Originally Posted by
OBoile
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Look, you keep doing you. I'm not telling you that you need to stop or change or whatever, but just keep in mind that no one else is suggesting this rather extreme approach. The fact is that pretty much all reasonable rep schemes will work reasonably well for someone who is looking to get fit and doesn't have some extremely specific performance goal.
Did it your way for years, no good results. Did it the Friel 2nd edition way for a year, wasn't getting dropped anymore. My guess is that getting results requires a certain amount of muscular endurance. That was in my late 50s.
Thing is, a rider coming into it at 75 is problematic. His muscle strength will outstrip his tendon and ligament strength. The way to keep the weights down in the appropriate range is simply to increase reps. No way to screw that up. One expects that form will be a learning experience. Better to learn it with weights that won't cause permanent damage. I see no reason to rush a rider of any age into a low rep program. Why would one do that? The rule is, "First, do no harm."
Telling folks new to strength training to just keep the weight down denies them the huge advantage of maximizing fiber recruitment which is how one gets stronger at the same bodyweight. Your long and successful work with strength training might make it more difficult to see what works best for older athletes just starting out with strength. There is simply no logical reason to think that one size fits all.
You may not have been here long enough to remember back when all the serious racers here and on the 41 decried any weight training as counterproductive or at best, a waste of time and energy. They had the studies to prove it too, showing that conventional strength training made no difference except in sprints. IMO the reason that those studies didn't show anything good was that they were too short for the E+S riders to gain enough strength-endurance over the E riders.