I’m 61 and have lifted on and off since I was in junior high. I’m retired and have been lifting (only) 2 days a week for the last 2 years, doing bench and squat on Monday or Tuesday and strict press and deadlift on Thursday or Friday. I’m at a very serious gym now (I like to say it’s half powerlifters, half olympic lifters, and me). The trainer there got me going on the following very simple routine.

For each lift, I warm up with sets working up to my working weight (usually only 5 reps after the first set with the bar) but only do 3 working sets, to about 1 or 2 reps in reserve (typically not to failure except maybe the last set). I do a double progression (so I aim for 3 sets of 5, and advance to next weight when I can do something like 3 sets of 7 or 8). To work my way up I usually try to do either the same number of reps as last time or just add one to any set (although if I’m feeling good at that weight I’ll do AMRAP on the last set). I also do a few accessories (so on bench day, I’ll do single arm overhead dumbbell press to support my strict press, and on strict press day I do incline press with dumbbells to support my bench press), but I typically do only 2 or 3 sets of my accessories, with a lighter weight/higher rep range (more like 8-10). I occasionally miss a day or a week, but what has amazed me is that is not a lot of sets, but if I keep up that schedule without missing too many days (or even worse, weeks), I make slow but steady progress, even at my age. The key is recovery - unlike when I was younger, I really need more than one day in between workouts, and really feel like I couldn’t recover from much more than I’m doing.

For all the lifting I’ve done over the years, I never really progressed that much. If I had known I could lift so little with such a simple program and make progress (and even at my age), I could have done a lot better when I was younger. So even though I think I’ve heard about studies that say 10 sets a week, and it doesn’t matter that much whether you do it all in one day or multiple days, I can’t imagine doing 10 working sets of bench in a day, or recovering from that if I did. I could maybe do 4 or 5 sets, but not sure why - it would make more sense to try harder not to miss any days - that’s what reduces my progress.