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Hosted by Andy Reay, former professional rugby player and strength and conditioning coach, this show gets straight into what really matters for long-term performance: staying injury-free, building serious strength, and competing at any age. You’ll hear the methods, principles, and beliefs behind Razor Performance, shaped by years of coaching driven, time-poor and often injury prone men, back to their best. If you want to know how to rebuild confidence in your body, stay injury free and strong, and know what actually works, this is your new weekly listen.
Welcome to part two of the Razer Performance Podcast. Today it will just be me talking about training in your 40s versus training in your 20s. Now there's a lot of information about this out there at the moment. There'll be a lot of different opinions, but I am a 42 year old man. I've trained throughout my 20s and I also train a lot of men and some women who are of that age range and I understand how things do need to change.
Andy:Okay, so I'm going to start off talking about wants and needs. Now, I just want you to think about what were your wants when you were 20? Mine were, I wanted to be strong, I wanted to look good, and I wanted to be able to compete in my sport. That was really it. Now, what does that mean for needs?
Andy:What did I need to get to that point? Well, I needed to be in the gym. I needed to be lifting heavy. I needed to be playing my sport a lot, and I needed to be competitive. And essentially, I just wanted to beat my mates.
Andy:Okay? And that's what I wanted, and that's what I needed to do to get there. But now, as a 40 year old, my wants are much different. Now, I'd love you just to have a think about what your wants are. So personally, my wants are I want to be able to use exercise as a little bit of an escape from, you know, family, kids and work life.
Andy:So I want to be out, I want to be able to run, bike, swim and go to the gym when I want to. And I want to be able to play sports with my mates if there's the option to do that. I also want from a family perspective, I want to be able to play football with my son. I want to be able to drag them out of bed in the morning. I want to be able to wrestle with them.
Andy:And I just want to be a strong dad. Okay? And I'm sure that resonates with a lot of people. People. Now, what do I need in order to get there?
Andy:Do I need to be in the gym lifting super heavy and trying to beat my mates all the time? Probably not. Do I need to be hyper competitive in my sport? Probably not, but it may be a different sport that I'm trying to be a bit more competitive in, something that's not rugby where I get beaten up all the time. So therefore my training still has to change.
Andy:So you can see that there's a huge difference between the wants and needs of the two different people, the 20 year old and the 40 year old. Now in order to highlight this point, I had a really interesting and actually quite emotional conversation with a mate of mine the other day. He was an ex rugby player, he was a prop, he's one hundred and twenty kilos or he was one hundred and twenty kilos, and when he was playing, that was what his body was for. It was to scrummage and to play rugby. Okay, he ate for that, he trained for that, he rested for that.
Andy:Everything was about being on the pitch, being big enough and strong enough to scrummage and play rugby. And he actually said to me, I don't really know what my body is for now. Okay, so there is absolutely no point of him being one hundred and twenty kilos anymore because it doesn't serve a purpose. And I think that really highlights the wants and needs difference. Okay, where you were back then and the wants and needs are completely different to where they are now.
Andy:You've also got the reality of being a 40 year old and having a 40 year old body. Now, this isn't me saying that you can't do things. I mean, I have a 52 year old client who's still playing rugby. He's running half marathons in ridiculous times. He lifts big weights.
Andy:He's doing amazing things. But he trains differently. So, there's a few things to consider. Firstly, you've got your lifestyle. You've got kids so you're probably not resting as much.
Andy:You're probably busier than you've ever been at work. You've got house, bills, all sorts of responsibilities and stress. So you need to think about how am I even recovering from this exercise, which will affect what you're doing in the gym. You've also got old injuries. Now old injuries will stack up.
Andy:Something I hear really often was, yeah, but why do I need to do that now? It's never been a problem before. Well, what happens when you get an injury? If I can make this quite simple. Let's say that you rolled your ankle.
Andy:Now, when you've done that, your body will reduce the amount that those muscles around the ankle can do because it will cause pain. So if you roll your ankle for example, the muscles will tone down the muscles around your calf, your body will tone down the muscles around your calf and they just won't allow you to jump around because it's injured. Now what will happen then is something else needs to take that load. Okay? So if your muscles around your calf or your ankle aren't working or doing as much as they need to, then something else is going to take that load.
Andy:It may be higher up the leg. So maybe your quad of your hamstring will do a little bit more of the load. Now if you consider that, and you consider that more and more and more injuries stack up, eventually your body just runs out of options if you haven't rehabbed things properly. And we'll come into the rehab side of things in a minute because I think that's a really important part of the training that you need to have. So what do you need to do in order to be that person that you want to be?
Andy:You probably don't need to be in squatting and dead lifting super heavy. You probably don't need to be quite as strong as where you were before. But you do wanna be strong enough to do the things that you wanna do. You wanna be fit enough to be able to do the things you wanna do. You want your body to be able to cope with different sporting events.
Andy:Okay? So my body doesn't now need to cope with getting beaten up for eighty minutes, but it does need to be able to cope with swimming, you know, a 10 k down a river, which is slightly different. So you need to be flexible, you need to be strong enough, and you really just wanna feel good. You don't wanna feel stiff, you don't wanna feel sore, you just want to feel strong enough to do what you need to do to feel good. So what does that look like from a training perspective?
Andy:Well, there needs to be those things in there. So there needs to be some rehab, there needs to be some flexibility work, there needs to be some strength still, but there also needs to be some slightly different types of strength to make you feel better. So what that looks like from my perspective. I used to be part of the sort of no stretching crew, you can stretch using strength, which I still believe is true to a certain extent. But actually, every time I go to the gym, I like to have a stretch for six or seven minutes at the start of any session.
Andy:I still like to have strength work in there. Okay, so, but my thoughts around strength is I like to try and make the exercises as safe as possible and with as least chance of me getting injured. So if we go back to the squatting and dead lifting. Personally, I tend not to squat myself very often. I don't deadlift myself very often, and I don't really deadlift my clients very often.
Andy:The reason is, if we take a squat for an example, you have to have very flexible shoulders. You have to have a flexible trunk. Your hips need to move well. Your knees need to be fine. You have to have good ankle range.
Andy:Okay, all of these things all fit in. Now, if one of those things isn't functioning, which is more likely to be due to the old injuries, then you're at a higher chance of getting injured. Now, personally, I think why would I not do something safer? For example, a leg press. Why would I not, if I can load the same amount of weight through my legs, reduce my chance of injury, and get the same benefit, why would I not do that?
Andy:So, so far we've got a bit of flexibility in the warm up and using more safe strength measures. Then we'll move on to, I like to use a lot of single leg work, single arm work, cable work, and I like to move in multiple planes. The reason I do that is because I've been squatting and dead lifting and benching for my whole life, So therefore those movements make me feel stiff now. The movements that don't make me feel stiff are less load on my back, single leg, like I say, single leg, single arm, cable work, and move me in different planes. So my body starts to feel good.
Andy:And then we get onto the rehab piece. Now this is the biggest thing in my programme that I really like to get in the weeds about. When I meet people, I like to go through every single injury they've ever had, and I like to see if we can just make sure that there's something in the programme to make sure that that muscle, that area, that joint is functioning well. And I think that is hugely important. When you're 20, you don't need that because you haven't had the injuries.
Andy:When you're 40, you have, and it needs to be very specific. So just to recap, we need to think about flexibility. We need to think about strength. We also need to think about strength in different planes of motion using different exercises and, like I say, single arms, single legs, cables to make you feel good. And then we need to think about those old injuries and we need to make sure that during every session we are trying to solve something.
Andy:The last thing I wanna talk about is how much we recover. Now, when I used to train, I used to train every day. I used to eat enough, and I had the option to eat enough to be able to recover from that. Nowadays, I don't have the time, I don't have the capacity, and I don't really sit down that often. So you do need to think about how many sessions a week you're doing.
Andy:Now, I would suggest that three focused weight sessions a week would get someone in their 40s stronger, feeling better, and achieving all of those wants and needs better than five or six sessions a week. I've also had runners where I've trained once a week for strength and they're doing all their running outside of that and I've seen huge strength improvements. So I think you need to get yourself out of the mindset of more is better. I would actually say less is better, better recovery, and a better, much more targeted approach to your training. Okay, so it's solving exactly your needs which serve your wants.
Andy:I hope that's helpful and I hope that sparked a little bit of thought around your training. But final point would be, what do you actually want now? What do you need to get to that point? And right this second, are you doing it? My name's Andy Ray.
Andy:I run Razor Performance. I help 40 year old, 35 to 55 year old dads get strong, bulletproof their body from injury, and then get them to a point where they can go and achieve something amazing. You've probably heard from this podcast my thought process around training is probably different to a lot of people, and I think there is a huge value in being very specific to people's wants and their needs. If you need any help, you can contact me on LinkedIn, I'm on Instagram, or you can, I'm w w w dot razorperformance dot co dot uk. If you need any help with any of your training, just give me a shout.