My wife and I enjoy working out together. We are both 60 years old and in decent shape except we have totally neglected our lower bodies while doing weight training for the past 2 years (yeah, sadly, the same exercises). So now we've read the New Rules and are about to begin Break-In. My question: is there any reason for my wife not to do the same Break-In exercises that I do?
She can do the whole workout with you, at her own strength level. Not sure how strong she is, but based solely on her age, she might need to do the pushups on an incline, or the squats bodyweight or with the preset bars or with lighter dumbbells instead of the 45lb Olympic bar. But she can do the workout, just base her loads on her own strength.
Thanks for both replies. We're looking forward to starting the Break-in. Truth be told, we both may have to start the squats using our own body weight, just to get the balance and form correct.
We completed the first day, Workout A, of Break In. Although we have done what we refer to as "walking lunges" the 15 rep static lunges were a real challenge. I'm still a little wobbly going doen steps. We mostly worked on getting the form right, staying with our weight in the middle of our feet on squats, for example. It was a good tired feeling when we were done. Looking forward to Workout B on Wednesday.
Went great, actually much easier than 1st day since there was more upper body and abs and less leg, and we had been doing the former. We will continue with workout A and hope to strengthen legs. That static lunge is the killer. Then my wife will probably move on to Fat Loss 1. I was thinking about going to Strength 1 but, wow, it looked tough. Any opinion as to the best program to go to after Break-in?
Personally, I don't think it really matters. Just pick the one that you think you will enjoy the most and stick with it. It's the sticking-with-it that matters.
Keep working on that static lunge. It's so important to never loose the ability to come up from the floor on one leg. As we age it's easy to loose that ability and it WILL start to impact your daily life. So keep working on it. It will get easier!
I completed ten workouts of Break-in. Pam did 8 workouts as she went away for a week. I definitely needed to "break-in" my lower body, she needed break-in work on the upper body. We're both going to start FL1 next Monday. Will perhaps need to make some adjustments in the exercises as we work out at home, where we have a good bench, and a stack-weight station. We just added Swiss balls and a step-up. No place to do chin-ups and no place to hold the barball for squats, so I have to first lift the barbell. Also, from what I have read, a stronger spotter would be better for bench presses so I wouldn't have to lift the barbell off the bench rack. Any suggestions? I really want to try Hypertrophy but decided to do another more general conditioning with FL1. Plus, I'll have to buy some heavier plates to really do the low rep. exercises in Hypertrophy.
Just thought an update might be in order. We have completed 4 exercises in FL1, two As and (today) 2 Bs. Of course, the B workout with two deadlifts and the Bulgarian split squats thrown in is a killer. But we're getting the 15 reps. So far, just using body weight with the Bulgarians. As we move down to 12 reps, I'll try holding some dumbbells with the Bulgarians as I see FL2 has you press as you squat. That should be interesting. I'm jelly legged for a minute or two after the 3rd set of 15 reps with just body weight.
I also substituted a barbbell incline bench press for the dumbbell incline bench press because I only have dumbbells that go up to 25 lbs. and rather than do more than 15 reps I did three sets of barbell incline bench presses with 90 lbs. As we move to 12 reps I am going to increase the weight on the presses and deadlifts from 90 to 100 and see how that goes. Today was real tiring. No energy to do some extra ab work at the end as we had been doing previously: some front and side planks, twisters, etc. Still enjoying NROL.
New Rules . . . for women?
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