TONY GAFFNEY, 52
Gets a wake-up call he didn’t expect
If I’m honest, I agreed to this because Anna, my wife, wanted to do it, and the Premier League season was over. It wasn’t because I thought I needed it.
I knew I wasn’t as fit as I could have been – my sleep was quite patchy and I’ve been plagued by a bad back on and off for years – but I thought I was more fit than I was. I’m rarely ill, I cycle to work – an 18-mile round trip. I walk the dog at weekends. As the father of three daughters, I’m the one who does the heavy lifting, so I didn’t think I was dangerously feeble. I’ve never lifted weights or set foot in a gym. To me, they were places where men posed in front of mirrors and knocked back protein shakes.
The first nasty surprise of the regime was the blood test at the start, which showed that my testosterone level was at the low end of normal. Still, I’m 52 and I’ve been married for 20 years with
three children and a dog – what else did I expect?
At the first gym session, there was more bad news. Dan found my lower back was stiff as a board and my glutes and hamstrings were short and weak – the worst possible combo. I sit down all day – on the bike, at my desk, then back on the bike, and at home. The glutes should be the axis of the body that stabilises and supports your upper and lower half. For me, they’ve been something to rest on.
At the gym, I was struck by how many clients were my age. I didn’t feel out of place and never sensed that everyone was thinking how pathetic I was. The exercise routine is quite straightforward. You start with a lot of foam rolling and stretches. To begin with, stretching took up most of the one-hour session because my muscles were too tight to mobilise without it. After that, you start firing them up – and that means glute bridges, clams, walking sideways with your legs banded together. Then you can start the main workout – compound exercises designed to hit loads of different muscle groups at the same time.
Going three times a week, Dan used two of those days to work on my posterior chain – the spinal muscles, gluteus maximus and hamstrings – as that’s where I needed it most. That meant dead lifts, lunges, lat pull-downs, reverse hypers. Dan is a stickler for technique and I constantly slumped or shrugged my shoulders or bent my knees too far, so there was a lot of rest time where he’d tell me what I was doing wrong!
On the third day, we worked on the anterior chain – the muscles at the front, such as quads and core. That meant variations on plank, press-ups on the bar, generally easier for me as my quads are quite strong from cycling – but short due to lack of stretching.
We had to build it up slowly and, as someone who has never lifted weights before, I was actually surprised by how heavy they were. When I lay down on my back on the bench for a bench press and Dan gently gave me the bar without any weights on it – just to practise technique – my first thought was how heavy the bar was. We didn’t progress much with that one.
Honestly, I didn’t get on too well with diet. The quantities weren’t the problem, but you’d need to do a lot of prep first to have all the right ingredients and it might require a lot of changes to your normal routine. My company has a free restaurant – a very good one – and I wasn’t prepared to forfeit it to go off in search of 150g of roast chicken with 50g of edamame beans. I’ve never counted a calorie or followed a diet plan in my life, though I don’t doubt that if you followed this one, you’d be a whole lot healthier.
As the weeks passed and the exercise regime set in, I started to really enjoy it. I felt stronger and fitter, slept better at night and just moved easier in the day – less like an old man and more like my younger self.
Unfortunately, a week before the end, we had a major setback, probably caused by two days of training without a rest day, followed by a typical middle-aged dad weekend that involved a battle with a massive hedge in our garden and collecting our daughter from uni (you need the muscles of a gladiator to load a student’s belongings into a car). By the Sunday night, my back seized up completely, one side became almost solid, and I could barely move. For three nights running, I woke at dawn in agony, walked downstairs to a chair and tried to sleep in the sitting position, as sitting upright was the only way to stop the pain.
After that, Dan told me to stop all the weights work and go back to stretches. Meanwhile, Anna was racing ahead with her regime, getting stronger by the day.
I’ve learned a lot over the past eight weeks. I’ve realised that weights are good and cycling is not enough. I’m planning to join the gym at work and also do a weekly yoga class, as I need to stretch more. I don’t know if it’ll save my testosterone levels, but it’ll certainly help me move easier. It has been a wake-up call.