Yes, the headline took some liberty, as the macebell descends from the Indian gada, rather than from weapons typically employed by Vikings, who fought mainly with spears, axes and swords.

The physiology behind this workout

The power of the offset bell

A dumbbell got it’s name for a reason: it just sits in your palm as static weight that you move in linear planes of motion, more or less. Nothing happens without you starting it.

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Macebells are nothing of the kind. Nearly all their weight sits in a steel ball at the far end of a handle (the length of which varies). That offset weight, plus gravity, is what makes the macebell workout unique, fun and creative. The farther a weight is from your hands, the harder it twists against your wrists, forearms, shoulders and trunk. Sliding your hands down the handle away from the ball can double that twisting force, making a 20-pound mace feel a lot heavier than 20 pounds. But choke up near the ball, and it gets remarkably lighter.

Macebells allow you to dynamically change the workout without changing the weight.

The two halves of every swing train (and restore) shoulder mobility

Every macebell swing has two halves. First you get the ball moving. Then you have to slow it down and turn it around, sometimes behind your head where you can’t see it. That braking half is what generates a lot of the mobility and strength workout.

The small muscles deep in your shoulder that hold your arm in its socket (aka the rotator cuff) have to control a weight moving in a circle or oval. Because the load is off to one side, the muscles along your sides and back work to keep your trunk from being pulled sideways. Your grip and forearms are working the whole time.

On the bigger swings, like the shovel, your legs and hips start the move. Your whole body takes part in nearly every rep. Be like Freyja and Thor, folks….

Functional mobility training, instead of straight-line workouts

Gym lifting mostly moves in straight lines: up and down, forward and back, both hands sharing the load evenly. Life doesn’t. You reach across the car for a bag, swing a suitcase into an overhead bin, turn to put a pot on a high shelf. The mace trains that kind of movement, and the muscles involved matter more after 50. In one study of 2,404 Australian adults, people in the oldest age group could raise their arms about 40 degrees less than people in the youngest.1 In a large study of nearly 140,000 people in 17 countries, every 11 pounds of lost grip strength was linked to a 16% higher risk of dying over about four years.2 That study shows a link, not cause and effect, but grip is a number you can move.

Two caveats

First, no controlled trial has tested macebell training in anyone, at any age. The only lab data I could find is a 2020 conference abstract that put muscle-activity sensors on eight college students. It found that muscle activity changed depending on which side of the body the ball was on.3 The case for the mace rests on simple mechanics and on what we know about the muscles it trains.

Second, your shoulders are the joint this tool works hardest, and shoulders are often damaged after 50 maybe without you knowing it. When researchers scanned the shoulders of 664 people in a village in Japan, about 1 in 10 people in their 50s had a full rotator cuff tear, and two out of three people with a tear had no symptoms.4

That’s why I warm up with Indian clubs and keep the mace light. I’ve had tendon repairs on both shoulders, and I’d like you to skip that part of my experience.

Where the name comes from

• The macebell is named after the medieval mace, a war club with a heavy metal head that soldiers used against armored opponents.

• Its ancestor is the gada, a heavy-headed club that wrestlers in India have trained with for centuries. Many wrestling gyms in north India are devoted entirely to swinging clubs and maces.

• The “bell” is the weighted steel ball on the end of the handle. The mace’s lighter cousin, the Indian club—which also originated in India, obviously—came to Victorian England in the packs of British soldiers in the 1820s.

Gear needed

• a macebell (optional)

• a cast-iron skillet (optional)

• a broomstick or wooden dowel (optional)

• a dirt shovel or metal rake (optional)

• a large hammer (optional)

Time commitment

• 5-30 minutes

How to do it

If the movements or equipment don’t work for you, check out the Variations & regressions section below.

Below, you have full access to:

• how to do this workout

• suggested sets and reps per set (and/or time thresholds) for your ability

• alternative ways to do this workout, for any fitness level

• raw video of freestyle macebell and iron-skillet routines that you can use as a guide (and laugh at all my skillet drops)

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Sandbag workouts for unconventional strength & power

I’m not sure there’s a more enjoyable and time-efficient method to build full-body strength and VO2 max than a 15-minute sandbag workout. You’ll feel it in every region of your body the next day, and burn more calories than seems possible in a room full of dumbbells and weight plates.

As a personal testimonial, after filming the workout in this video yesterday, I woke up feeling it (in a good way) in my shoulders, hips, lower back (in a pleasant, “oh, you worked out” kind of way) and even arms and fingers, from all the grappling and gripping. And I probably burned 400 calories, judging from how much I was sweating. Good clean fun!

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One important bit of housekeeping

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If you don’t have a sandbag, they’re not expensive to buy and fill. Alternatively, your gym may have weighted balls (aka medicine balls, as we used to call them) that allow you to do a form of these sandbag workouts.

See all Move Like It’s 1899 videos and articles here

The physiology behind this workout

All four sandbag moves train your muscles against a load that shifts as you lift it, so your legs, trunk and grip have to keep adjusting to control it. The shoulder lift and the toss add speed, and speed is what we lose first. Muscle power, meaning how fast you can produce force, declines earlier and faster with age than strength does.1 Much of that loss comes from shrinking fast muscle fibers, the ones that fire for quick, forceful movements.

In a Dutch study, those fibers were 29% smaller in men averaging 71 years old than in men averaging 23. But after six months of training, the older men’s fast fibers grew by

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Lateral workouts for unconventional strength & power

The Cossack landmine and the single-leg Romanian deadlift landmine are two challenging landmine exercises that build deep leg and hip strength through unconventional weighted movements.

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These are called “landmines” because the barbell, protruding from its anchor, resembles an actual military landmine apparatus. If you’re not familiar with gym landmines, don’t let the name or the setup keep you from trying this workout. If your gym doesn’t have the anchor sleeve to slide one end of a barbell into, you can wedge the end of a barbell into a corner with a towel or into a weighted sandbag.

Become a paying subscriber now, for just $1.23/week, before the price goes up on October 14.

Weighted Cossack landmines are a strength + power move, because they require your hips to open up and your lower half to stabilize a weighted movement laterally.

Traditional leg training is typically one-dimensional: either a forward or up-down movement: squats, lunges and step-ups are each examples of that. But life after 50 or 60 doesn't happen in only one plane of motion. The injuries we get certainly don’t limit themselves to only forward or up-down movements.

See all Move Like It’s 1899 videos and articles here

That’s why these two moves are important to try, because they train your legs to move sideways under load and to hold you up on one foot, which makes the small stabilizer muscles in that foot, ankle and hip work harder than anything you have to do on two legs.

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Functional strength = healthy longevity

Building functional strength in life's second half is extremely important to any aging body. Older adults, especially, need to develop pelvic, hip, and deep leg strength and flexibility, not just to avoid injury but also to create more symmetry between your right and your left sides.

Don’t skip the warm up

Warming up for these is extra important, given how Cossack squats will tax your hips, hamstrings and quads. So, jumping rope for a few minutes, as I mentioned in the previous MLI 1899 episode, warms up and loosens your muscles in two or three minutes. Jumping rope also improves your VO2 max over time, which is the single best predictor of how long you'll live from a lifestyle change.

Cossack landmines: the proper weight and technique

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First things first: I know it’s a silly photo. I’m really not trying to pretend I’m the David Hasselhoff of kettlebells. Sometimes you go with the least worst image you have. This is mine. Onward….

Kettlebells that blast your core and cut your upper body

I give you two kettlebell moves today, weighted halos and uppercuts, that do a lot for your entire midsection and core strength. Both of these workouts look like shoulder work but they’re also working your trunk, front and back.

If you have recurring lower-back issues as the result of too much sitting and not enough daily moving your body, this workout can help. It will also, after a few iterations, work your shoulders and arms to make them noticeably stronger and more defined. So it’s great for your mirror ego, too.

In the video, I’m doing these moves with a 35-pound bell. Halos and uppercuts work the muscles along your spine and across your abdomen that hold your ribs and hips still while a weight tries to pull them somewhere else, and that’s strength that keeps you upright after 50: a core that holds while the rest of you is moving across multiple planes of motion.

You don’t get hurt lifting a suitcase straight up. You get hurt turning to put it in the overhead bin. The halo trains the turning. The uppercut trains the drive.

In case you missed it: the #WorkoutWednesday video introducing foam rolling basics…

Warm-up and weight choice

I warm up with a jump rope, and I’d argue everyone over 50 should own one. Two or three minutes raises your heart rate and breathing enough to improve VO2 max over time, which is the single best predictor of how long you’ll live that you can change. It also trains coordination between your feet, hands, and eyes, which fades with age—unless you keep using it.

I’m using a kettlebell here, but you could also use a dumbbell. Start at a modest weight, and move up, instead of the other way around. If you can’t move it slowly, it’s too heavy.

The kettlebell halo workout: technique

Hold the bell sideways, with one hand through the horns, and brace your midsection.

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Why do you lift heavy things? Is it to get stronger? Or carve more defined muscles? Or become more powerful?

Which answer you choose (and there are more than just three) matters more than you may think, for reasons that go beyond how to train differently for each.

Muscle strength, size and power may sound interchangeable, but they’re not. Especially after 55 or 60, they become three distinct physical qualities, each trained differently, for different reasons, and each declining on its own schedule.

Muscle power, for example, declines more rapidly in older adulthood than muscle strength. That matters because while strength is inarguably good to have, building power—especially in your lower body and core—is what keeps you agile, quick and able to catch yourself from tripping into that first, fateful, potentially nasty fall.

Related read: The case for quitting bar squat (and 6 better workouts)

(Falls in later life are among the most reliable predictors of future falls, which are strongly correlated to the end of independent living and greater mortality risk.)

It’s certainly possible to develop muscle size, strength and power at the same time, if you train frequently enough with the proper discipline. For most people, though, it isn’t likely. So let’s break down the comparative advantages of each kind of training, regardless of whether you’re an aging gym rat or lifting your first dumbbell.

In case you missed it…

The different reasons to develop strength vs. size vs. power

Strength is the maximum force a muscle can produce at any speed. It’s the heaviest weight you can lift once.

Power is force delivered quickly. A kettlebell swing is power. So is a fast pushup, or even standing up from a low chair. Sprinting is pure power. Catching yourself mid-stumble is power that can pay a major health dividend.

Size is the amount of muscle you carry.

For anyone past 50 or 60, each goal has its case.

• Strength keeps you lifting luggage, grandchildren and yourself swiftly off the floor, and loads your bones in ways that keep them strong.

• Size gives you a protein reserve to draw on during illness or injury rehab, when the body can cannibalize muscle.

• Power declines faster than either of the others with age, and it governs the movements that keep you independent: stairs, curbs and recoveries from trips and athletic fatigue.

  

My personal take on training for size, strength or power

“Zielbauer, I’m gonna beat your ass before summer”

I’ve been training with weights since 7th grade, when John Allen, a giant 12-year-old burnout, promised to rearrange my face before the end of the school year. In response, I started working out in the basement with sand-filled plastic weights from a kit made by Sears Roebuck & Co.

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The importance of power in older adulthood

I didn’t know what I was so awkwardly training for, other than to survive John Allen’s threat (which he promptly forgot). But over most of the next 47 years, I trained maniacally for size and strength. Only after around age 58 did developing more power, speed and agility become one of my top fitness goals.

That’s because though muscle size and strength make you look and feel great, physical power is the main ingredient in maintaining walking speed, moving quickly with control and, crucially, reacquiring lost balance in a fraction of a second.

Related read: The case for quitting bench press (and 6 better workouts)

Specific exercises to train for muscle size, strength and power, and the research behind them

There’s plenty of research to support that thesis, which I’ll get into below, along with my thoughts on how to train for muscle size, strength and power. I also offer specific exercises that help you achieve each outcome.

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If your goal is strength: lift heavy

Worth repeating: No one over 50 needs to lift heavy. You can look and feel great by moderating the reps—and I say this with a “go heavy” mindset that doesn’t always serve my best interests. But if you want to get the strongest you can possibly be, lift heavy.

The best long-term evidence for this comes from the 2024 LISA trial in Denmark, a randomized controlled study of 451 adults at retirement age:

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It’s a phrase that means giving yourself opportunities to move your body like your forebears had to: lifting, pushing and pulling things across multiple planes of motion. Though we no longer need to drive fenceposts or chop wood or haul bricks, we can effectively mimic that human work a few times a week—just like it’s 1899, the year that arguably launched the modern age.

Why 1899?

In 1899, notable elements of society began rebelling against the technology advances that were disrupting how people had traditionally worked, moved and interacted.

Henry Ford launched the Detroit Automobile Company in 1899. Guglielmo Marconi sent the first radio signal across the English Channel. Liebig's Extract of Meat Company introduced Oxo beef stock cubes—an ancestor of what we now call ultra-processed food. In response to these and other developments:

• Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine launched in March 1899—the first mass-market American fitness publication, preaching exercise, unprocessed food and abstention from alcohol, tobacco, white bread…and corsets.

• Roosevelt’s “The Strenuous Life” speech, on April 10, became era’s most famous argument that ease and comfort cause individual and social decay.

• That same month, Sandow’s magazine rebranded to Physical Culture—the British side of the movement, built around Eugen Sandow, the first celebrity strongman.

It was a year that cemented the notion that, regardless what machines could do for us, bodies were meant to move. So, yeah, let’s move like it’s 1899.

In January, I wrote about wanting to set an ambitious, achievable expectation for my physical strength and flexibility in 2026. That became a simple, 7-word mantra that feels like the Move Like It’s 1899 origin story:

In that spirit, I created Move Like It’s 1899 to offer paying subscribers weekly weighted strength, speed, power and flexibility workouts in weekly ~7-minute videos aimed at (as the saying goes) aging with strength. Each video comes with written explanations of specific progressions and tips I’ve learned over a lifetime of athletics and almost five decades of weight training. I’ll also include a summary of the physiology of that week’s weighted movement and why it’s effective.

Move Like It’s 1899 videos will be more intense and developed cousins of the #WorkoutWednesday bodyweight workouts anyone can do in 3 minutes in street clothes. The goal for this video series to make building muscle, power & flexibility accessible to anyone to wants to have the muscle and mettle to drive a fence post or haul a wheelbarrow full of bricks…like it’s 1899.

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Why I’m starting this 1899 series with foam rolling

Subsequent videos will go heavier, with weights and workout-level progressions in multiple planes of motion, and progressions that push past what Workout Wednesday can do. But I started this series with foam rolling for specific reasons, some of them personal, that I think apply to everyone.

Forty-eight years of lifting and seven orthopedic surgeries have taught me that the workout you can’t do with proper form, flexibility and proper warm-up is often the one that hurts you, either immediately or—worse—slowly over time. A lower-back seizure has put me on the floor for hours and days, and after 50 an injury that once cost a week now costs a month. The psychological costs of starting over get harder with age.

In case you missed it: the #WorkoutWednesday video introducing foam rolling basics…

So this is the groundwork, literally: what I do on the floor before and after training so the harder episodes are ones I can keep doing. Learn these first. Everything that follows assumes you have and, more importantly, you’ll be glad you did.

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Foam-rolling progressions, and what they’re doing

Three sequences from the video, in the order I do them, with notes on what each one is working. None of this is rolling in the usual sense. The roller is a fulcrum. Gravity does the work that opens your hips, your back, your shoulders and other joints.

Let’s get started.

1. Thoracic spine opener (before a workout)

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By the time I was a college sophomore, I’d worked my way up to bench pressing 295 pounds on the third set (the first two sets being warm-ups of 135 pounds x 10 reps and 225 pounds x 7). It was a big number that took years to reach. It also answered what, at that time, seemed like an important question.

“How much can you bench?”

Across species, the male gender has its performative rituals. Gorillas beat their chests. Bison ram their skulls together. Peacocks splay their tail feathers. Young men bench press. Why they do is not difficult to understand. Bench presses work the chest, shoulders and triceps in one motion. They are a staple exercise among many professional athletes and strength trainers; the NFL Combine tests prospects on how many times they can bench 225 pounds. Bench presses give your upper-body strength a universally understood number, allows you to track (or brag about) it for decades and, not least, make you look great in a t-shirt or with no shirt.

You should probably quit doing them.

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The case against the barbell bench press

It’s pretty simple: by requiring your shoulders to accommodate the fixed-plane movement of a heavily weighted barbell, instead of making the weight follow the natural paths of each arm and shoulder, you’re stressing your AC joint and rotator cuff in ways that may well accumulate into an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon.

And the act of lowering the bar to your chest forces your elbows below shoulder level, allowing a heavily weighted bar to do a lot of silent damage over time.

Stress on the rotator cuff socket

To be sure, bench presses may seem to work just fine for years and years. But as your joints grow older, damage from the pressing exercise accumulates. Research shows that the bar pushes the ball of the arm bone backward in its socket on every bench press rep, the hardest at the bottom. The rotator cuff is resisting that weight, to keep the ball centered in the socket, which is similar in design to a golf tee—a shallow curve. Load the bar with enough weight for enough years, and the cuff becomes more likely to lose that struggle—at which point the ligaments take over, and ligaments don't recover the way muscle does.1

RELATED: A few months ago I wrote about the case for quitting bar squats, because it overloads the cervical spine and allows your weak-leg side to cheat off your strong-side leg. When you’re 25, 35, maybe even 45, you don’t pay the price. That comes later, after around 55.

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Ligaments can get permanently stretched

“Ligaments are not super strong, small amounts of strain will permanently deform them,” said Alec Mckenzie, a PhD lecturer in Anatomy & Physiology at Southern Cross University in Australia and an author of a 2021 paper on the impact of shoulder hyperextension exercises like dips. “Some people push beyond their range of motion limits during these common exercises which may place strain on the ligaments, which will elongate the ligament causing instability,” he told me in an email exchange. “In exercises like the dip and bench press, the load is acting to increase this range of motion i.e., pushing the joints beyond its ‘normal’ range.”

Shoulder damage accumulates silently

That tracks with my experience. In my roughly 40 years of bench press training, at loads that ranged from very heavy to relatively easy, there was never a moment where I incurred a sudden injury. Rather, my tendons seem to have shredded and torn over time. More than any other exercise, bench presses are very likely the reason I needed surgery in my 50s to repair torn tendons in both shoulders—the left shoulder in 2017; the right one in 2025.

Shoulder trouble is one of the most common problems among long-term lifters.2

Full-thickness tendon tears are incredibly common among older athletes, studies show3. Most cause no symptoms. Until they do, including interrupting sleep and acute pain in the shoulder joints while under load. In the video below, X marks the spot where my right shoulder remains when my elbows and arms are forced to extend well below it, albeit under only 135 pounds in this case.

Don’t take just my word for it

Traditional bench press is not an upper-body strength workout to grow old with—unless you enjoy sleepless nights thanks to rotator-cuff tears, followed by months recovery time doing nothing physical after a surgical repair. Don’t take only my word for it. Here’s Mike Boyle, a former strength & conditioning coach for the NHL’s Boston Bruins, the U.S. Women’s Olympic Ice Hockey Team and the Boston Red Sox, speaking in November about limiting bench presses for college athletes and why many of the Red Sox pitchers he’s trained actively avoid the exercise.

“They did not gravitate to the barbell bench press,” Boyle says at 31:13 into the video. But they were sanguine about doing the same exercise with dumbbells, instead of a bar, Boyle added.

To build upper-body strength that doesn’t attack your shoulder cuff, tendons and ligaments, not to mention your AC joints, several other workouts, including with dumbbells instead of a bar, offer virtually the same strength gains.4 Dumbbell-focused presses also allow your left and right chest and shoulder muscles to fire independently of one another, without your strong side compensating for your weak side. (We all have physically weaker sides).

6 better alternatives to bench press for upper-body strength

If you don’t want to give up bench presses, don’t. Just don’t say you haven’t been warned of the silent tears that can build into painful ones under repeated heavy bar loads.

But if you’re ready to build upper-body strength that is more likely to give you equal gains without a surgical intervention, here are my top six workouts with video demonstrations of each and explanations why each is better than bench presses.

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Physical strength is so important in the second half of life (and it’s never too late to start building it). But strength alone won’t keep you quick, agile and fully physically capable of handling unexpected challenges. You also need to develop power.

Strength and power are different abilities. And here’s a sobering statistic: Once you hit 50, muscle power declines roughly twice as fast as muscle strength.1 Power is something I’ve put more personal emphasis on lately. Below, I recommend several exercises that anyone in good health can do to build strong and powerful muscles. (At bottom, I’ve also included several power exercises for people with spinal issues).

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What is “power” and why is it important?

Strength is your ability to move a heavy thing. Power is how fast you can move it. And here’s a twist that many mature athletes may not realize: Heavy strength training alone doesn’t produce meaningful power gains in older adults. You can squat twice your body weight (though I don’t recommend bar squats) but your vertical jump and chair-stand speed will barely move. The reasons are mechanical and neurological: heavy lifting trains the nervous system to produce force gradually. Power requires the nervous system to fire fast—to recruit type II fibers quickly and synchronously. Slow, heavy lifting does not.

That accelerated decline in muscle power after age 50 is, in large part, a fast-twitch fiber story, and that’s why gyms are full of strong people who haven’t trained for power. Power is what gives your muscles quickness, and quickness is what gives out first in daily life. Power, not raw strength, allows you to:

• get out of a low chair or off the ground

• catch yourself when your foot hits the curb

• climb stairs two at a time (without spilling a brimming glass of water)

• throw fast, jump high, punch/kick with force (or deflect punches and kicks)

• accelerate and decelerate

• snap a towel, pan-toss an omelette or lift luggage into an overhead bin

• catch a falling object (or return a wicked tennis or pickleball drop shot2)

Muscles don’t have to be big to be powerful. They just need to be trained to contract faster and generate force more quickly. Here’s how anyone—women and men, younger or older—can start building more fast-twitch muscle power.

15 power + strength workouts you can start doing now*

Power is moving a weight quickly. So to create more powerful muscle for longevity, the solution is pretty simple: move weight faster. You can adapt your existing workouts to do that, of course, using a “slow/down, fast/up” rhythm to any movement.

Here are 15 specific exercises (with a couple video clips) that you can do at home or the gym that are excellent for building functional power into your strength training. (Scroll to the bottom for power exercises for people experiencing spinal issues.)

• 9 of the 15 movements below have 🅗 after them, denoting exercises you can do at home with no equipment or almost no equipment

• The mace bell exercise shown the photo above is not among the 15 power exercises below, but it is a great workout. If there’s interest, I’ll create a post on it.

• I marked my favorite movements with 🤘

I’m creating a downloadable PDF for paying subscribers that includes a printable weekly planner you can put on your fridge. Look for an email from me on this early next week.

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I have fond memories of my heavy squat sessions. They were often on Friday nights, when the gym was empty but for the true believers. The core of my routine was 8 sets of 10 reps of 225 pounds. The endorphins, the sweaty heart-rate spike and the iron-denominated gains in strength were addicting; the return to existential baseline real.

“The king of all exercises”

Weighted back squats are one of the most demanding compound movements there is, because they recruit multiple muscle groups and joints simultaneously. NFL players, powerlifters and generations of coaches and dedicated gym rats the world over swear by them. They’ve long been considered one of the most complete lower-body exercises. They’re good at making your butt and legs look great. And they show the world—quite literally—how much of it you can shoulder.

And you should probably quit doing them.

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For most people over 50 (and, very arguably, anyone) bar squats are not the best way to achieve well-balanced, injury-free lower-body strength for the long haul. Back squats tend to exploit pre-existing structural problems in your hips, glutes and core and create the potential for insidious, slow-developing back, pelvic and knee injuries that, in midlife, become harder to heal.

Also, squats aren’t even the best way to make your butt look great.

To build lower-body strength, balance and stability, several other workouts beat squats, and I’ll get into those below. But first, the case against bar squats—and some context:

I know people love their bar squats. After 40-odd years, however, I reluctantly stopped doing them, once it became painfully clear how they were setting up my body for pain and injury. I know I’m not alone and, conversely, also that my experience isn’t universal and that lots of people love squats. Which is why I’m hoping you’ll….

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The case against weighted back squats

My argument is simple: Though legendary, bar squats—especially at or above body weight—are an outdated way to build lower-body strength. Depending on how hard and heavy you go, I’ve come to think of them as the workout equivalent of petting the bison in Yellowstone National Park: kinda not worth the risk.

Bar squats create lumbar spine compression

When you descend into a loaded barbell squat, you put your lumbar spine under significant compression. One study, albeit from 41 years ago, demonstrated that at loads between 80% and 160% of body weight, the compressive force on the lumbar spine can reach 6 to 10 times body weight.1

Heavy bar squats combined with deep knee flexion, in particular, carry increased risks as discs L4-L5 (the primary load-bearing segments of the lower spine) and L5-S1 (the lowest movable segment) are being compressed and sheared simultaneously while in a mechanically disadvantaged position.2

Back squats exacerbate your accumulated asymmetries

Back squats tend to magnify the asymmetrical muscle development that almost all of us have to some degree—a slight lean to one side, one hip dropping slightly lower than the other, a tilted sacroiliac joint, one foot turned out more than the other. Over time, these asymmetries tend to concentrate stress on one SI joint more than the other, which is a common source of the chronic, hard-to-diagnose low back and hip pain that long-term heavy squatters—me included—often develop in their 40s and 50s.

Beware the asymmetric, tilted SI joint. When SI joints are continually stressed by asymmetrical loading under heavy compression, the surrounding ligaments and joint surfaces can become chronically irritated in a way that is genuinely difficult to treat and often misdiagnosed as a lumbar or hip problem.

This is where the insidious negative impact of bar squats can become a problem, because SI joint dysfunction tends to accumulate quietly and become a nagging problem—the low-grade but persistent pain that seems to live in the middle of your lower back that you can’t stretch or massage away. (Once again, I’m speaking from personal experience.)

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Okay, but what about people who haven’t been damaged by four decades of heavy squats?

Other reasons to ditch loaded back squats

At 50 or older, mobility deficits tend to become baked in from decades of sitting, asymmetrical muscle imbalances and accumulated tightness. All these factors, I believe, argue against starting a new habit of squatting with a heavy bar on the back of your neck.

Hormonal changes that reduce the protective buffer. Particularly in women post-menopause, high-compressive loading of knees and hips under a barbell becomes a different proposition after 50 when hormonal support for ligaments, tendons and cartilage diminishes.

The human tendency to ego load. Who among us isn’t susceptible to throwing more weight on the bar in an attempt to impress everyone else in the gym, none of whom actually notice?

Joint pathology accumulates silently. Plenty of people in their 50s have cartilage degradation, meniscus degeneration or disc issues that don’t produce symptoms during most movements but can flare up under barbell squat mechanics.3 That footnote refers to a 2024 paper in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology that identifies excessive arching of the spine and knee valgus (inward movement under load) as the two most common problems in older adults who do bar squats, creating the potential for injury, on top of all the other factors mentioned above.

In that regard, I’m pretty much Exhibit A for my argument to ditch bar squats. I can squat heavy, and my form may look fine at first glance. But as you watch the above video, notice how much my left knee wanders with each rep, relative to the red vertical line (my right knee also does but not as much). That’s knee valgus, likely a function of weak hip stabilizer muscles, including medial glutes.

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I hadn’t noticed that movement until I recorded myself, and for anyone who continues back squats, I recommend they do the same, from the front, side and rear, to understand exactly how their bodies may be compensating to manage the weight.

Further below, I offer a video of me doing a different weighted leg exercise that works the same muscles but without the lateral knee movement.

Don’t take just my word for it

As it turns out, some heavy hitters in the professional strength and conditioning world have come out in favor of ditching bilateral back squats. Here’s Mike Boyle, a renowned former strength & conditioning coach for the NHL’s Boston Bruins, the U.S. Women’s Olympic Ice Hockey Team and the Boston Red Sox, speaking in September on Peter Attia’s podcast (before Attia’s troubles) about why he moved away from training athletes on bilateral back squats:

Boyle argues against bilateral training in favor of unilateral strength work, which I was heartened to hear because it validated one of my favorite lower-body strength routines—it’s No. 3 in my list below.

6 better alternatives to squats for lower-body strength

If back squats work for you, and you love them and you’re convinced your form is excellent and you don’t want to give up the exercise, don’t. Just don’t go heavy.

But if you’re willing to consider better strength workouts for your legs and core, here are my top 6 strength workouts with explanations why I think each is superior to back squats.

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Because Substack is increasingly l…

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Greetings—from my garage. Here’s the video (scroll down ￬) for paid subscribers that I promised in my most recent Saturday Coffee. Because so many of you asked for it, I decided to send it to all paying subscribers.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of working with rings is that they force your gym body to adapt to new forms of instability, to keep your weight centered and balanced on the rings. Thus, this workout builds muscles that regular gym weights and weight machines can’t. Talk about functional strength!

NOTE: This movement isn’t for everyone and requires some shoulder and triceps strength as well as some equipment, which I discuss in the video. But if you’re interested in developing upper-body strength in just one minute of daily movement, this simple rings movement works. It also builds six-pack abs in short order, I’ve found.

Let me know what you think in a comment.

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