How many times has someone slid up to you and said, “Hey, I’ve got a neat idea! Let’s go down to the gym and lift incredibly heavy weights until it hurts like crazy and we have to stop!” Once a week? Once a year? Let me guess. Never? And why is that? Because lifting weights is stupid, embarrassing and painful, that’s why.
I remember the first time I decided to venture into a weight room. It was when we lived in Aspen, where they tend to hide weight rooms in “spas,” which look deceptively normal at street level. Lots of expensive shrubbery, lots of glass. A girl just inside the door takes your dough and signs you up for a year. It happens very fast. The pretty girl takes your credit card and says, “I’m Chanterelle, by the way. Let me show you the pool.” Which she does. It’s nice. Then the cheerful room full of aerobic dancers. The step machines and the stationary bicycles. Nice. It all looks nice.
Then it’s time to get down to business: “So, look, do you, uh . . . have a weight room?”
A cloud passes over Chanterelle’s face. “Sure, sure. Let’s go take a look.” A hurried glance back at the counter and the mouthed words “Run his card!” Then down the rubber steps into an underground space that looks like a cross between the engine room of a World War I destroyer and a dominatrix’s mudroom. Lots of tile and mirrors. Drains in the floor, so it can be hosed down when they’re done with you. Huge steel machines with black pads all over. Lifting machines, twisting machines . . . machines to pull the teeth out of a Caterpillar tractor. And lots of sleek wires that seem to be used to tie women up and make them grunt. Men, too. Men with weird veins running all over their arms and necks. Like fat worms under the skin. Veins like macaroni on acid and biceps that look as if they’ve been blown out. This is a scary place.
“Listen, you probably have a lot to do. I’ll just—”
“No, no,” Chanterelle says quickly. “You’ve already paid. You’re dressed. Let me just get Lance. Oh, Lance . . .”
Up hulks this guy with a deep tan and more teeth than you’ve ever seen in one mouth before. Sort of nice-looking, but something’s terribly wrong. Like his body doesn’t quite make sense. And the planes of his face . . . they’re way too sharp. This guy is . . .
“Hi, let me show you around.” It’s Lance, and he begins this rap about the machines and his special training techniques. But you’re not listening . . . you’re just staring, nervously. At his body. Because it’s becoming clear to you that he is almost certainly an android. And the manufacturer has scrimped on the little life-giving details that are so important. Maybe a foreign manufacturer, too, because he’s dressed funny. His little red shorts look much too small on his huge thighs. And he’s wearing a sleeveless T-shirt with enormous armholes through which it is impossible not to see his pecs, or whatever they’re called. And his armpits. His armpits are the deepest and furriest you have ever seen. You could raise wolverines in there. You want to take a step back so he won’t drip testosterone all over your new sneakers. You want to get the hell out of there . . .
Why, you ask yourself, why is this man telling me all this in a book promoting exercise? I am telling you this because I want to persuade you to find a strength trainer—maybe not as bad as Lance, but bad—and learn to do weights. And then do them two days a week for the rest of your life. And I want you to know that Harry and I realize this is not an intuitively appealing idea. Regular strength training for life sounds stupid, nasty and scary. And we wouldn’t even mention it if it were not one of the best pieces of advice in the whole damn book. Especially for women, who have to worry more about osteoporosis. Strength training will make you feel good and stay healthy for the rest of your life—once you get over the shame and terror and revulsion of going to the gym. In fact, it’s so important that Harry has memorialized it in his Third Rule, which goes like this: Do serious strength training, with weights, two days a week for the rest of your life. Maybe three would be better; it’s okay to do strength and aerobic stuff on the same day. You’re allowed to do that.
You will perhaps remember how we talked about the tide that sets against you by the time you’re fifty? The tide that threatens to wash you up on the beach where the gulls and the crabs are waiting to do unpleasant things? There are aspects of that tide to which women are peculiarly susceptible. Like crippling falls, disfiguring bone misalignments and the like because of the wildly unfair business of losing bone mass at the rate of 2 percent a year that Harry will talk about in the next chapter. As he will say, lifting weights is the single most important thing you can do to resist that horror and keep your skeleton functional. Super important, obviously. You don’t have to turn into a gym rat, but it sure does make a world of sense to do some weight lifting, starting right now and continuing for the rest of your life.
In addition to saving your bones, there’s muscle mass. That goes, too. Out with the tide. Turning the sweet muscles of your youth into the dusty drapery of old age. Makes you too weak to do stuff. Like run across the street if you have to. Or get out of the tub. Or ski. No matter what, you’re going to lose muscle cells as you age; that’s one of the things you cannot change. But you can beef up the surviving cells—which have tremendous redundant capacity—to offset much of that loss.
Your joints—the meshing bones and the tendons and sinews and the goopy pads that make them work—are also important at your age because they go to hell first if you don’t do something. The little grippers that attach tendon to bone get brittle and weak as you age. They atrophy. They let go without notice. And the goopy pads between the bones dry out and you make little crunching sounds when you move. And you hurt. The combination of all this stuff is aging joints, and it has more to do with your aging than almost anything else. When your joints go, you hurt all the time. You walk funny. You fall down. You get old.
Sounds bad, right? Well, here’s the weird thing. Lifting big, heavy weights stops most of that. Lifting heavy weights every couple of days basically stops the bone loss . . . stops (or offsets) the muscle loss . . . stops the weakening of tendons, restores the goopy pads and gets rid of the pain. Aerobic exercise does more to stop actual death—by heart attack and lots of cancers—but strength training can make your life worthwhile. It keeps your muscle mass from going to muck, your skeleton from turning to dust, your joints from hurting with every lousy step you take. This is key. We would not put you through the horror of weight training if it were not key. Here’s another odd thing. After you’ve been doing it for a while, you kind of get into it. But we’ll come back to that.
So what do you do? Hire a trainer, at least to get started. Trainers are expensive, Lord knows, but they’re worth it, at least to begin with. Learning to do weights is a little harder than it looks, and a surprising number of people you see in the gym are doing it all wrong. Doing it wrong is both counterproductive and dangerous. Not “kill you” dangerous, but “hurt your joints and drive you away” dangerous. So hire a trainer for the first few workouts. And go back once in a while to keep yourself honest. Besides, for most of us, the world of weight lifting is such a strange land that it doesn’t hurt to have a friendly guide to get you past the weirdness.
Consider my favorite trainer, Audrey, a short, regular-looking Jamaican woman in her early fifties. She’s no chiseled hard-body, but she knows exactly what she’s doing, and how to get you to do what you should be doing. Interestingly, she is by far the most successful trainer in a fancy chain of gyms. She’s tough, loves to laugh and is remorseless. I told her about going on TV to promote these books, and she redoubled her exhortations. “Chrees!” she said to me in this lovely, lilting Jamaican accent. “This is seeri-ous beesness! Your bahdee, Chrees . . . your bah-dee (pause for effect) cannot be (pause) . . . a walkin’ contradiction! Chrees . . . they will know you are livin’ a lie!” And another twenty whatevers.
If money is an issue—money is always an issue—you can get started by reading a decent book on the subject. There are any number of books that offer good guidance and neat little drawings or photos of men and women doing stuff. But stay away from the books that promise to do it all for you in five minutes a week or some such nonsense. And avoid the temptation to buy one of those snappy gadgets on TV that promise to do all the work, without any unpleasant input from you. You’re a grown-up, right? Then don’t be a dope. The gadgets, or the weights, do not do the work. You do.
Okay, go to a decent gym and hire the nicest, smartest man or woman you can find. I was kidding about Lance and telling the truth about Audrey. There are some scary gym rats out there, but there are also plenty of informed people who are seriously interested in how bodies work and in making yours work better. It’s a hot little field these days, and good people are going into it.
Do not make the mistake of hiring some person who just talks to you. Or listens. The gyms are full of women, in particular, who pay big bucks to have trainers chat with them and occasionally hand them a light weight. Chatting is good. We have almost a whole chapter on chatting and how it’s the woman’s great gift in the Next Third. But it ain’t lifting weights. No. If you want to fool around under the guise of exercise, play golf. If you’re going to do weights, do weights. It is not supposed to be restful.
Harry and I are not the ones to tell you what machines or free weights to use and how to do it; we leave that to your trainer and the books. But we do have a couple of points. First: You are forty, or fifty, or sixty . . . you are not twenty or thirty. Second: You are here to be younger next year, not next week. You don’t want to make a mess of things in the first few days. So, much as it runs against my temperament to say it, take it easy. If you’re one of the handful of women your age who’s in great shape, take it sort of easy. If you’re like the rest of us, take it really easy. In the next chapter, Harry will tell you that you can build muscle pretty quickly, even at your age, but joints take much, much longer. Strong muscles can pull weak joints apart. So, in the first few months, do less weight than you can handle and more reps—maybe twenty instead of the usual ten or twelve. Give your joints time to get in the game.
Women vary—surprise—but it is my observation that women, more than men, tend to dog it a little on weights. I see an awful lot of women in gyms with very light weights, going very slowly, with very long delays between sets. Lots of pausing to drink water, wipe the fevered brow and all that. But sooner or later you gotta go for it or this stuff doesn’t work. Go light, with high reps, in the beginning, when you’re developing the all-important “muscle memory.” Then go for it. Be strong, suck it up, do your job.
You may not think it, but using weights is a little like learning a new sport—not as complex as skiing or tennis, but a new sport just the same. And your muscles have to learn how. That’s less true with the machines, which is why machines are more seductive and fun to use. And, tragically, why free weights are so much better for you. Free weights involve balancing and subtle corrections from side to side, all of which use and strengthen a whole bunch of other muscles and, more important, zillions of neuroconnectors, which are at the heart of your ability to function in the real world. It’s not just the strength that matters, it’s the wiring, too. The amazing message system that tells you where you are in the world and lets you function. By all means, use machines to get started and mix machines into your strength training indefinitely, but get into free weights, too.
This is just an aside at this point, but it goes to the free weight question. Riding a stationary bike in a spinning class is analogous to using machines for weight training. It’s wonderful, but not as wonderful as riding outside, the analogue to free weights. When I ride a real bike, outside, my heart rate routinely goes 15 percent higher than it usually goes in spinning class. Not because I’m trying harder, but because real biking is a little harder—and thus a little better for you. There’s more going on. There’s all that balancing all the time . . . all that looking around at the real world to see where you are and what’s coming up. And there are those millions of tiny adjustments every minute to take account of the real world and balance and Lord knows what else. That stuff takes energy. And it’s super for you. It brings all those pesky neurotransmitters back to life and makes them strong. The stationary bike cannot do that. Moral: Free weights are much more complex and much better for you. So get into them eventually. But let’s be fair: doing any weights is a torment and doing machines is just fine if that’s all you can stand. Most days, it’s all I can stand. I hate free weights. And fear them. Seems reasonable.
Eventually you have to get to heavy weights and low reps. You have to do weights “to failure” some of the time. That means a touch of pain. That means lifting weight that you can lift, say, only ten times before you literally cannot do it anymore. Sounds nasty, doesn’t it? Sounds like a guy thing. But it’s not. That’s how this process works. Men’s and women’s bodies do not vary one bit in this important respect.
You build muscle by tearing it down. It’s all part of the growth and decay business that Harry is teaching us about. But this goes beyond inflammation. What you actually do—and this is Harry’s language—is “microscopically damage” your muscles by lifting heavy weights. When they grow back, they’re bigger and stronger. Your bone mass increases at the same time. And you gain tendon strength. And neuro-connector strength, which may be the most important of all.
To make real progress on the strength front, you may have to go to three days a week. (My trainer says two days is for maintenance, three days is for getting stronger.) If you do go to three days, rotate the areas covered. Your muscles need a day, or even two days, to recover from a serious weight session. If you don’t rest between sessions, it’s all teardown and no buildup. Not good. And don’t forget aerobics. No matter what, you have to have at least four days of aerobics each week.
If you run out of time (or passion) for doing weights, do whatever you can for your legs, especially your quads. This means squats, or one of those big machines where you sit down and push a weighted sled up a ramp with your legs. Or any of several other machines and exercises aimed primarily at your quads. Do your hamstrings, too, maybe using the machine that makes you pull back with your heels.
A lot of people seem to think strength training means barbells and biceps, and they forget their legs. Not smart. When your legs give out, you’re cooked. That means the cane, the walker and the chair. Especially for women. If you don’t keep up your bone density, the great threat over time is that you will fall and break your hip. Remember, weights build bones. Weights build hips. Busted hips mean infirmity and death. Nothing is more important than heading that off. And nothing helps more than doing serious weights with your quads and hamstrings.
Strengthening your quads is also the best thing you can do to prevent bad knees. Strengthening your quads, the shock absorbers of your body, means you’re much less likely to fall and get injured. And strengthening your quads, the biggest muscles in your body, means they will burn more calories, even on “idle.” So, when in doubt, default to quads.
Whenever I talk about this stuff, the one thing I always hear from women is that they’re afraid doing weights will make them “bulk up.” This is absolute lunacy. First, it doesn’t happen. Second, so what if it did? And third, this is the silliest excuse for idleness you’ll find in an area where silliness is the rule.
The fear, I guess, is that muscles on a woman will make her look too masculine and drive the poor boys away. Or, much worse, she’ll get big meaty thighs. But working out does not make thighs meatier. It makes them work better. It makes them stronger. It makes them more shapely. And, in the long run, it keeps them from turning into ugly, waddling smucker. Besides which, women who happen to be blessed with strong legs and thighs to begin with are the truly lucky ones. We are mammals, after all. And the fun of being a mammal . . . the essence of being a mammal . . . is moving around. On our legs, for God’s sake. If you want to have scrawny little pins and sit around like a fern, okay . . . but that’s not what we’re for. We are designed to move. That’s what makes us feel right. And having a good set of wheels, having strong calves and thighs, is one of the high blessings for our breed.
Finally, the notion of what looks good in women’s bodies is, blessedly, changing. Title IX has swept through, and athletics are now part of women’s lives. Women are no longer supposed to lounge on divans and be helpless, like Daisy in The Great Gatsby. Women do stuff today. And they look it. And men who are not idiots like what they see.
It’s never too late to start a serious program of strength training. Quite the contrary. The later in life, the more important it is. There was a study done a while ago in a nursing home. They got all the residents, including the ones who were on walkers or bedridden, to do weights. It worked miracles, even though some of these people were in their nineties. Almost all the bedridden got up on walkers. The ones on walkers went to canes, and so on. Moral: Weight training is serious therapy to halt or reverse the ravages of aging. Do it early and you can skip a lot of aging altogether. Do it late and you can reverse a lot of it. I have felt those results myself, big time.
Here’s another little payoff story from a while back. It was 15 degrees, early in the morning in New York, and I was down by the East River, walking Aengus, the selfish dog. Bright sun, wind on the river. And all of a sudden I felt like running. Not for exercise or to show off (no one was around) . . . just for the hell of it. And I did. Cutting this way and that like a hundred-year-old football player. Astonishing the dog, who joined right in. Strange. Nice. I remembered, later, another time when Aengus was running around on the lawn like that. Like a lunatic. I said to Hilary then, “Gee, I wish I felt like doing that.” And here I was, running around like a lunatic, out of sheer exuberance. Because I felt like it. Strength training does that for you. It makes you look a lot better, too. No matter how old you are. Makes it more fun to take your duds off and climb into bed at night with Old Fred or whomever, too. It’s worth the pain, ladies, worth the pain.
The real reward for lifting is feeling great the rest of the time, when you’re just walking around. Especially in your joints. That reward isn’t instantaneous—it can take months—but it’s a big deal. In my case, when I took this up seriously, I had a lot of sore joints: hips, shoulders, elbows, wrists, Achilles tendon . . . the works. I was starting to totter around like a little old guy, even though I did a fair amount of aerobic activity. It was creepy. I was going to an odd, sidearm tennis serve, which was useless and made me look a hundred. Sometimes just reaching for something on a shelf gave me a little twinge. Aging. I was aging. And you will, too. Unless. . .
When I started weights, all that went away! Not my arthritic hands, but the rest of it. I am not exaggerating. I remember how I used to creak and wobble and hurt a little, first trip down the stairs in the morning. Gone! My hips do not hurt anymore. Or my feet. Not even my shoulders, which were the worst and took the longest. My serve still stinks, but it’s no longer sidearm. Even my Achilles tendon, which I suffered with for decades, has responded. All because of weights. Harry warns that some of my aches will come back as I get older, but not for quite a while and not as bad. I’ll take that.
Part of what I was curing was mild arthritis, which is nothing more than inflammation, often brought on by idleness. Women often tell me that, gee, they can’t do weights because they have arthritis and it hurts. I tell them they probably hurt and have arthritis because they don’t do weights. Think about this: For most forms of arthritis, the prescription is a six-week course of physical therapy. But physical therapy is mostly just six weeks of supervised weight training. Six weeks because your insurance coverage runs out after that. But you shouldn’t be doing it for six weeks, you should be doing it for life, two times a week (maybe three). That’s how to prevent most forms of arthritis if you don’t already have it. And to make it better if you do.
Here’s another huge change in my life, once I started doing weights: I quit falling down. One of the truly alarming things that happened in my early sixties was that I began falling for no reason at all. Two or three times, I was crossing the street or just walking on a city sidewalk and stumbled over a little uneven place or a rise in the pavement. I’d catch the bottom of my sneaker and go flying, as if I’d forgotten how to walk. And I wasn’t even old. I was in decent shape and pretty damn active, but I was falling down. Talk about hearing the waterfall. I thought I was going over.
Once I was carrying a lot of stuff and had Aengus on a lead, running across Park Avenue as the light was about to change. I caught the bottom of my foot on the pavement, and down I went. The light changed, and I was in the middle of the cars. Aengus was loose and terrified. I was dazed and surrounded by broken packages. Horns were honking, and a woman in the median actually screamed because she thought I was going to be killed. I thought so, too.
Something similar happened on a mountain hike out west, about ten years ago. The steep part, the challenging part, was over, and that had gone fine. Now we were on the flat, half a mile from the parking lot, and for no reason I tripped and tumbled off the trail. Landed on top of my own leg and broke it. Was put into a cast and couldn’t exercise all summer. I thought, so this is aging. Great!
The happy fact is that it did not have to be that way, and it isn’t anymore. The reason I was falling, Harry tells me, is that the neurotransmitters that coordinate balance deteriorate with age. Which is to say, your balance goes and you walk into stuff as if you were an idiot. Harry says that, for all of us, simple walking is really a series of near falls followed by a million tiny adjustments and recovery. When you age, the wiring that manages that stunt falls apart, and so do you. You no longer catch yourself. And here, of course, is the pleasing news. Lifting weights fixes up the wiring and cures the problem. Not a hundred percent, Harry says, but damn near. In my experience, anyway. I have not fallen in years. Don’t even stumble much, or come close. Presumably because I do the stinking weights. I tell you, I swear by ’em. And you should, too. This is so important for women, because of the bone loss problem. It is super important for women not to fall down. Doing weights keeps you from falling. Doing weights builds up your bone mass so that, if you do fall, it is not catastrophic. So do the weights.
Luckily, you don’t have to take all this on faith or in reliance on one old boy’s experience. Harry is going to explain the science, and All Will Be Made Clear, in the next chapter. To me, it’s holy writ. I didn’t much like all that falling down.