Since I no longer race, at least not seriously or at the track, I had to take a step back and ask myself why I would continue to go to the gym to practice powerlifting workouts, and what I hoped to accomplish from that. Well, it had really become a habit to work out, and I wanted to prevent age-related muscle and bone-density loss. Plus, I hated the idea of throwing away all of the strength I had gained at so much effort, and I had started to enjoy it too. However, I'm now 64 years old, and the old body needs a bit more maintenance to keep it running properly when powerlifting.
In late 2023 I was really having a hard time when attempting 1RM lifts (one rep max; a single maximal lift). This had actually started to become an issue shortly after the start of the COVID-19 shutdowns in 2020. Why?
Well, as this relates to my bench press, I had bad shoulder pain that held me back. I think that the shoulder injury I mentioned in 2021 was probably a RSI (repetitive stress injury) caused by a poor desk setup when I started to work from home during the COVID-19 shutdowns. Several months of that quickly made bench presses quite painful. I couldn't even reach up into kitchen cupboards anymore. Even after I got a new desk with a keyboard tray, along with my trusty Herman Miller Aeron chair, all of it set to correct ergonomic settings, the pain continued. In May of 2021 I finally went to a doctor and got a cortisone injection into my right shoulder (something that might not have have been an option while I was competing due to anti-doping rules) and that helped immensely... for a couple of months before the pain returned.
This pain didn't really go away completely until late 2023, so that, combined with the intermittent gym closures, meant I missed out on proper bench workouts for almost three years... no wonder my 1RM went from 265# in 2019, to a low of just about 170# in 2022. By late 2023 I had managed to gradually overcome the pain, in part by using a wider grip on the barbell, and got back up to 220#... still well short of my PR. Since then I have only been able to get up to about 230# to 235#. But I haven't tried a 1RM test in a long time, so who knows, it might be higher now.
Then there's the whole issue with my back. Since about 2015 I started to very occasionally experience really bad spasms (cramps) in the muscles in the center of my back, next to the spine; that'd be the quadratus lumborum (QLs). But it never really interfered with my workouts. In recent years, though, I started to get these spasms more frequently, several times a year. And then, in November of 2023, I was trying for 1RM tests and basically had to completely give up on squat and deadlift attempts because my back would spasm severely every time I tried to lift more than about 80% of my 1RM. Very disappointing.
I tried a variety of things to address my back spasms: Calcium, magnesium, more salt, creatine, massage, more stretching, etc. Nothing seemed to help. In March of 2024 I again tried for 1RM testing, and again had to completely give up the squat and deadlift attempts due to the painful spasms (I was happy to get a 235# bench though).
I asked Stacey Otlin, former owner of Santa Cruz Strength, for advice, and she suggested I start to use a lifting belt; yeah, I had never used a lifting belt for these before. I was lifting completely "raw" all those years, man! Well, guess what; that really helped! Whenever I lifted over 70% I'd wear my lifting belt, and though I could sometimes feel the spasms start I would just make sure to brace my core against the belt, and voila, the spasms would almost completely cease... yay!
Notice I said "almost." Well, the underlying issue causing my back spasms was still in there somewhere, and I wanted to understand what it was and if there was anything I could do about it. My doctor suggested I get an MRI of my back. That made sense to me, even though it would not be covered by my insurance. So in August of 2024 I got rolled into a massive MRI machine and had a full scan of my spine. Those things are noisy.
After a week or so I got the results back in the form of a PDF file. I don't understand the terminology very well, but the general idea was that I had several spinal disc bulges. Sounded pretty scary. This is the "Impression" which is sort of a summary:
- There is circumferential disc bulging at L2-3 as well as a superiorly positioned extruded disc fragment on the right with associated spinal stenosis.
- There is mild to moderate multilevel degenerative disease demonstrated otherwise without other disc extrusions.
- There is mild spinal stenosis at L3-4 and L4-5 related to disc bulging short pedicles and ligamentum flavum hypertrophy.
- There is some high signal within the posterior disc margin L5-S1 millimeters reflect a small annular tear without significant disc bulging.
- There is mild right neural foraminal stenosis at L3-4 related to asymmetric right lateral disc bulging without impingement on the right nerve root.
I had been worried that I had major back problems, like maybe even a herniated disc, as my back spasms could well have been a symptom of that. I hated to think I might have to give up my workouts because of this. But when I talked to my doctor, she felt that none of the issues revealed by my MRI were particularly worrisome. For instance, it turns out that about 80% of men my age have disc bulges. Also, I read that the spinal discs harden over time, so that at around 50 years of age, they are essentially hard tissue that isn't susceptible to herniating. (The discs start out as bags of a sort, filled with a viscous fluid, but it hardens over time until about age 50 when they become hard like a rubber disc.) So, if you are over 50, you probably don't need to worry about herniated discs, just the other usual suspects.
But she also said that I should see a physical therapist about how this might affect my workouts. That was really good for me, because the PT I met with was super helpful. He suggested that I consider doing single-leg lifts instead of two-legged lifts. That would allow me to halve the load on my spine, while maintaining the same load per leg. I found a cool video that had some options for this. I did this for a while, but now I feel that it is safe for me to still perform standard two-legged lifts, at least some of the time, given that my risk of a herniated disc is essentially zero, especially since I'm religious about using my lifting belt now.
So now I have a much better sense of how to keep lifting into old age... that is a goal of mine. Let's see how long I can do this before I have to take up aquarobics instead!
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