Strength Training Basics For The 40+ Year Old Rider

As you get older, strength training changes from a “good to do” to a “must do” status. Losing your strength, muscle and power are all realities for the 40+ year old rider and strength training is the best way to slow that process down. This is the #1 tactic for riders who want to do this for a lifetime - get and stay strong and you’ll avoid age-related physical decline for as long as possible.   Plus, improving your strength, power and muscle mass can help improve performance and reduce your risk of injury, so it helps now and acts as insurance against future losses. And while a lot of things can help, if you want to maximize your results there are some basic principles that the 40+ year old rider should be observing. First, almost anything can “work” but it eventually stops working and it may not build the strength and fitness you need for riding. The goal is to follow a training program that will help us on the path towards riding for a lifetime: improving our MTB specific fitness and our overall longevity/ health. With that in mind, here are some basic guidelines to help you with designing or choosing a training program. Podcast Notes: 2-4 days a week is plenty and the specific number depends on how much you are riding and your ability to recover. The more you are riding and the more important your performance the fewer days you will lift. The more you are trying to focus on strength training/ building muscle the more often you need to lift. So this breaks down to 2 days a week during the riding season and 3-4 days a week in the off season depending on time available and goals. You want to focus on big, compound movements but doing some isolation exercises won’t make you dysfunctional and can be beneficial in some cases. You want to focus on getting stronger or doing more volume with the main movement patterns and the exercises that train them - Squat, Hinge, Push, Pull, Carry and Rotate.I’d also break them up into unilateral and bilateral exercises But doing some isolation exercises like curls and tricep extensions can help with total body isometric strength as well as help with muscle building/ preservation. You want to use a variety of set and rep schemes, with the bulk of them focusing on the 2-4 sets of 3-8 reps.  2-4 sets is enough volume to build strength and power without excessive fatigue. 3-8 reps covers the strength and power end as it gets into the hypertrophy end of things, giving you a variety of training stimuli to pick from. I’d recommend 80% of your training falling in this range and the other 20% falling into the higher rep ranges, going up to 20-30 reps. I don’t recommend spending time in the 1-2 rep range as the risk to benefit ratio isn’t high enough for me to be comfortable with recommending to most riders. You don’t need to train to failure to see results and IMO it should be avoided as a 40+ year old rider. There is a lot of science that tells us that you don’t need to train to failure (or beyond) to see results. You can train to near failure and see the same results while also saving your body some wear and tear and also lowering your injury risk. Training to within 1-3 reps of failure is plenty to see results. This usually occurs when you start to slow down the concentric portion of the exercise, so as long as you go until you start to slow down then you are fine. Leaving 3-1 Reps In Reserve (RIR) also helps avoid injury since the closer you get to failure the more likely you are to see a technical breakdown that can lead to an acute or overuse injury. Don’t use bodypart training and instead focus on total body or upper body/ lower body splits. Using bodypart training split (where you train the body by body parts like Chest, Back, Legs, Biceps, ect.) is a great way to build muscle but not the best way to build functional strength and power. Like I mentioned before, you want to focus on training movement patterns and so you want to divide your workouts based on those movement patterns.