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Strength Training
Max Lipset, a certified strength and conditioning specialist, has worked with world-class athletes like cross-country skier Annie Hart, helping her achieve her dream of making the U.S. Olympic team with several years of specialized training.
“The main variable we changed in her training was adding a significant amount of strength work,” says Lipset. “She made it there, performed well, and achieved everything she hoped to in the sport.”
Not everyone can become an Olympian by adding strength training to their fitness routine, but experts say that everyone can improve their health with regular strength training. The benefits include everything from increasing bone density and dropping pounds to reducing the effects of arthritis, back pain, heart disease, depression, and diabetes.
Lipset says that as we age, strength training can make a big difference in alleviating some of the aches and pains of everyday life, making it possible “to do essential daily activities like standing up and sitting down, picking things up off the ground, twisting, lifting, and bending”
BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
Lipset, a former pro soccer player and coach, founded The Power House gyms with locations around the Twin Cities. He partners with Summit HealthEast Sports Center in Woodbury, and describes it as a collaboration that brings together experts from the clinical side and the performance side to improve patient outcomes before or after an orthopedic treatment.
“My company’s partnership with Summit Orthopedics is a cool example of two groups that are in slightly different spaces when it comes to health and well- ness coming together and saying, We both have something to offer and we want to do it in a way that is collaborative,” he says. “It’s a really valuable opportunity for individuals looking to maximize the safety and efficiency of their training.”
His team works with everyone from high school athletes and weekend warriors to baby boomers sorting through the aches and pains of aging.
“Strength training can improve performance and prevent injuries by putting a little bit more mass on your joints,” he says. “If you have any kind of contact in your sport, you’re going to be less likely to sustain an injury.”
PLAYING THE LONG GAME
It almost sounds like the steps to a funky dance—squat, step, lunge, hip hinge—but these are the core movements of daily life that can keep you young.
“As long as we are covering those movement patterns and strengthening them, it’s going to help us stay active over the course of a lifetime,” says Adam Maronde, performance manager with Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine in downtown Minneapolis.
“If we don’t have the strength from that muscle tissue to help support us in a lunge or squat, we’re not going to be able to climb up stairs.”
—Adam Maronde, Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine
When considering your fitness goals, he says, it’s important to ask yourself this question: Are the things I am doing going to allow me to be active for a lifetime? He notes that if strength training isn’t part of your fitness regimen, it should be. “Strength training is particularly beneficial in that we either use it or we lose it,” he says. “So, we’re either going to use this muscle tissue or it’s going to atrophy as we age, and it’s not going to allow us the strength to climb up stairs as we get older.”
Studies show that women begin to lose lean muscle mass in their late 20s, and men begin to do the same a couple years later. Loss of muscle mass can make you weak, decrease your mobility, and leave you more prone to falling.
Maronde says the squat, step, lunge, and hip hinge are fundamental movement patterns that can make or break us as we age. He says keeping those moves limber and strong is a recipe for increasing our longevity.
“If we don’t have the strength from that muscle tissue to help support us in a lunge or a squat, we’re not going to be able to climb up stairs; we’re not going to be able to get up from a chair or pick up a laundry basket,” he says.
Strength training should cover the activities and movements for everyday life, Maronde says. “For an NFL athlete, it might be very different from what a 67-year-old returning from double knee replacements does for a squat, but they are both working through that movement pattern.”
DEFUSING TIME BOMBS
After years of working with professional athletes in the NHL, NFL, MLB, and NLL, including more than a decade as a strength and conditioning coach for the Minnesota Wild hockey team, strength and performance coach Kirk Olson is now focused on helping both up-and-coming and professional athletes.
Olson, MS, CSCS, of Twin Cities Orthopedics, has built a crew of about a dozen coaches and trainers with a goal of helping young athletes optimize their talent. One way to achieve that is to help young athletes develop stable and mobile joints.
“A mobile joint that’s not stable is a bomb waiting to explode,” he says. “A stable joint that lacks mobility could also be problematic if that stable joint gets put into an excessive range of motion. However, if you create a mobile joint that is also very stable, now you have an athlete who is bulletproofing their joints.”
Read more from our Annual Health Guide in the November issue of Mpls.St.Paul Magazine or here.
