Strength Training for Seniors: An Instructor Guide for Developing Safe and Effective Programs
With more than 35 years in strength training as an athlete, coach, teacher, professor, researcher, writer, and speaker, Wayne Westcott, PhD, is recognized as a leading authority on fitness. He has served as a strength training consultant for numerous organizations and programs, including Nautilus, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, the National Sports Performance Association, the International Association of Fitness Professionals (IDEA), the American Council on Exercise, the YMCA of the USA, and the National Youth Sports Safety Foundation. He was awarded the IDEA Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993 and was honored with a Healthy American Fitness Leader Award in 1995.Westcott is currently the fitness research director at the South Shore YMCA in Quincy, Massachusetts, where he has carefully studied the physiological responses of adults to various programs of strength exercise. In 1996 he conducted a landmark study of 1,132 subjects showing that men and women over age 50 build strength and develop muscle at the same rate as younger adults. Together with co-author Tom Baechle, he wrote Strength Training Past 50, which was ranked as one of the ten best health and fitness books of 1997.Westcott has authored ten other books on strength training, including Building Strength and Stamina and Strength Fitness: Physiological Principles and Training Techniques. He has published over 300 articles in professional fitness journals and has written a weekly fitness column for one of Boston’s largest newspapers since 1986. He has served on the editorial boards of Prevention, Shape, Men’s Health, Fitness, Club Industry, American Fitness Quarterly, and Nautilus.Westcott lives in Abington, Massachusetts, with his wife, Claudia. He enjoys strength training, running, cycling, and gardening.As an exercise leader for 16 years at the Creighton University Cardiac Rehabilitation program (one of the earliest to include a bona fide strength training component), Thomas R. Baechle, EdD, has a great deal of practical experience working with the over 50 population. He also has more than 20 years’ experience teaching weight training and strength training for athletes at the college level. He currently serves as chair of the exercise science department at Creighton University, where his honors include an Excellence in Teaching Award.Baechle is the executive director of the NSCA Certification Commission, the certifying body for the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA), and is president of the National Organization for Competency Assurance, an international organization that sets quality standards for credentialing organizations. He has earned credentials from the NSCA’s Certification Commission as a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist and Certified Personal Trainer; from the American College of Sports Medicine as a Test Technologist and Exercise Specialist; and from the United States Weightlifting Federation as a Level 1 Weightlifting Coach. He is cofounder, past president, and former director of education for NSCA, and in 1998 he received the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award.Baechle has authored seven previous strength training texts, including the highly popular Fitness Weight Training. He also served as editor for NSCA’s Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning, a comprehensive text that has contributed to the growing number of university-level courses that prepare professionals for careers in strength and conditioning. Three of Baechle’s texts have been translated into French or Japanese.Baechle lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with his wife Susan and two sons, Todd and Clark. He enjoys strength training, woodworking,  and making crafts.