Striving to improve with age

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Frank Wilhelmi - Simi Valley CA: Striving to improve with age, with fairly consistent success. 1/10/2010 Update - Now three months past the 70 year mark, I have retired from the missile business, working full time on making Seniorfitness.com the best it can be. The contest I was to enter never happened because of injuries, and after some research into why we beak more easily as we age, I changed my workout approach. I had seen information on Static Contraction Training (SCT) - an approach to building muscle that was outside the norm for your standard workout addict - but in July 09 I finally decided to buy the e-book and try it out. To my amazement, it solves many of the injury problems experienced by aging athletes, and it builds strength and muscle at an astounding rate, with a whole lot less effort. SCT was developed by Pete Sisco and is the result of several decades of experimentation aimed at optimizing the growth of muscle versus the effort spent in the gym. Bottom line - push/pull/lift the biggest weight you can hold for 5 seconds for one rep, in the strongest range of motion and then set it down - next exercise! He bills it as "25 seconds of work to gain all the muscle you want - guaranteed!" He alternates two workouts of 5 exercises each, with enough separation between days to insure complete recovery and regrowth. The one criteria for workout frequency - if you couldn't lift more on the next workout you didn't wait long enough. I started the routine on July 10, 09 by calibrating what I could hold for the 5 seconds, and a 4-day separation between workouts. As the weights increased with every workout, I would run into a failure to lift more and add another day of separation. Next time around I could lift more, just like Pete taught. For the dead lift, I calibrated with 315 lb on the first day, and every workout I up'd it 20 pounds until I got to 425lb. This got a bit scary, so I started increasing by only 10 pounds for the next workout. Below is a clip of my dead lift on New Years day 2010 when I finally got to 495 (10 plates on the bar - reasonably impressive for this 162 lb, 70-yr-old). I was so stoked by the milestone that I grabbed a guy in the gym to record it for posterity. At this point, my workouts are 10 days apart, so it is 20 days between dead lift attempts. The popular thinking is that a gap between workouts of this length would negate any growth stimulus - its not the case! Every time I go I'm stronger and bigger! You run into a lot of false information in this game, and the three-days-a-week for everyone is a classic example. I don't know when I will find a limit at this, but I haven't hit it yet. I plan to listen carefully to my body and proceed with caution. Note that this is completely separate from my aerobic training, and is strictly for maintaining strength and size. But with 10 days between strength workouts, there is plenty of time for other forms of aerobic exercise. Pete Sisco really has this technology figured out! SCT is as good as it gets for piling muscle on an aging body. He has clients far older than I that are still getting stronger as they age. Want to be strong in your old age? Buy this e-book and get started:Click Here! _________________________________________________________________________________ March 2008 - I'm a 68 year-old working Aerospace Engineer (with an eye toward retiring to specialize in the senior health field). I have been in the missile business since joining the Navy in 1957, but first started exercising and becoming interested in health and physiology at the age of thirty. I married my only and still wife Jo at 25, who thankfully puts up with my varied interests and ventures, have two terrific grown children and one granddaughter to date. I'm an investor in the Synergy Performance Health and Fitness chain, in the process of developing a set of seminars to teach the principles of life-long health to Synergy clients and prospective clients. I work a 36 hour week at Alliant Techsystems (aka ATK) and spend much of my free time working on this website. The balance I spend with family or teaching Christ and His Church to those wishing to become Catholic, which I came to in 1975, and have been an instrument of that process since. I'm an avid reader, especially the sciences and medical material, with a love for theology tossed in. I do woodwork for fun and am truly a home-body, love architecture and decorating - if I could afford a 12,000 square foot house, I would have one in a heartbeat. I work out generally three days/week, usually at lunchtime, and limit my workouts to under an hour. I cycle my workouts, changing up about every 8 - 10 weeks to start light and escalate the poundages and intensity for one of the multi-joint power lifts to try to get to a new personal best in some variation of squats, deadlifts or bench press. Some would consider that insane, but it seems like the natural thing to try for me. Within the last two years I have done some of my heaviest ever reps, and also picked up some pulled muscles that surprised the heck out of me. The theme of this bio is to highlight that I am at a crossroads; I am taking my future in a new direction as an advocate and spokesman for lifetime health and fitness. One way to demonstrate that commitment is to prepare for and enter a bodybuilding contest, to show how even a near-70 year-old body can be improved in a short time with existing technology, without illegal drugs. To that end I hired a trainer skilled at bodybuilding competition to lead me through the preparation and presentation skills. We are working toward a contest on July 19th in Culver City CA. Video clips of the preparation and the contest will be posted below as they unfold - I hope you find them at least a little inspiring. This clip is an introduction of Nick Estrada - professional trainer and competitive bodybuilder: On March 5th, 08, we video'd most of the Chest & Back day to chronicle the process of preparing for the competition on 7/19/08. Below are some of the shorter clips unedited. I plan to make sequential movie out of the clips and edit out the dumb stuff so the viewer can see the progress from month to month.

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18. Fitness: How To Choose The Right Lifetime Fitness Centre by Nicholas Tan Post Date: 04/18/2008 In reality, you really do not have to spend a lot of money on expensive health club or fitness centers memberships, treadmills, or the latest fitness gadget to get moving. However, some people find that if they make a monetary investment, they are more likely to follow through on fitness. Fitness centers are, basically, built to provide people the proper fitness equipments, trainin ...more...

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20. How A Cardio Heart Rate Monitor Helps You by Debra Shaffer Post Date: 11/09/2006 Why Have a Cardio Heart Rate Monitor? I recently finished a 12-week team fitness and weight loss program at my local gym, where I learned many valuable things about fitness training and how it relates to heart health and efficient workouts. I experienced first-hand the necessity of being able to watch your heart rate with an exercise heart rate monitor, while doing various speed and incl ...more...

21. What is the Best Cardio Machine for Your Workout? by Dan Patterson Post Date: 10/25/2006 I think this is an age-old question, but today I want to address what I consider to be the pros and cons of some of the main cardio machines out there. Each one has their benefits of course, but I think that each can also be used for different situations. So let's get started: Treadmills Ah, the ever popular idea of running in place. I've read many articles that state that running ...more...

22. Lifetime Fitness - What it is and How to Achieve it by Dan Patterson Post Date: 09/26/2006 One of the biggest concerns with most diets and other types of programs out there is that many of them are very hard if not almost impossible to maintain over a very long period of time. Many people worry about the bounce back effect that they experience after being on an especially restrictive diet. Others start a new workout program with all of the best intentions, but find themselves back to ...more...

23. healthy Habits Last a Lifetime by Mila Sidman Post Date: 09/18/2006 Starting a family fitness routine is a great way to set up your kids with a lifetime love of fitness and exercise, not to mention that it’s good for your health and waistline as well. Although most of us know the importance of exercise and physical fitness, life often gets in the way and exercise is often the last thing on your mind. However, it doesn’t have to be difficult to get your fa ...more...

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26. Excess Weight and Body Fats? Laugh Them All Off by Ismael D. Tabije Post Date: 03/03/2006 Have you ever heard of the truism “jokes are half meant”? If you have, do you believe in it? If you have not, then now, you have read of it and maybe if you read on, you’d be able to think of a joke of your own which could be half or full-meant. I gathered some of the most popular jokes on health and fitness over the Internet and after laughing about them, I thought maybe I could te ...more...

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28. Winning Your Weight Loss War For A Lifetime by Beth Scott Post Date: 10/31/2005 Are you fighting the uphill battle of weight loss? Stuck with not knowing who or what to listen to anymore? One person tells you one thing, the next tells you do the exact opposite. Who should you believe? There are so many weight loss diets and plans out there that it's growing increasingly harder to decide what actually works and what isn't even worth wasting your time on. You've go ...more...

29. The Third And Final Key For Achieving Your Lifetime Fitness Goal... by Tony Farrell Post Date: 10/16/2005 Before delving into 'Keys #3', the final and most important key to success in your muscle and fitness routine, I'd like to remind you about what the previous article discussed. In a previous article "Key #2", you were given a number of steps to follow. If you haven't received this article, I suggest you read that before reading this one here, as it will make what I'm talking a little more clear ...more...

30. Muscle and Fitness -- The Second Key To Achieving Your Lifetime ... by Tony Farrell Post Date: 10/16/2005 Lets discuss 'Key #2'. But just before that, I'd like to remind you about what the previous article discussed. In a previous article "Key #1", you were given ten steps to follow. If you haven't received this article, I suggest you read that before this one here as it will make what I'm talking a little more clear. You can access that article here: http://www.how-to-build-muscle-and-fitness. ...more...