What They Don’t Teach You About Training Seniors

What they don’t teach you about training seniors...

Guidelines for personal trainers working with seniors are often vague and lack specifics.

These are three things I’ve learned by working with seniors:

1. Exercise is a cognitive challenge.

This means that exercise is great for seniors to help maintain cognitive function. On the other hand, it also means that seniors may have a harder time talking, counting, or otherwise multitasking while exercising. Seniors may also need more form reminders and may not as easily remember exercises from previous sessions. This all requires the personal trainer to modify their approach when working with seniors such as limiting chitchatting while the client is performing the exercise and repeating exercises until they are very familiar.

2. Fitness and range of motion standards for younger populations are less applicable to seniors.

For example, a personal trainer may expect a younger client to be able to squat to 90° before progressing in weight. However, a senior who is just starting to exercise in their 80s may not ever have the range of motion to squat to 90°. Yet, you can still slowly and safely increase (or at least maintain) their muscle mass using the range of motion that they do have. For example, they can do sit-to-stand exercises from a chair holding a five pound weight and work their way up to eight or even ten pounds! Trying to get your senior client to meet the “ideal” standards will leave you frustrated and your client receiving minimal benefit.

3. Progress looks different with seniors.

I have found that personal trainers often either treat seniors like they are made of glass or swing too far the other way and treat them just like a healthy twenty year old. Seniors can build muscle mass and progress in the gym, however, they face different challenges than younger people which need to be accounted for. Fluctuating pain levels, medications, malnutrition, and aging all play a significant role in the progress a senior sees in the gym. A good trainer needs to be highly adaptable to the current state of their senior clients and accept that sometimes, maintaining muscle mass is a great goal for an advanced senior!

Helping seniors feel comfortable while working out starts with understanding their unique situation!