In my dreams, I coach in a system like the Chinese, in which I have a few dozen elite lifters handed to me between the ages of 18-20 after they’ve spent the last 8-10 years training under excellent coaches and are already world-class lifters at this young age. These athletes are professional weightlifters, with no obligations or responsibilities in life beyond snatching and clean & jerking more weight. Additionally, their compliance with my prescriptions would be closely approaching 100%. I would also have several assistant coaches who were extremely well-educated and experienced.

As it turns out, this is not much like the situation I’m actually in, which I suspect is essentially the same as that of a great many individuals who make a living in a similar fashion. Most of my lifters and other clients have jobs, school, families and most started lifting as adults. As requested by some of our readers, this article will focus on training weightlifters who start and lift as adults rather than the supple, malleable promising young brats we’d all prefer to be and to coach.

With such athletes, we have quite a few considerations to make that we wouldn’t have to worry about with youngsters, such as limited training time due to job, school and family obligations, decreased flexibility and mobility, limitations—either physical or psychological—from past injuries, an often stunning collection of bad habits, and the inevitable reduction in recovery and work capacity that accompanies increasing age.

Those individuals who arrive at weightlifting with some kind of previous athletic experience often have decent strength bases unlike young kids. This can be both beneficial in some respects and a real problem in others. On the one hand, it’s less you have to work on; on the other hand, that strength is rarely specific enough to be entirely applicable, and strong individuals typically have egos that make them resistant to using appropriately light weights for periods of technical instruction and practice. Managing this is really an issue of being confident in what you’re teaching and the resulting respect your athletes and clients have for you as a coach. If your athletes don’t listen to you, check your own confidence, ability and presence before you start blaming them.

Part of this confidence and respect is being honest enough to admit when you don’t know something—don’t try to make something up. If you don’t know, tell your athlete and let him or her know that you will find out.

Of course with multiple problems present, you won’t have the luxury of working on them individually—you will find yourself trying to manage correction of all of them together. This can be a bit overwhelming, but you can make it a bit easier by initially considering them all individually and then adjusting as needed when you attempt to bring everything together. That is, what you may decide is the perfect prescription to correct some flexibility limitations may become a bit excessive when you add in strength work, technique work and whatever else you’re doing. Consequently, you will need to cut it back a bit to allow some time for the rest.

Past Injuries

Limitations imposed by past injuries can be some of the toughest problems to cope with. Most often, you’ll be dealing with many years of reduced range of motion, scar tissue accumulation, compensatory movement patterns, weakness, and even fear of certain positions and movements.

Although we’d all love to be experts in every area (Why don’t you call a specialist, Joe? I am a specialist. At what? At everything.) I recommend seeking the assistance of an actual expert when working with significant problems. Of course, do your best to help your athletes and clients find a medical professional with experience treating athletes, not just dying post-hip-replacement geriatrics.

Try to communicate as much as possible with that professional about what you’re seeing and what you’re doing in the gym to give him or her a clearer understanding of the problem and what they’re attempting to prepare the client for. Video of a dysfunctional movement pattern, for example, can be very helpful to a physical therapist or chiropractor who would otherwise not be able to view such a movement and be forced to rely largely on descriptions by the patient, which you probably know as well as I do are rarely accurate.

In addition to referring your clients to the appropriate medical professional, do what you can to educate yourself about the problem and find possible corrective strategies you can safely and effectively implement in the gym. The internet offers a vast amount of quality information, often at no cost—you have no excuse to not at least give it a shot.

In all cases, be conservative when attempting to introduce or reintroduce movements or positions to these clients. No matter what the nature of the limitation—physical or psychological—a more gradual progression will be safer and more effective. Keep your perspective long term and avoid trying to push too hard too fast because you or your client is simply impatient. Remember, the condition more than likely took years to develop—you’re not going to fix it in three training sessions.

Decreased Mobility & Flexibility

Aside from reduced mobility and flexibility accompanying past injuries, you will encounter these problems with people who have developed them in the absence of any injury—either due to being sedentary or simply engaging in physical activity that never posed any kind of significant flexibility demands (e.g. running, cycling, walking, etc).

I’ve read (on the internet, of course) experts who claim adults cannot improve flexibility. I don’t know where this notion comes from, but it was certainly not the same planet I work on. I have helped plenty of clients in their 40s and 50s increase their flexibility dramatically over the last several years. Perhaps whatever literature these guys got the idea from referred to some kind of “study” involving underpaid, unmotivated physical therapists “stretching” old people in assisted living facilities over a period of 30 days. It would not be terribly surprising to me if no significant changes in flexibility were observed in such circumstances.

Achieving considerable improvements in flexibility can be an extremely long, frustrating process, but it is entirely possible in all cases. Again, keep things in perspective—if you have a 50 year-old client who hasn’t stretched or done any kind of flexibility-requiring activity for 30 years, you shouldn’t be surprised to find their range of motion doesn’t suddenly increase 25% after a week of stretching. Patience and consistency are the two most important elements of improving flexibility.

Never push stretches or mobility drills into the range of pain. Discomfort is fine—if it’s comfortable, it’s probably not doing anything. Mike Boyle likes to say that “Does it hurt?” is a yes-no question. Any qualification that accompanies a “no” response means the real answer is yes. If you hurt your client stretching, guess what? Not only will you fail to make the progress that you could, you will probably lose your client.

For individuals who work sedentary jobs, encourage them to get up and move around every hour or two whenever possible. Performing some basic dynamic warm-up type movements throughout the day will do absolute wonders for progress. Such a quick routine upon rising every morning will also be helpful.

While flexibility and mobility are working their way to ideal (or at least to necessary minimums for safety), modify training to avoid unsafe positions and movements. For example, those with limited shoulder and/or thoracic spine mobility or reduced arm adductor/internal rotator flexibility will often experience sharp pain when jerking. As a trainer or coach, pain during a movement should be a pretty straightforward indication to you that the movement should be stopped and some kind of assessment and corrective plan implemented. Alternatives can be used during this period of correction, and periodic re-assessment can be performed to determine when the excluded exercise can be re-introduced. In the jerk example, often these same people will have no pain during pressing or even push pressing, so these can be used. We may also do jerk supports, jerk recoveries, jumping squats, jerk split drops, jerk dip squats, jerk springs, and lunge and other unilateral leg strength exercises. There are always alternatives to doing nothing at all. Be creative and work around the problem while actively working to correct it.

Decreased Recovery Capacity

Unfortunately, as age and wisdom accumulate, the ability to recover from all the great new training methods you’ve learned decreases. This paradox is particularly aggravating, but short of pharmaceutical intervention, there is little we can do about it (and even the effectiveness of such intervention will continue decreasing over time).

Quite simply, a lifter in his or her forties will not be able to manage the same volume of training stress as a lifter in his teens or twenties. While the trend is consistent, the actual training volume and intensity each athlete can effectively manage is very individual. This is something, as with athletes of any age, that you will need to experiment with somewhat. Start conservatively, evaluate, and build up as tolerated rather than aiming high initially. Starting with what turns out to be excessive volume or intensity will make the process of determining what works much longer and more difficult than necessary. A week of excessive volume will take a week or even more sometimes to recover from, which means you’ve lost that much time (and possibly more) to evaluate the effects of the program as the athlete’s response to training during that period will not accurately reflect its effect on him or her, but rather the effect it has with whatever degree of systemic fatigue is present.

In addition to age, we can also consider bodyweight when trying to determine effective levels of volume—the larger the athlete, the less volume he or she will be able to handle. Again, the degree of change will be very individual, but expect to modulate the volume to some degree in accordance to bodyweight.

In addition to adjustments to the training program, lifestyle and nutrition elements should be emphasized to maximally utilize the recovery capacity that does exist. Sleep and other stress-reducing exercises are the number one priority (as they are for anyone). Often older adults have conditioned themselves for many years to survive on stunningly little sleep, and often that amount decreases as they age. This should be emphatically discouraged—these individuals are not growing in the sense that kids are, of course, but they will be constantly remodeling their bodies in response to training stress. This can only be successful in the presence of adequate rest.

Limited Training Time

Adults generally have far more responsibilities and obligations than their younger counterparts, and accordingly, are less likely to have flexible schedules and extensive tracts of time available for training. Sometimes this is due simply to poor time management and more time for training can be recovered through restructuring days and weeks; but sometimes it is entirely legitimate and it is an obstacle that will have to be worked around.

Fortunately, this decrease in available time for training mirrors the decrease in recovery capacity, and as a consequence, you may not actually be losing time you needed for more training. In fact, such scheduling restrictions can sometimes be a blessing, in that it naturally prevents the overly enthusiastic coach or athlete from prescribing or performing more work than can be managed.

Masters-age lifters will often make more progress training as little as 2-3 days per week. Don’t be afraid to try less rather than more. You may also find that with more training days, it will be helpful to more dramatically modulate volume and intensity from day to day. That is, while you may program 3 consecutive days, the middle, and possible the third day as well, will be far lower volume and intensity than the first.

Bad Habits

Although there are bad habits of more than one nature that could potentially limit the progress of a lifter (foil-smoking cocaine, for example), in this case, I’m talking about technical habits. A more advanced age means more possible time to practice incorrect movements and consequently more difficulty in breaking them. Since this article is supposed to be about beginning weightlifting as an adult, this theoretically shouldn’t be a problem as the lifts haven’t been performed previously. However, this doesn’t mean an individual hasn’t performed other training in the gym with exercises that are somehow related enough to cause problems. The most obvious examples would be the basic strength lifts such as the squat, deadlift and press variations. Squatting and deadlifting habits in particular can be dramatic and tough to break, such as trying to reach your ass into an adjacent state when squatting, or leaning so far over the bar when deadlifting that your head slips up your ass.

Obviously corrections for technical problems will vary with the problem as well as the athlete, so they can’t be covered here. My book has quite a few you can try out. The basic approach, though, is to be patient and consistent, just like with flexibility work. You won’t fix a bad habit in one session—it can take weeks and months to correct certain habits.

Non-Compliance

There is nothing unique about adults with regard to compliance to a coach’s prescriptions other than the potential for age differentials to interfere. That is, occasionally an older adult will be resistant to listening to a younger coach. This is not something I’ve personally had a problem with, but I’ve seen it and heard others’ laments.

The advice for this problem is the same mentioned above with regard to the egos of strong people. If you’re not actually good at what you do, not confident, and not respectable, you will not have compliant athletes, no matter the ages involved. Fix the problem.

Easily the best way to ensure compliance is to deliver results. I realize this is a bit of a paradox, as it’s difficult to produce results if an athlete is not complying with your prescriptions. However, no one is 100% non-compliant (and I would hope that any such individuals would be summarily dismissed from your facility). Even with less than perfect compliance, a good program and good coaching will work to a significant extent. Use this success to prove to your athletes that you know what you’re doing rather than trying to talk them into it.

Finally, make it clear to your athletes that your effort and attention will be commensurate to their commitment and effort. Those athletes who are not willing to do what they need to do should not be receiving the same kind of coaching as your dedicated, hard-working, compliant athletes.

Bottom Line

Ultimately the key to success with weightlifting as an adult, either as a coach or the lifter, is to evaluate and program individually as you would with an athlete of any age. Obviously in a gym full of many lifters, you can’t completely individualize for every one. However, you can always be evaluating your lifters’ responses to their training and making individual adjustments to a general program. For example, at Catalyst Athletics, I write a program for the team that most lifters follow. A few of those lifters receive individualized work or modifications to the program as needed to address volume, schedule or technical needs. Then I write completely individual programs for other lifters who are at a high enough level to warrant it. I would love to write individual programs for all of them, but the reality is that many need essentially the same things anyway, and I simply don’t have the time even if they didn’t.

A helpful starting point is to write what you might consider the ideal program, without concern for being too heavy on the volume and intensity, and then pare it down to accommodate the needs of the adult lifter in question. Again, err on the side of too little rather than too much, and add things back in if tolerated.