USAWA

Al, you lucky meathead, I’m actually in civilization right now…darnit!

This study didn’t look at it in that way and didn’t provide percentages. What they did is take all of the publicly available USAPL meet results and simply analyzed it in different regards. As it relates to age they looked at all of the USAPL age categories, with some adjustments, and how male and female lifters performed in the equipped and raw divisions by each lift.

OVERALL—meaning equipped and raw numbers, regardless of weight class or gender—what the study found is that the weight lifted for men and women doesn’t differ significantly between the ages of 24 to 49. When looking at the differences in amount of weight lifted by lift, the only lift that showed a notable change with age was the squat for the women. Here’s how that broke down:

Age Average Weight
19-23 111
24-39 108
40-49 101
50-59 90

Compare that to the men:

Age Average Weight
19-23 193
24-39 193
40-49 190
50-59 183

One more example, since it’s a very popular lift, the numbers for the bench press in men are as follows:

Age Average Weight
19-23 128
24-39 133
40-49 138
50-59 130

Oh, heck, here ya go, the men’s deadlift looked like this:

Age Average Weight
19-23 218
24-39 228
40-49 220
50-59 208

So Al, if you want to look at percentages, how do you do that? Do you take the most weight lifted in an age category and a given lift and look at the difference in age categories that lifted less for that particular lift to come up with a percentage? How do you determine how much strength they gained/lost on a year-by-year basis when the time-frame is 4, 5, 9, and 9 years? And there are more problems than just that….

What I really wanted to accomplish in sharing this data is to show that even if you don’t look at age-specific physiological changes in strength via a bunch of peer-reviewed hardcore research, if you instead go directly to the published results from competitions, lifters will see that the commonly held beliefs about age and strength performance just don’t hold true (at least not until a much higher than commonly thought age).

So we’re back to the same ol’ thing…the formula that USAWA uses is fictional (not that the age classifications and formulas used by other strength sport organizations aren’t fictional as well…don’t want it to look like I’m just picking on USAWA) and arbitrary. How, then, could it possibly be fair? And isn’t sport principally supposed to be governed by fairness (among other things)?

Yes Al, numbers in kg and remember, these numbers represent AVERAGES of ALL lifters across ALL weight classes and equipped and unequipped TOGETHER. The data represent a total of 648 meets, there were 47,913 total participants with 21,953 individual participants, 6,038 of which were female.

Please bear in mind the OVERALL findings, then also consider that there are differences in average weights lifted by lift and then, of course, that in doing the statistical analysis those differences in numbers didn’t add up to anything significant (except for the women’s sq). So whatever percentage someone would want to apply to an age formula would be fictional because the actual differences don’t amount to anything significant.

Now, admittedly, there is a difference between statistical significance and meaningfulness. Statistical significance is based on irrefutable math; meaningfulness is what you and I might personally attach to the numbers. Therefore, say the actual change in strength between a 25-year old and a 45-year old is a 2.5% loss and it’s statistically insignificant. I would go with that and attach no meaning to the strength loss. You, however, might consider that personally meaningful. I cannot argue your personal feelings on that, only that regardless of the meaning you attach to the %-age, it still remains mathematically insignificant. For that reason, if that 2.5% change in being 25 or 45 years old would be used as part of a formula, I would have to argue that the formula is based on fiction. Another consideration is that USAWA considers a 1% drop in performance per year of chronological age. Like I mentioned earlier, how could one accurately draw that conclusion based on this particular data (not to mention the physiological data that doesn’t support that concept)? Let’s just look at the men…

Consider the 24-39 age category to be the “strong” ones because common thinking tells us this. Thus male sq is 193 and represents 100%, which means that the 190 the 40-49 age group squats is about 2% less. This 2% difference applies to averages over 15 and 9 year differences in age, respectively. How would one come up with a 1% drop in performance per year after 40? The drop in performance between 40-49 and 50-59 is at roughly 4%. Again, how can one conclude from that, that a guy who turned 52 will squat 1% less than he did when he was 51? And of course it would be impossible to generalize that his entire strength performance across all lifts would drop by 1%.

But that’s just for the squat. Consider that in the bench press the age argument doesn’t even hold true as the 40-49 group actually benched nearly 4% more than the 24-39 group. So at this point not only does the “percent by year” argument fall apart, but so does the base argument that age made a difference at all. CLEARLY, something other than a chronological age effect must be contributing to these numbers (which ONLY apply to USAPL and ONLY for the years investigated).

I could go on with this from a mathematical/statistical/research perspective but to be frank, I lay much more stock in the exercise physiology research that addresses physiological changes due to aging and the effect that bending barbells might have on ameliorating any aging effects (which adds additional power to the argument that the age-adjustment-formula is fictional because from a physiological perspective drops in performance cannot be supported until much higher ages than 40). But again, don’t forget that we’re talking about averages. This means that there are certain lifters that are actually lifting more weight as they age while others might indeed be lifting less. But for those that lift less, what is that due to? Clearly it’s not chronological age. Could it not be due to time in sport, losing motivation, a chronic injury, getting fat and nonathletic, poor diet and life-style practices are catching up, the training regimens are less than effective, stressful life/career events, etc., etc., etc, and a combination of any or all of this?

Any way you cut it, you simply cannot attach a cause and effect relationship to losses in strength performance and chronological age, at least not until decades after 40…just because there’s a direct positive correlation between amount of rainfall and ice cream consumption in Indonesia, that doesn’t mean rainfall causes Indonesians to eat more ice cream. So let’s just be honest about this—not that whoever came up with the age-adjustment-formula was being dishonest…he/she was most certainly trying to do something good based on commonly held beliefs—but isn’t it really done in an effort to allow people of different ages to remain competitive and to give them an opportunity to feel good? And isn’t it also true that if you can rationalize that your one-armed deadlift is now at 42 25-pounds less than it was when you were 28 is due to being almost 15 years older, you hold little if any personal responsibility for that loss in strength performance? So at the end of the day, what any argumentation about the effects of age on strength performance accomplishes is fogging up reality…and sometimes the truth can hurt and pointing out reality is taken as insulting by some….

John, thoughtful questions. In the acquisition of lifting skill and strength for any particular lift, at any age, you notice relatively quick gains in performance/strength early on, then gains take longer to acquire. This, research has demonstrated, is seen equally in people in their 20’s and 80’s. It is initially due to your nervous system learning how to execute the lift and as a result your muscles contracting with greater, well, “synchronicity.” So the initial gains that you see, starting in week one and over about the first month to six weeks or so (which also depends on the complexity of the lift), are largely not due to true muscle strength. The muscle strength contribution comes afterwards and then continues with proper training strategies for decades to come. Therefore, there really is no continuous learning or experience curve in executing a particular lift that would mask any losses in strength, whatever a given loss may be due to.

So as you lift a weight the neuromuscular system is doing two main things at the same time; 1. it’s generating a certain amount of force (i.e., strength) and 2. a certain amount of speed at which the weight moves. Of these two aspects of lifting a weight, scientists have found that for older people (roughly 70’s) the generation of impulse (speed) becomes less while being able to generate force remains for much, much longer. This happens, however, many decades after turning 40 (when USAWA’s age correction formula takes effect) and is heavily influenced by the person’s training status, among other things. Put another way, if you’re not particularly well trained in your mid-60’s or so, you might demonstrate in the laboratory setting a reduction in impulse generation. But if you’ve spent nearly a lifetime training in a scientific manner then the loss of impulse development would turn up much, much later. From a practical perspective—e.g., how much weight you can actually snatch—that age-related loss in impulse is hard to measure in kg’s, you really need the laboratory for that to see it.

Well, time to head back up the mountain….