Powerlifting: The Best Strength Sport for Athletes Over 40
Masters powerlifter Ron Delaney, one of the all-time greats. Even if you never compete, lifting in your 40s and beyond sharpens your physical and mental abilities.
Introduction
I need to come clean: there's no best sport. It entirely depends on your background, interests, and abilities.
But you can make a solid case for powerlifting as an ideal competitive outlet for masters athletes. Even if you never intend to enter a meet, barbell lifting in your 40s improves your overall health and quality of life.
What is a Masters Athlete?
Masters athlete typically refers to a specific age division within a given competitive sport. No standard agreement exists on the exact range, but most sports use 35 years old as the starting point.
Powerlifting federations define masters athletes as those 40 years old and above. The International Powerlifting Federation and the United States Powerlifting Association include several sub-categories as well.
Unique Benefits of Training in your 40s
Athletes that compete in sports gain potent effects. This is true whether you're a lifelong marathoner or discovered your passion for martial arts later in life.
According to the authors in a 2018 Journal of Lifestyle Medicine paper, "masters athletes have been proposed as a model for successful aging." Benefits included decreased health risks associated with various chronic diseases and reduced premature death. (Click here for the full article)
In addition, tough training counteracts the myth of an inevitable decline in our 40s.
Research shows that athletes benefit from continuing to push themselves. A 2023 study in the Journal of Aging and Physical Activity showed age doesn't significantly affect performance. As they note: "Sedentary lifestyles play a larger role in any observed decrements in performance and recovery in masters athletes."
Reasons to Powerlift in your 40s
The lesson: continue to pursue your favorite sport for as long as you can. And keep exploring if you have yet to find one. Many of my strength and conditioning clients discovered their passion in their 40s and 50s. In many cases, they spent their lives assuming they were unathletic and then found an outlet, whether running, rowing, or fencing.
Regardless of your path, lift weights to build muscle mass and strength. It improves performance and resilience. You will stay active in your sport for decades, continually reaping the physical and mental benefits. You can read more about strength training for masters athletes in this article.
With that said, my biased opinion is that powerlifting offers an excellent entry into strength sports as we age.
Here's why:
Barbells are accessible
Strongman is another fantastic strength sport, but it's challenging to find specialized training gyms with the right equipment. Plus, building a home gym with items like Atlas stones is a longer process.
By contrast, every commercial gym now has a power rack and barbells. You can also create a quality powerlifting setup at home with fitness companies at various price points.
It's an efficient form of strength training
You get an excellent return on your time. Powerlifters train the barbell squat, barbell deadlift, and barbell bench press, which are compound movements. They work a variety of muscles and joints simultaneously.
Your training may still include assistance or isolation lifts like biceps curls. But it's easy to incorporate those movements into the logical structure of a powerlifting program.
The movements are relatively easy to learn
Olympic weightlifting requires incredible athleticism and power. Movements like the clean and jerk belong in your program if you've already mastered technique.
Power lifts, however, are simpler and more forgiving if you're coming to strength sports later. While precise form still matters, you're practicing functional movement patterns from everyday life, like squatting. You're just learning the specific mechanics of lifting heavy weights safely.
New motor skills improve cognitive function
Learning new skills has powerful effects on cognitive health, including mastering barbell lifts. Research shows that we gain strength initially by forming new neural pathways. Our brains learn to coordinate specific actions like gripping the bar and contracting muscles at the right time.
Load management and progressive overload reduce the risk of injury
You might have seen clips from a powerlifting meet or watched a PR attempt in your gym. These max-effort lifts are typically brutal, but they're also the single expression of months or years of training.
Most of that training will take place at 50%-75% of their capability.
Physics and some common sense dictate that the best gains from slowly increasing the intensity of your training (the load). Such moderations prevents you from exceeding your current physical state (your load capacity) at any given time.
The principle of progressive overload guides programming. The total weight lifted or the total volume will slowly adjust over time.
These training approaches help lower the risk of injury, which one paper found less common in older and more experienced powerlifters. Their maturity in managing training loads and making appropriate attempts during meets was cited as a critical factor. (Click here for the full paper).
Training builds discipline and self-awareness
Powerlifting is hard, but only sometimes in the ways you expect. Occasionally, your training may require single repetitions at 90% effort. On others, you'll want to push your top sets but need to hold back. For example, if you're in week 1 of a 4-week mesocycle, you must preserve energy for future weeks.
The ability to exert self-discipline in both settings carries over to other aspects of life. This is particularly true if you become more self-aware during training. For example, you might like to exert yourself to the max every session, leading to poor performance on meet day. That could be a helpful insight if it appears elsewhere, such as burning yourself out in week 6 of a 16-week work project.
In addition, powerlifting requires a process-orientation. After your novice gains, the rate of progress slows down. As a result, you need to get comfortable following an extremely deliberate plan with delayed gratification. You may lift for 4-5 sessions before you see the results.
To learn more about mindset training, read my article here.
Powerlifting gives you a foundation for other sports
Rarely is there any downside to resistance training. If you train like a powerlifter for six months and decide it's not for you, you've developed an excellent base for pursuing other options. You will enjoy substantial carryover, whether it's another strength sport like functional fitness (aka CrossFit) or rec basketball league.
Specifically, you will develop strength that shows up as power and explosiveness. You'll need to adapt your training to realize those benefits fully. But you can hold onto the strength you've gained with relatively little effort, even if your workouts change.
Training and meets build camaraderie
Powerlifting builds community based on a shared interest. Your training and your health will improve, partly because social ties correlate with longevity.
Powerlifting competitions test your abilities, but they're fun. Most lifters focus on their performance while cheering loudly for anyone giving their best. Plus, there's a lot of downtime to watch other feats of strength.
Conclusion
If you train and compete in a sport in your 40s, continue to do so.
Whether you've participated in athletics previously or would like to find the sport for you, there is always time. Training and competition provide unique physical and mental benefits. They're an opportunity to build meaning into our lives that will carry us through the decades.
And regardless of your experience or status, make your training challenging. Research shows that performance declines because people pull back, not because of any inevitable age decline. As a strength and conditioning coach, I've witnessed remarkable feats when people simply refuse to accept myths about aging.
The sport of powerlifting is ideal for masters athletes for many reasons. Participating in a strength sport builds physical and mental fortitude for meeting the challenges of this unique life stage.
If you’re interested in beginning powerlifting or continuing to compete in your 40s and beyond, please reach out. You can find my contact information at this link.
