He’s 79 and getting stronger every week

The fastest way to lose quality of life as you age is to let your muscles atrophy. In your middle years, this just looks like higher body fat, stiffness, and a decline in athleticism and energy. But as you continue ageing, it starts to look worse and worse. Loss of bone density, muscle wasting, and a steep decline in basic functional mobility well before it’s necessary. What I wish everyone knew was this. You do not need to be young and fit, all live in a gym to get all the benefits of regular strength training. In fact, just a few minutes of the right effort a few times a week at home is enough to reverse all this age-related decline, make you stronger, build muscle tissue, increase your metabolism, get you leaner, increase your mobility, and utterly change the trajectory of your physical wellbeing. I’ve had plenty of students in their 60s and even in their late 70s absolutely crushed with this approach.
Are they doing handstand pushups and front levers? No. Are they getting stronger every week, feeling the best they ever have and seeing their body transform into a younger version before their ass? Yes. In this video, I’m going to show you how. We’re going to go through the basic theory of how to build strength fast while staying safe and uninjured, especially as an older person or someone who’s completely untrained. Then with the help of Philip, my 79-year-old student, I’m going to take you through a real training demo that you can follow along at home, do this today, see for yourself how this works. If you’re younger than Philip, then there’s no excuses. The most frustrating thing I see as a coach is the people that most need to be doing this sort of work, not doing it because they think they aren’t ready for it. When will you be ready to start training properly?
Because the thing about strength is that they will not magically appear by you walking into a gym or a fitness class. If it were that easy, then every rep you’ve ever done of bringing spoon to mouth to eat would leave you with massive forearms and biceps. The only way to get yourself to a position where you are strong enough to work hard is by working hard. At some point, you need a signal to your body to actually change. And the only way to send that signal is by working near enough to your limit that it tells your body something needs to happen. The status quo won’t do. We need to adapt. It doesn’t matter if you’re 20 years old and fit or 80 years old and frail. It’s still the same mechanism. And so while we’re all somewhere on a broad spectrum of strength and ability, somewhere on that spectrum is your limit.
And so to progress, you just need to find yours and start working there so that you improve it. There’s no prep for that work. You just start. Okay, but what about injury? I think the biggest thing that stops people, especially older people, diving in and starting heavy strength training is a fear of getting hurt and it is valid. But what are your options? Either you do nothing and continue to get slightly weaker and more injury prone every month, or you start pushing to find your limit, see how your body reacts, and over time, push it to get stronger and stronger. Here’s a really important thing I think you need to remember right now. If you’re not that strong, then by definition, you’re not capable of producing the sort of forces that you’re worried about getting hurt from. Scaling to 100% max effort for you right now is probably going to be a far cry from what max effort looks like for me at 29 years old with over a decade of consistent, intense strength training experience behind me.
You’re not going to be doing weighted one umpchin up eccentrics like this. Maxing out for you might look like both feet on the floor, guiding yourself through a chin up with barely any weight on your arms. But as long as the work is at your limit or close enough to it, you will signal your body to grow. One really good thing about getting the load from body weight training is that when you learn to do it properly, you’re always in control of the difficulty, which means that rather than working under a really heavy barbell that you could get stuck under that doesn’t care about your body at all, with body weight training, you can just shift your position and suddenly there’s zero load. When you’re feeling ready to push harder, you can scale up. If you feel like you’re about to stamp something, you can back off at a moment’s notice.
I think at the end of the day, there is no perfectly safe way to get stronger. There is no guarantee that you’ll never experience any injuries in your training career. In fact, it’s very unlikely that you won’t. But as I said, what’s the alternative? The best thing that you can possibly do is train smart, make what you do count, listen to your body, and manage issues as they come up, because there’s only one surefire way to take that accelerating slope downhill, and that’s by not trying at all. If you’re just going through the motions and never pushing your limit, you may be very safe for now, but you may as well be sitting on the couch. When you do this right, in other words, when you just do the intense work needed, it doesn’t take long to get a result. Again, you could rep out bicep curls with a spoon all day, every day, and never stimulate any muscle growth.
But if you spend a few minutes struggling for your life to move your body through space as hard as you possibly can, that small amount of time has a massive effect. And back to this point about injury, less is so much more for this reason. The limiting factors, you’re getting crazy results is not how much you can train. It’s how much you can recover. If I could get more results by training more, I would. But every time I signal to my muscles to grow by training hard, I need to go and let them recover from that training and do the growth. So if you work with enough intensity constantly at your strength limit, 40 minutes a week is more than enough to progress and we’ll give your body ample time to recover, rebuild, and hopefully stay injury free. Let’s look at how to do that.
With Philips help, I’m going to show you how to apply this to the row, the horizontal pulling movement that we use in our system to build all the way from doing this to at the high level things like front levers and front lever pulls. Before we dive into the how to, if you want to learn the rest of the movements and see how they all scale from the end goal down to zero, I’ve put them all into a guide. You can download that below using the link in the description. All right. So Phillip’s going to be doing this demonstration on the rings, but regardless of what equipment you have, there’s a way to do this. So if you have rings, great. If not, TRX will work, a hip height parallel bar. You can try using a sturdy table. Or the best at home method is probably to use a bedsheet, tie knot, put it through your doorframe like this, grab two parts and it’s exactly like using the rings.
Try it this way for now. Once you start getting results and get hooked, you can always go and buy rings later. What we’re going to be doing is essentially a body weight row, but we’re going to modify it so that we can scale the intensity up and down to find our strength limit, work there the whole time. And this is how in just a couple of minutes, a week, we can get enough mechanical tension to drive muscle and strength gain, regardless of starting strength level. So when I train this movement, it looks something more like this, that’s up high end of the spectrum. What Phillip’s going to be doing is further down. Now I actually had to go back a couple months and get an older video because Philip, his training now has progressed beyond this sort of beginner level. So this is Phillip from the start of the year.
What you’re going to do is grab the rings or whatever you’re using as your anchor point. And so the movement itself is a row where we’re pulling our elbows down towards the ground, keeping our hips roughly level with our shoulders. So our body moves horizontally like this relative to our anchor point where our hands are. Pretty simple. If we get elbows past our body, that’s a rep. Now, what you’ll notice Philip’s doing is it’s not just like going through the motions, breezy row. What we talked about just before is you need to be scaling up to hit your strength limit to really get the intensity that we need to stimulate actual changes in our body growth. And so what Philip’s doing is subtle, but it’s really important. What makes this movement difficult is the distance between your hands and your shoulders. So the further you push the rings horizontally this way towards your feet, the harder the movement gets.
And so you can do this experiment yourself right now. Get to the top of the movement like Philip gets to here and then rather than lowering, you push the rings or the bedsheets or the table or whatever it is away in this direction so that your shoulders relative to where your hands are, move in this direction. The larger that horizontal gap becomes, the more torque is going to be required at your shoulder to keep yourself in position. And so the more force your muscles are going to have to generate to keep you there. And eventually if you keep increasing it, you’re going to exceed the strength threshold of those muscles of your upper back that are working to keep your elbow down and you’re going to start to figure your hands getting pride away from you, your arms getting pride open. And so that’s what Philip’s doing here rather than lowering.
He starts pushing the rings away and it might be subtle when you’re watching, but it’s enough to make it so difficult that he’s actually unable to hold himself up. And in the same way as he rose up, he’s trying to push the rings away each time. As soon as it gets too easy for him, he tries to push them away further, meaning that he has to really, really try hard to pull his elbows back to keep moving forward. See the same thing again here. You can see the rings moving, diverging horizontally, forcing himself down. Now Phillip’s done like a couple reps there, that’s it for the week. The approach we use is once you’ve cooked, once you can’t give it 100% anymore or you don’t want to, you’ve probably done enough to stimulate growth for the week. And so that’s it. That’s an entire set of training.
If this gets too hard and you’re not even pushing the rings away and it’s still too difficult, what you can do is walk your feet backwards, which shifts the loading and puts more weight on your feet, meaning less on your hands. And you can do exactly the same thing. And as you get stronger and it gets easier, you can move the opposite direction where you get your body more and more underneath the rings as you load more and more of your body weight onto your hands. And these are the early levels. This is all we use. It’s just simply varying that horizontal distance between hands and shoulders as we row to work as hard as possible. Once it gets really too easy, then we can start to transition up to progressions like front lever tux, which is what Phillip’s starting to work on now, which is very exciting.
And so doing this, you can see how everything actually scales down to zero. Phillip’s doing exactly the same movement pattern that I’m training when I’m doing my front lever variations, but he’s just working at a level that works for him. He’s still getting the same relative intensity. He’s still sending the same signal to his body, but his body’s able to handle it. And from his own words, he’s never felt better doing this. So it is pretty simple and that’s the point. You want to minimise the variables and just have one focus, which is rowing those elbows back as hard as you possibly can because the better you get at doing that, the stronger you’re going to be, the bigger your muscles are going to be. And with this movement, particularly that’s going to overhaul your posture, feel your back out, make you feel incredible. Run the experiment.
Do this once a week. Go for as long as you want, then stop. If you’re not feeling stronger at it or noticing real improvements in your posture and how your body feels within a month, then feel free to disregard everything I say. If you are, then make a commitment to learning this stuff and actually implementing it into your routine. This is a sixth of all I do. It doesn’t need to be that complex or time consuming at all. In fact, the less it is, the better. Be like, Philip, make it happen. I’ll be here when you’re ready.