I almost never post here anymore because I don’t really feel I have much to offer. Seeing as though I turn 69 on June 5th, however, I suspect I am qulified to address training for older folks. My experience may be somewhat unique so take it with a grain of salt.
Rule #1: Restore movement (as best as possible) before adding much load. When I started doing S&S when it was published I found myself consistently getting small injuries and experiencing a lot of general exhaustion, which I suspect was CNS related. I was progressing too fast and had a lot of movement dysfunction that kept sabotaging my efforts.
Then I took a break from S&S and focused on Original Strength resets. After several years of those and achieving level 2 Certification (Pro) I found myself moving way better generally. I was walking without knee pain and enjoying light to moderate bicycle riding for the first time in years. I also do light Leopard Crawl intervals a couple times a week to tie it all rogether.
Rule #2: When movement has been restored, start gently adding load and progressing slowly using heart rate as a “self-regulating” mechanism. For me, that has meant S&S, keeping my max heart rate below adjusted MAF max (really low for us geezers) and recovering until my heart rate drops to about 60% of max. Progress has been steady and surprisingly fast without the nagging injuries and CNS exhaustion of the past. I am also continuing my walks and bike riding with at least one of them a week exceeding 1.5 hours.
Rule #3: Focus on what is going in your mouth. Al Ciampa is the one who challeged me on this and about a year ago I started logging everything that I ate. I didn’t go on any exotic diet, I just held myself accountable. It didn’t take long to figure out that if I limited calories to 2,500 a day (my metabolism, YMMV) I would lose about 1 pound a week. In this year I have lost 45 pounds. Believe me, that makes a sifference.
Key to all of this has been diaphragmic breathing and consciously slowing my breathing rate, even when training. I use no feed-forward tension techniques. If I can’t breathe diaphragmically through my nose with my tongue on the roof of my mouth, my intensity needs to come down.
I’m feeling great, better indeed than I have in decades, and I am serious about that. My goals are simple, to be able to live my life the way I want to and to be able to care for those around me. In terms of S&S, 24Kg is my goal. I’m not that far away and if I can do that routinely in my 70’s I’ll be fine.
One final observation: It’s interesting to me that when we are young and have all of our lives ahead of us, we tend to be in too big of a hurry to progress. Then when we get older and are literally running out of time, we become patient.
Sorry for the long post. I hope it helps.