Yeah, I know, you guys are thinking "What, another article for the old Guys here at the Blog?" Well yeah, that's right. Because nobody is getting younger, and if you don't look after your own fitness, some some health aide will in a nursing home.
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Hey There,
Ten years of running my over 40 fitness studio in New Zealand, and there is one number that keeps turning up.
Two and a half.
That is the average number of sessions a week our people actually do. Not five. Not six.
Not the punishing schedule you see all over the internet every January.
Two and a half sessions a week, year after year.
I know. It is a terrible slogan. Nobody is putting THAT on a t-shirt.
But here is what I can tell you after watching it happen for a decade.
Every single person who holds that average gets phenomenally stronger than they were the day they started.
Their muscle tone changes.
Their range of movement opens back up.
And the things they had quietly stopped mentioning start coming back.
Getting off the floor. Standing up out of a low chair without pushing off the arms. Carrying the shopping in one trip. Going up the stairs and arriving at the top able to speak.
All of that, from two and a half sessions a week.
And notice it is two and a half, not two. Some weeks are three. Some weeks are one.
That matters, because people are so hard on themselves about this.
You have a rough week, you get to Friday having managed one session instead of two, and you write the whole week off as wasted. I hear it constantly.
That is not how muscle works.
The session is not where you get stronger.
The session is where you break the muscle down.
The getting stronger happens afterwards, while you are asleep, eating your dinner, puttering about doing nothing in particular.
The strength work is only one half of the equation. Recovery is the other half, and it is not the lazy half.
So one session in a week is not a failed week.
It is a session, plus a lot of repair time.
And a quiet week here and there, where life takes over and you do very little, will not undo you.
Quite often it is exactly what your joints were asking for.
So the odd week off is not the problem, the six months off is. And that is the only catch in the whole thing.
Imagine you trained hard for six months. Fifty sessions, roughly twice a week, genuinely good work.
Then you stopped for six months. Life got in the way, the weather turned, the shoulder played up....
At the end of that year you would be almost exactly where you started. All that effort, handed straight back.
Now imagine instead you did two sessions a week for fifty two weeks, worked around the injury, same effort in any given week.
No heroics, no six week blitz, nothing you would even tell anyone about.
Twelve months later you would not recognise yourself.
Same person. Same weekly workload. Completely different year.
Consistency is not the boring bit you put up with before the results turn up. Consistency IS the result. Everything else is decoration.
One thing I should clear up, because it lands in my inbox most weeks.
Nobody is asking you to turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger. There is no oiled posing routine at the end of this.
You will not wake up one morning unable to scratch your own back, do up your bra or having to go through doorways sideways.
Muscle on that scale takes years, a frankly upsetting amount of chicken out of plastic containers, and a level of dedication that ruins holidays for everybody involved.
We are not building. We are replacing.
From your thirties onwards, if you do nothing about it, you lose somewhere between three and eight percent of your muscle every decade, and it speeds up after sixty.
That is not a scare story, it is just accounting. Let that tick along quietly for three or four decades and one day you notice you are using two hands for a job you used to do with one.
Every session you do is a bit of that handed back. You are not building something new and ridiculous. You are going and collecting what was already yours.
So this week, do not plan five sessions. Plan two.
Then do the same next week. And the week after that. If one of those weeks turns into a single session, that still counts. That is the whole thing.
I just want you to be kind to yourself, and not put too much pressure on missing a session.
Normal people are doing amazing with just 2 and a half sessions a week. If they can, you can too.
Gavyn
