Late in December ’18 a new Fitness19 gym opened in Simi Valley; Jo and I joined and I (surprisingly) was hired as a Trainer. I finally have a hands-on opportunity to pass on my expertise in optimizing the aging process, a major part of which is Strength Training. I get to teach clients how to get stronger as they get older and to lower the risk of age-related diseases through nutrition, exercise, supplementation while correcting sleeping and thinking patterns to get their best life ever. I’m having a blast with this late-life career move!

I focus on a strength-training routine that is easy to memorize, so you don’t need a trainer forever; one that most people can learn in a few months and then keep doing it as long as they live. I teach a workout that uses three sessions of about a half hour each for two days of the week. We do Pushing exercises on day one, Pulling moves on day two, and legs on day three. It takes a week and a half to get through all three workouts, giving plenty of time to completely repair the muscles we worked, and that lets you grow stronger with every workout, and stay strong for life. That spacing gives us plenty of time for actual living, without depressing our immune system so we don’t get sick. We never over-train so we never get tired of the routine and want to give it up. In the process we correct skeletal and muscle imbalances, giving you much-improved posture and resistance to injuries, with better mobility and balance.

I teach clients how to eat to stay lean for life (because building muscle is the fastest and best way to permanently lose body-fat), while being able to really enjoy eating without crazy diets and food fads. I teach how to use supplements to compensate for the functional losses that come with aging. I coach clients on motivation and thinking quality to get the best life you desire; I show clients how to get regular, restorative sleep, and how to have energy enough to enjoy living well into advanced age.

In December 2017 wife Jo and I sold our 2-story, way-too-big home and a day after the check cleared bought a new, not yet finished single story home and moved to an apartment to wait for its completion. We moved all the stuff that would fit into the apartment and the rest we hauled to storage – it took two storage units to hold it all. In the process of moving boxes I managed to strain my Infraspinatus muscle. By the time we finished moving into the new house in early March 2018, I was pretty beat up and couldn’t do outward shoulder rotations with any load whatever. I’m about halfway through three weeks of rehab sessions, and seeing real improvement. I’m using Michaels W-Zymes several times daily with a Bromelain/collagen/boswellia complex to promote scar-free repair, and hope to get back to action.

I also just finished a three month “contest” testing a new supplement known to boost  cellular and plasma levels of NAD+, a coenzyme involved in perhaps hundreds of metabolic processes, that declines with aging, to see if boosting NAD+ levels can reverse some aspects of aging. The most striking result was the complete disappearance of two bright red patches on the back of my left hand that were rough and scaly, about a half inch across, and had been growing more thick and larger for several years. The abnormal tissue has been replaced by new smooth, normal-looking skin. I wish I had photographed the hand, before I started, but I wasn’t expecting any change, so only I know what it looked like, but I’m amazed at the change. I put on about 6 lb of what looks to be muscle, and haven’t been working out at all. I was taking nicotinamide mononucleotide (MNM) powder or tablets sublingually several times a day for a dose of 1 gm/day, 5 days/week for the three months. I wish I had been able to do my normal workouts to see if I could seriously bulk up, but any improvement at age 79 is a gift, and I felt continual improvement in energy, motivation and well-being. I will keep using this product, at lower doses for now, but plan to do another course of this when I get the shoulder healed up and can use higher loads in regular workouts. Please check out this rather amazing product from Alive by Nature. 

For the past year and a half I have been rebuilding SeniorFitness.com at greater expense than I will ever justify, so I can continue this mission of reporting practical science and strategies for Optimal Aging. I’ve set up a new email system to bring my readers a much improved Senior Fitness Update newsletter to keep you up-to-date with what works to allow us to age without disability and pain. I just turned 78 on 9/11, and so far, I’m still doing quite well staying fit and disease-free.

Wow: It has been a year since I updated this log. A number of things have gone wrong with this aging body in the meantime.  I lost some more cartilage off my left humerus, and encountered some binding against outward rotation of the shoulder joint. That happened back in September ’13 I think, but a visit to my Orthopedist (who did my shoulder surgery back in 06) led to 4 weeks of physical therapy, with some improvement and a half-hearted discharge with a poor prognosis. I have been working with it since, and it gets quite sore and annoyed with me after most upper body workouts. It does seem to be improving with time. Like always, I’m using Michael’s W-Zymes and Serrapeptase to help heal and remodel the injured tissues, and seeing some improvement. It also keeps me from doing squats, because my left shoulder kills me with pain trying to hold the bar on that side. I switched to doing inclined leg presses from now on.

I began having symptoms of heart distress like I felt before my 2001 quad bypass operation, and conclude that I am clogging up again. I’ve decided that I will try to fix it by using pomegranate extract at 2500 mg/day in spread doses. In the 2 months since I started I have seen significant improvement in exercise tolerance and reduction of symptoms after big meals, so I think I am gaining on it. I will keep posting improvements or the lack thereof. See Frank’s Column of 11/13/13

Update on that:on 2/26/14 I surrendered to my cardiologist and he stented one of two grafts from my 2001 quad-bypass that had closed up. The other graft was abandoned and he put three stents in the artery that was bypassed by that graft. On 12/18/14 the center stent in the 3-stent artery series had become restenosed (clogged up) and my cardiologist stented the stent (One inside the other) to reopen the artery.

I launched a self-study on how stents close up and found that the smooth muscle cells of the artery wall proliferate through the stent and disrupted endothelium (expansion of the stent causes a crush injury to the artery wall’s endothelium, which the underlying muscle cell want to fix and start rapidly multiplying). I also found that the primary inhibitor of this proliferation is local production of Nitric Oxide in the artery, which has been badly reduced by the tearing of the endothelial layer of cells (by the stent installation), consequently allowing the stent to close.

I started taking pre-workout nitric oxide booster supplements 4 time a day for about 6 months and as of late 2018 no further symptoms have appeared.

I also set a new personal best in the inclined leg press; 9 plates/side or 810 lbs on the sled for 6 reps last week, and the knees are no worse for wear. I plan to upload a video of making 5 reps with that load 6 weeks ago.

After yet another run up in SCT deadlift, I got to 525 lb and had trouble balancing with that much weight; fell forward once , backward right after and decided to come back in a month and try again. I was also having trouble holding the grip, even with straps, and had ordered a set of lifting hooks, which hadn’t arrived yet. So when the time came I worked up to the designated weight, but got the bright idea to use a reverse grip on one hand to help with hanging on to the weight. I had a crowd watching as I tossed the last two 10 lb plates on and got ready to pull the weight. As I started the lift, the reversed shoulder on the right felt weird, my upper back got behind the timing and I know I was too rounded in the thoracic area, but fought it valiantly, believing I could pull it straight, until I felt/heard that really big POP in the middle of my back. POP – an ugly sound and I knew I hurt something bad. I put the weight down went home and headed for my chiropractor thinking I had popped a rib out of place. Later I had an X-ray that showed a compression fracture of my T-12 vertebra. So, I found my limit and resolved (promised the wife) that I wouldn’t go within 100 lb of that ever again. Still I wonder how far I could have gone with a symmetrical grip or the lifting hooks – oh well, I promised so I will never know.

I did one more deadlift session on 1/21/10 and lifted 505 lb without injury. I was so stoked! Then something crazy happened: my wife suggested that I should set up one of my G-scale trains (Garden Railroad stuff I inherited from my father) for the granddaughter. This stuff had been in my attic for almost 10 years, and when I hauled it out I got the bug to do a real layout in a raised planter area of the back yard we were planning to renovate. Before you know it I was on a full blown project – one of those youthful dreams we say we will get to when we retire – and the gym was not seen for almost 4 months. The track is laid, the wiring is in, I’ve run trains on the main loop and I’m half way through building the control panel to run the turnouts and power the siding track segments. In early June I started back at the Static Contraction workouts and right away got in trouble – wisdom is hard to come by and sometimes fleeting.

I reasoned that I had not lost much strength, so lowered all the first workout weights by 20%, and set the spacing of workouts at 5 days. I started with workout B which includes the deadlift and used 405 lb. Five days later I did the shrug with 385 and felt a slight sting on the right side of my trapezius at the T1 vertebra. Thinking nothing of it, I did the next workout 5 days later and used 415 for the deadlift but this time it really smarted; stung like hell and stayed that way. My chyropractor affirmed that I had a tear of the ligament at the T1, and should let it heal for at least 2 months. I waited and used all the healing strategies I know and I’m now back up to 445lb for the deadlift and climbing, but I put the spacing between workouts back to 10 days right from the start – too much weight, too close together is the invitation to injury. The rule for starting over should be: review your record sheets and use the workout spacing associated with the proposed restart weight, and add a day for safety. Now I’m taking another break, training a friend to help him beat middle age obesity once and for all.

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 – it’s 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.