Train Hard OR Play Hard...What's it Gonna Be?
Trying to do both sets us up for a world of hurt
Eliza Barclay’s recent piece: No One Told Me This Would Happen to My Body in My 40’s really stood out to me. She discusses several key issues that we face with our own clients: ever increasing injury rates over 40, the importance of strength training during this period of life, and the differences between men and women as we age. A key quote of hers sums up the biggest challenge we face as we struggle to maintain fitness in the face of aging - “I do the kind of physical activity (high-intensity yoga, running and rowing) that should theoretically keep my whole body strong. Yet doctors and physical therapists kept telling me that certain muscles were very weak, causing my joints and other muscles to overwork, leading to injury”. Preventing this outcome is actually easy, but we overlook the best strategy.
Over Training, Under Achieving
Many of us feel frustration with our bodies as we age. It’s upsetting when our bodies don’t respond the way they used to. Any of the great athletes to recently retire can attest to this (Federer, Nadal, and Serena Williams), but even we as amateurs feel this sense of loss. The big difference is that amateurs don’t have a team of physiologists, trainers, and therapists to adjust our training volume and intensity in order to promote the longevity of our physical ability. When we begin to lose performance or notice aesthetic changes, what do we do?…We train even harder. We remember how we looked and performed at 25, and we strive for that level of training to maintain that same level of ability. The disconnect here is rather obvious. Our bodies over 40 have no business with those load levels. In fact, we had no business training that way even at 25, but our tissue was young and pliable so we got away with it. We do exactly what Eliza talks about: we continue to train harder and harder, for worse and worse outcomes. Our injuries increase and our performance declines.
Is There a Fix?
No. Aging is about managing, not fixing. There’s no hack. No cold plunge, supplement, red light, stem cell, or peptide is going to prevent our bodies from aging. The single best intervention we can make is exercise, but that’s also our biggest risk. My industry puts so much focus into trying to get people more active that we fail to reign in our over-active clientele. If we don’t exercise correctly (managed volume and intensity for our age and tissue integrity) we run the risk of getting injured, becoming inactive, and accelerating the degenerative process we were trying to avoid in the first place. The majority of clients I see fall into this very trap. It’s my job as coach to get them to see a way out by training smarter, with much less impact, applying the correct dosing of intensity.
Great, So What’s My “Correct Dose”?
Many individual variations exist, but there are some across the board truths that apply to all of us.
It takes less time than you think -
Your cardio and strength training work should take the same amount of time as your commute to the gym. In other words, 8-12 minutes of high intensity cardio and 12-15 minutes of strength training is more than sufficient for most of us. The rest of your workout time needs to be spent on mobility, pliability, and functional balance.
Impact is not your friend -
High impact training (running, bounding, plyometrics, and kettle bell swinging) are all effective ways to increase human performance, but at what cost? These high impact methods need to be used at very low volumes to achieve the desired result without injury. Even if your sport calls for high impact movements, training the very same way will increase your odds of getting injured sooner.
Social exercise is not training -
I play pickup basketball. It’s great exercise, and very social…I love the other guys, some of whom I’ve played with for years. But basketball is something I train for. It’s not what I do to stay young and fit. If I exercise in the gym like I do on the court, my body will break. My “training” time in the gym is what I do to prepare me for my sport. If I’m jumping around on the court dozens of times and subjecting my body to such high impact, then there is absolutely no reason for me to turn right around and apply the same loads in the gym.
The sooner we figure all this out, the more heartache we can save ourselves. Aging is inevitable, and actually quite enjoyable when managed correctly. There’s no reason to give up any of the activities we love, but we must let go of the training expectations from our youth. We can train hard OR play hard, but we simply can’t do both.
Sam Ditzell