The BJ Gaddour Podcast | Men's Health Fitness Workout Nutrition Lifestyle Business · BJ Gaddour

Ep. 285- Training By Decade: Teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s & Beyond

September 16, 2024·1 hr 14 min·5 clips

BJ calls your twenties the peak for growth hormone, testosterone, metabolism, and fluid intelligence.

BJ starts by shouting out VIP member Tom Boyle for suggesting the topic. The timing makes sense to him, since he is turning 42 next week. From there, he lays out the episode decade by decade, from the teens to 50 and beyond. He has lived through everything except that fifth decade, and he has spent plenty of time working with people over 50 throughout the year. What ties the whole conversation together is staying able to train and work without getting knocked off course. He keeps coming back to the idea that the best ability is availability. He also runs through the 28-day Hanks challenge and says people can jump in at any point. When he gets to the twenties, he treats that decade as a time to push strength and power as high as possible. Building a bigger ceiling there, he says, gives you a better floor later on. The catch is that a higher ceiling can also mean a harder fall if you ignore injury risk. He uses his own body as an example of how wear and tear can change the path. His knees were already beat up by the time he entered his twenties. That forced him to adjust lower-body work while he kept pushing upper-body training. The imbalance got obvious enough that people noticed and joked about his thighs getting skinny. He does not present that as a neat cautionary tale from a distance. To him, it is the real tradeoff that comes with training hard. He still likes the idea of going after hard gains in the twenties, but only if the program respects joints and recovery. When people ask how to gain size, he points to a two-upper, two-lower split as a strong option. He says to include compound lifts in the four-to-six rep range. He also wants work in the eight-to-12 range. Higher-rep work at 15-plus belongs in there too. The point is to train hard enough to raise your potential, but not so recklessly that you burn through the next decade before you get there.

As heard by us

A decade-by-decade training talk that pairs ambition with staying available.

The episode moves decade by decade, from the teens through 50 and beyond, and keeps its attention on practical training choices instead of nostalgia.

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Why you'd press play

You want decade-by-decade training advice without the usual fluff.

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