Cut From Steel

He won Mr Universe fourteen years after the first one

Reg Park was born in Leeds in 1928 and won the amateur Mr Universe title in 1951. He took the professional title in 1958, and then again in 1965.

Park was the second man on record to bench press 500 pounds, after Doug Hepburn. He spent the early sixties playing Hercules in a run of Italian films, which is how most of the world outside the gyms met him.

A teenage Arnold Schwarzenegger had a photograph of Park pinned up in Austria. Park became an early influence and then a lifelong mentor to him, which is an unusual thing to agree to be for the man who goes on to eclipse you.

The part I care about arrives much later. Park moved to South Africa and carried on training people for a living. He was still taking clients at a gym in Sandton in 2007, at 79, in the year cancer finally stopped him.

Fourteen years separated his first Mr Universe from his last. Fifty-six years separated the first title from his final morning on a gym floor.

Nobody hands a man that kind of span. Park's career was not built on the year he peaked, but on the decades he kept turning up. He booked it one session at a time, like everybody else.

You stopped lifting because your shoulder started arguing

You loaded the bar the way you did at 30, and something in the shoulder or the lower back spoke up within a fortnight. So you backed off, or you went light and told yourself light was pointless.

I want to tell you what the research actually found about load. A network meta-analysis comparing low, moderate and high loads reported that muscle growth was essentially load independent, provided the sets were taken to the point of failure.

You were never obliged to lift heavy in order to build muscle. The obligation was always to work hard.

It's not age. It's these three.

I will give you three things about training after 45 that nobody says out loud on a commercial gym floor.

01 / Size Does Not Need The Big Numbers

The analysis found no significant differences in muscle growth between low, moderate and high loads when sets went to volitional failure. Twenty repetitions at a weight your joints tolerate can build as much muscle as six at a weight they do not. The requirement moved off the plate and onto the effort.

02 / Strength Is A Different Animal

The same analysis found strength gains were load dependent and clearly superior with heavy training. So a bigger squat number still demands heavy weight some of the time. Keeping the muscle on your legs into your seventies gives you far more routes than the man at the next rack has ever told you about.

03 / What Failure Actually Means

Failure here means the point where one more clean repetition is not going to happen. It does not mean the point where it starts to burn, or where you get bored, or where the set reaches a round number. Most men stop three or four repetitions early and have done for a decade. That gap, rather than the weight, is why the last ten years produced nothing.

Take it back today

I owe you the honest limits. These are averages drawn largely from people younger than you, trained and untrained, and light-load sets taken to failure are genuinely unpleasant to perform. Plenty of people abandon them for that reason rather than any physiological one.

You should keep some heavy work in the week if your joints will take it, because bone and tendon respond to load in ways light sets do not fully replace. Two sessions at moderate weight and one heavier session is a sane arrangement for a man of 55.

I want one set out of you today taken all the way to the end. Pick a weight you could manage about fifteen times, and keep going until the sixteenth genuinely will not happen. You will learn more about your training in those ninety seconds than in the previous two years of it.

You have been blaming your shoulder for a problem that lives in the last three repetitions. Take one set properly to the end today. The number on the bar matters far less than you were led to believe.

— Travis

Insider Member's Corner

6 free habits that keep you training after 45:

Forty-five is the age you stop buying gear and start buying tools.

01 / Iron · A trap bar

A hexagonal bar puts the load in line with your hips instead of out in front of them, which takes a great deal of shear off a lower back that has already had opinions. You step inside it, you grip at your sides, and you pick the thing up the way a man picks up a heavy box. It is the single friendliest way for a 55-year-old to keep deadlifting. Buy it once.

02 / Soles · Converse Chuck Taylors

The Chuck Taylor has been made since the 1920s and remains, by accident, one of the better lifting shoes money can buy. Its sole is flat and firm, so nothing squashes under you when the weight gets heavy, and the canvas upper does not care what you do to it. They cost a fraction of anything marketed as a lifting shoe. Every serious gym in the world has a rack of them.

03 / Trail · Hadrian's Wall Path

Eighty-four miles of National Trail from coast to coast across northern England, walking beside a wall the Romans finished in the second century. It takes most people six or seven days, the pubs are spaced correctly, and the middle section is genuinely wild country. You will be tired in a way that no gym has made you tired in years. Book it for May.