us healthy and keeping us exercising for the long run. My biggest deficit is flexibility. I’ve never been flexible so I’ve always had a mental block to stretching.
What constitutes an injury for you when lifting heavy? Did you need a doctor, surgery?
I am not trying to be facetious here. I get injured, but I believe it’s nearly always some sort of tendinitis caused from overuse. It doesn’t require a doctor to treat, for me to think it’s an injury it must last more than 10 days, and it typically has taken from 1-6 months to get resolved.
I have never gotten injured from lifting too heavy a weight, maybe I am just too cautious about certain exercises. Dead lifts, fly machines, squats I could probably injure myself if I tried too heave a weight too soon. Bench pressing, I usually don’t have a spotter, so I never try and lift anything where I don’t know for sure I can lift it. And I seldom use free weights in any case. Most of the time I use nautilus machines, I have been lifting / exercising since about 16, in those days I did use free weights.
When you did get hurt lifting heavy, how heavy and what type of exercise? And in retrospect, did you think that maybe you didn’t have enough recovery time, had bad form or tried to increase weight too soon?
When I have gotten what I believe is tendinitis, in retrospect I could see what I was doing to have caused it. Most of the time it was some sort of cardio. My right shoulder tends to be “sensitive” to too much weight, not sure why. Meaning if I try to use a fly machine with the max weight I can move, my shoulder joints will feel annoyed for a couple of days. For a while a few years ago, it got bad enough where I had to alter how far back I could move the arms on the pec deck. Now I only move the arms one position back from neutral. A similar machine I am careful with is the Side Lateral Raise machine, for the same sort of reason, my shoulders can object.
Running is no doubt hard on feet, hips, knees and back. But too hard? I think it’s fairly easy to run too long or too often without proper recovery and to injure yourself. My brother when he was young started running and ignored pain, keep it up for a week, his knees had permanent damage. He was convinced the no pain to gain mantra was true. While for me, after I am warmed up, if I start getting pain I stop quickly. Try and figure out why I might be getting the pain.
I have read that running strengthen cartilage over time, granted, you can over do it. And in your case with a spinal injury, of course you wouldn’t even want to try it at all.
I have a friend I the health club, she is 77, she used to be an avid runner. She started to have a lot of knee pain. But she is compulsive, when I asked her questions, she was running 2-3 times a day. Now she bikes the same way, rides a bike to the health club, keeps a bike in her truck in case she gets an opportunity to bike, puts on 2000 miles a year on the bike. She is in pretty good shape, more flexible than I am, she can do splits, I can probably bike a longer distance, but I am 10 years younger. We exchanged phone numbers, I will likely go on a couple of rides with her this summer.
I am 66, I think that is older than you, personally I don’t think much about age holding me back. The biggest thing I have noticed is the whole recovery thing is longer. Yesterday I did 4.3 miles on the treadmill (2.3 miles running, the rest walking), walked around the dog park with my dog, then went back to mow the lawn. My Fitbit watch said I did 8.5 miles running / walking. When I do that sort of thing, my whole body aches all night long, but I am fine in the morning. Some ibuprofen and a hot epson salt bath really help, otherwise it’s hard to sleep. When I was younger, I didn't get that sort of reaction.