TSR wrote:but not so great for things like joint strength
You might be surprised how that joint strength would improve with an intelligent barbell program. I used to have frequent knee pain from just squatting down or stepping up onto a 2-foot ledge; today I do 300lb barbell back squats without pain.
I'm only criticizing the sentiment that says, "You don't need those scary freeweights to get strong, all you need is your body." You can tell yourself that until you go to lift a piece of furniture or put a heavy box up on the top shelf.
it is almost impossible for me to gain muscle
Hypertrophy is a tangent, but: You've never done it right. Even
stoptothink will back me on this. I myself was at BMI 21 at one point, looked emaciated and couldn't bench press or squat my own body weight. I got from there to BMI 24.5 at 8% fat in ~1.5 years of semi-serious effort. The training has to be progressive and you have to eat way more than you'd think -- I'd add 300-400g carb to my diet on workout days. (E.g. a half-dozen bagels or entire box of cold cereal.) And you have to do that consistently for MANY months at least. I believe I could've gained faster if I'd trained more frequently and eaten even more, and that I would have gained even more if I'd kept going and gotten really strong.
The real point is how difficult it becomes to hang onto basic strength and mobility, insulin sensitivity, bone density, posture, etc. as you age, and how barbell training is a magic bullet for all that stuff, simple to coach, very safe (far less injurious than, say, jogging), infinitely scalable with clear progression, so that both an 80yo great-grandma and a competitive powerlifter can benefit from it.
Depriving ourselves to boost our 40-year success probability much beyond 80% is a fool’s errand, since all you are doing is increasing the probability of failure for [non-financial] reasons. --wbern