I finally get it. Why so many dyed-in-the-wool weightlifters forsake the weights when they reach a certain age.

But I only got it when I got down in the dumps while lifting weights about seven months ago.

In the early 1990s, interest in weightlifting and bodybuilding was so high that just about every article I wrote on-spec (writing an article before contacting a publisher) got purchased - even though less than half ultimately got published. The competition between magazines like Muscular Development, Flex, Muscle & Fitness, and Muscle Mag International was so fierce that they would buy any decent article just to keep the competition from getting it - and at a rate higher than a writer could ask for today.

Ah, the good old days.

Since I was submitting articles to those magazines regularly, I read them frequently. While doing so, I learned more than style and tone.

I learned that once many of the best bodybuilders and weightlifters stopped competing, they stopped lifted weights entirely.

For the life of me, I couldn’t fathom why until I did the opposite. Until I resumed lifting weights for my upper body last September after incurring an arm injury early in the summer.

As you would expect after weeks of nothing more than range-of-motion work, I used very light weights and added a bit more in each subsequent session. In five weeks, I was lifting about two-thirds of the weight I had used prior to the injury while doing high-repetition sets.

What you wouldn’t expect - or at least I didn’t - was that I had plateaued. s A bigger surprise was how three weeks of lifting the same amount of weight for essentially the same number of reps bummed me out.

Sometimes I felt like an old man; other times, like punching a wall. How could I be so much weaker than just a half year ago?

I never missed a workout from being so bummed out, but the toughest part to those for my upper body now became getting into my workout gear and going down my basement stairs. In fact, that’s still the case sometimes.

That’s because at my age and numerous injuries, I know I’m not getting back all the strength I had before the last injury - and I had already lost a fair amount prior to that. But no matter how much more strength and muscle I lose, no matter how mentally challenging it becomes to descend those basement stairs, I will not stop lifting weights.

Neither should you.

I know it’s tempting to adopt the attitude that many retired competitors do: “I’m not nearly as strong as I once was, so what’s the point?”

The point is, while your muscle fibers do possess a type of memory (it’s why you never forget how to ride a bike), they can’t recall of the amount of weight you used five years, five months, or five days ago. What your muscles never forget, however, is how to fight their own failure.

When you lift to this point of fatigue - regardless of the amount of weight, regardless of your age - your muscles adapt so it doesn’t happen again. Up until a certain age, that means they increase their mass. After that age, the failed muscles manage to slow - and sometimes even regain - some of the muscle loss that occurs from sarcopenia, the natural loss of muscle tissue as you age.

All of this is true whether you lift what’s a heavy weight for you eight to 12 times or a lighter one 25 to 35 times. High-rep workouts using lighter weights definitely work, even for those willing and able to hoist heavier weights.

This was proven so in a study published in the October of 2015 issue of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. A research team led by the guy who also serves as the sports nutritionist for the New Jersey Devils of the NHL, Brad Schoenfeld, PhD, took 18 young men with weightlifting experience and assigned them to one of two workout groups.

They either performed three sets of seven exercises with heavy weights for eight to 12 reps or lightened the load in order to perform 25 to 35. The study found that both groups experienced statistically similar strength gains in the muscles studied: the elbow flexors and extensors and the quadriceps femoris.

In fact, more muscular endurance was recorded in the bench press by the light-weight lifters than the heavy-weight lifters. (In the back squat, however, the heavy-weight lifters experienced a bit more than double the strength increase that the light-weight lifters did - though the light-weight lifters still averaged an 8.8 percent strength increase.)

So if you’re lacking motivation to lift weights because you can’t lift as heavily as you once did, you need to make the title of this article your new definition of success. Regardless of the type of exercise, amount of weight, or number of reps, success is now failure, temporary muscle failure.s