At 51, Harley Pasternak’s focus is building and maintaining his muscle mass sustainably as he ages.
Sarcopenia, the natural process of age-related muscle loss, usually begins at around age 30 and accelerates at age 60. As resistance training can help to prevent it, Pasternak has tweaked his workout routine to make this the focus.
He also prioritizes recovery by training for 20 minutes at a time and giving the muscles he worked several days off before hitting them again.
“As I get older, I find my recovery is not as it once was,” the personal trainer, who has worked with over 100 celebrity clients, including Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, and Robert Pattinson, told Business Insider.
While he doesn’t do any cardio-focused workouts, he consistently gets in 12,000 steps a day for his heart and mental health.
He shared the 20 minute workout routine he does six days a week.
Each workout focuses on two major body parts and the core
A gym aficionado, Pasternak has multiple gyms in his Los Angeles home, and he uses them daily. “I have a gym in my office. I have gyms on the way to gyms,” he said.
Each of his workouts centers on two major body parts and a core movement, so he never works the same muscles two days in a row. He chooses one exercise per body part and does multiple sets of around 20 reps, with a core movement in between.
A typical day might look like this:
Body part one: rhomboids (upper back), Exercise one: inverted row
Body part two: hamstrings, Exercise two: stiff leg deadlift
Core muscle: abs, Exercise three: pike planks
“So I’ll do, let’s say, 20 rows, 20 stiff leg deadlifts, 19 rows, 19 stiff leg deadlifts, then I’ll throw in my pike plank, ” he said.
The next set he’ll do 18 reps, then 17, followed by a pike plank, and continue reducing the reps until he’s down to 13. Then he’s done and ready to get on with his day. “It’s the simplicity of the workouts that makes them easy to jump into,” he said.
Switching up exercises to challenge his body
Every time Pasternak works the same muscle, he uses a different movement. For example, “the next time I do hamstrings in five days from now, it’ll probably be a prone hamstring curl, or a kickstand deadlift, or a Nordic curl,” he said.
This is partly so his muscles keep adapting to a new stimulus to build strength, and so he doesn’t get bored. “Mentally, I would get bored doing the same exercises all the time,” he said.
