Awaken Masters

Crush your workouts – not your body.

You’re not here for the geezer program. This is a new era, where advances in fitness have changed the game for older athletes. Muscle ups and thrusters at age 70? Why not? It sure beats sitting around the retirement home.

Now it’s possible to stay strong, look good, and move well at any age – and most importantly, stay out of the injury zone so you can keep getting after it. Crush your workout, keep your body humming, and head out to rock the rest of your day – and come back tomorrow to hit it again.

At the same time, with more years comes more stress. Life is fuller than when you were in your 20s and had time to work out for hours, and recover for the same. Your stress bucket is faster to fill up with job, kids, aging parents, mortgage, and other responsibilities – you don’t need your training to send you into overload.

Priorities have changed, too – do you really need to PR or win at all costs? No one can keep that up forever and still live a balanced life. And what’s most important, anyway? Is it an extra few pounds on the bar, or simply being the best you can be for where you are, right now?

Other programs hand out intensity and volume like candy on Halloween, until the nagging injuries pile up. Or they ignore the fact that with aging comes changes to your resiliency and ability to recover – not to mention hormonal, neurological, and other physical factors. Without a smart approach to program design and structure, you’re either feeling beat up by your training or too exhausted to tackle the rest of your life.

Experienced athletes know that consistency wins. Pushing too far into injury, overtraining, and burnout means less days in the gym and more time recovering – or feeling sidelined by your limitations. Instead, take on a training program that keeps you at optimal efforts, with movements designed for your needs.

Get Built, Not Burnt

Awaken Masters is a 12 week program with 5 workouts per week designed specifically for the needs of older athletes. Its approach is the same as our flagship program, Awaken Training Series, in that it’s a 12 week progression that develops your strength, motor control, structural balance, mobility and stability in a range of positions, and conditioning using Functional Bodybuilding principles:

• Simple to complex
• Build from week to week
• Quality over quantity
• Earn your intensity

Within the Masters track, you’ll find a structure that supports optimal performance without overtraining:

• Prehab and warmups that account for the added years of sub-optimal positions Masters athletes have accumulated driving cars, hunched over desks, etc. Regain range of motion and stability in a variety of positions for fitness as well as function.
• Conditioning first to get great quality out of this part of the session, and thoroughly prime and prep your body for the strength work to follow.
• Less Maximal Loading and more Submaximal Loading – With hormonal and nervous system changes, the opportunity for getting stronger comes more in the way of building great structural balance and muscle endurance. Explore new repetition ranges, increasing time under tension, and place strength efforts later in training sessions to get the RIGHT type of strength work and avoid tweaks, aches, and pains.
• Positional Emphasis – When training in compromised positions, slow things down and create training scenarios that help build position before strength. This program is particularly mindful of not raising intensity in positions that are generally tough on Masters athletes.
• Structural Balance Finishers – Rather than ending every day with intensive conditioning that leaves your body neurologically tight, you’ll finish several training days each week with structural balance supersets that allow you to end with high quality reps and set your body up for a great recovery session to follow.
  

Ready to get after some fun, addictive programming designed for your needs as a Masters athlete?