I just turned 31 this past year, and I couldn’t feel better. Despite this, I have been at a bit of an athletic crossroads lately that has gotten me thinking about the philosophy of a lifelong athlete. The “crossroads” I am dealing with is the fading of some of my elastic qualities while my barbell numbers are slowly improving year by year.
As I am starting to look more like a strength coach, and less like a high jumper, so too has my attitude towards the balance point between training strength and speed, as well as the process we move through as athletes in the course of our life. A huge portion of the crowd that reads my site is in the “30 and up group”, and of this group, a large number of them are not just coaches; they are working hard for their own athletic gains.
(Even if you are a young’n, don’t tune this article out quite yet. Middle age might seem like an eternity away for you, but you’ll get there someday. Aside from that, the keys to maintaining your athleticism over time have a lot of relevance for anybody interested in reaching their highest level of performance.)
Although I am quite far from any sort of “golden athletic years”, or even what we would call middle age for that matter, I am starting to realize those things that contribute to a long, and more importantly, rewarding athletic lifespan, which I want to share with you through this article.
1. Maintain your Movement: Feet, hips, soft tissue work, mobility and coordination
Of every point on this list, I’ll say that maintaining athletic movement patterns might be the most important thing for us as we go through the stages of the “athletic lifestyle”. Of all these patterns, nothing is more important than maintaining connection with one’s feet and hips. When guys start to live on their heels from repeated weightlifting patterns/lack of dynamic work, and lose athletic hip extension, speed and power go down the drain quickly. Aside from this, the muscular coordination responsible for a variety of athletic movements can be lost quickly if it is not practiced. Remember, strength is a skill.
On top of this, maintaining mobility is just huge.
If there is one thing an athlete needs to be able to do for a good long time, it the ability to do a solid high-bar squat, all the way down, with no compensations. To be able to do this well, you need to tend to your mobility on a daily basis. Anecdotally, I find a good motivator for this is to keep full-catch Olympic work in my repertoire in some form, even if it is just done for warm-up purposes.
I don’t get the chance to play sports too often, so I take care to do hurdle drills and sprints at least once a week to maintain some much needed mobility and coordination. For you, there is a variety of things to do that sustain your athletic movement patterns; the easiest thing is just to keep playing team sports often, and include some special attention to foot and glute work.
Finally, as you get older, you usually get more money. Get yourself a deep-tissue massage on a regular basis if you can. You won’t regret it.
2. Train speed oriented movements frequently
When we get older, we start to lose a bit of fast twitch muscle volume, and our CNS likes to settle into a slower gear. A lot of this fast twitch loss is initially due to not being explosive as often as when we were in our teens and early 20’s. To make up for this, I strongly recommend that a lot of athletes in their 30’s and 40’s regularly do a good volume of high speed oriented work, such as rapid box hops, line hops, jumping rope fast, high knees, as well as a hefty dose of agonist/antagonist work within their ability level. An injection of speed and rate oriented barbell training can also be useful for someone who has let their high speed pathways get rusty through a long off period from regularly being explosive. In this scenario, absolutely every lift and movement is fast… nothing slow (not that you’ll always train this way, and there will come a point where you won’t be able to, but it’s a great injection of power that’ll go a long way). After a while, your CNS will get the idea and you’ll feel the difference.
3. Be explosive
Every athlete needs to do the following on a regular basis: Sprint fast. Jump high. Throw far. This is no exception for older athletes, just be careful of the volumes you are training with (and watch the sprinting if you haven’t done so in a while). Don’t forget that “fast twitch is the fountain of youth”.
4. Compete in any way possible
One thing that an athlete can’t stop doing is competing in some way. As heroic as your motivation level might be for whatever athletic endeavor you are shooting for, you can’t replace the motivation that comes from knowing that you’ll be laying your skills on the line with other competitors. For best results, compete often; especially in the speed realm of things. Playing team sports is clearly one of the best ways to do this. I’ll tell you that my online clients that reap the greatest results from my programming are those who are able to get in a competitive sport environment at least a few times a week. You can’t replace that motivation and adrenaline response that sport brings. Compete, compete, and compete again.
5. Be a good sport
There is seriously nothing worse than when a basketball game at the YMCA has to stop for 10 minutes because guys can’t stop arguing about a foul; it’s like elementary school all over again, but worse. The older we get, the more we should be able to learn from our experiences. The greatest lesson of all is respect for your opponent and the competitive ritual itself. This isn’t something that is innately inside of a lot of athletes, and respect for one’s opponents is something we can continually build over time.
6. Don’t stop setting personal bests
Athletes live for “the PR”. Don’t let age stand in your path. As you get older, you get stronger. You might lose a little elastic strength along the way, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t push your strength related maxes up for a good long while; especially if you didn’t push lifting to its highest limit when you were younger.
Another thing to do is get involved in a new event or competition, or even leisure activity that you can regularly improve in. Improvement is a potent fuel that drives us through our athletic highway, even if it isn’t in our “main event”. Unless you are one of Ivan Abadjiev’s star Bulgarian lifters, you can likely afford to occasionally include other lifts or activities that you can gain a sense of satisfaction from improvement, and new “PR’s” in.
7. Train with young people
Spend time with, and train with those with youthful energy, and you will reap some great benefits. If fast-twitch training is the fountain of youth, training with those younger than you is the holy grail. Just like you want to train fast to be fast, train with younger (or at least young at heart/energetic) people.
8. Learn new skills
Second to the “PR”, one of best experiences that an athlete can have is learning a new skill, or mastering an aspect of an old one. In terms of the nervous system, learning something new is a PR of sorts, as you are doing something your body has never done before, as well as expanding your repertoire of abilities. A great way to kick butt as you move through life is to pick up an arsenal of athletic skills along the way.
Case in point, I was recently down at the “Be Unstoppable 3 Seminar” put on by Chad Wesley Smith and Juggernaut Training Systems. Although I’ve been around the Olympic lifts for 15 years, I found that there were a good handful of things that I wasn’t aware of before. Getting a step closer to mastering the lifts was very exciting and fueled me with new energy. I also was also able to take that excitement into my coaching sessions that next week in my job as a strength coach. Constantly learning is not only the norm for successful people, but it is also a fuel for better training and coaching.
Learning new skills, as well as sports that help maintain basic movement qualities are an important factor in lifelong athleticism
9. Become a professional
One of the best books I read in the past couple years was “The War of Art” by Stephen Pressfield. The great thing about this book was learning how to deal with what Pressfield terms “the resistance”, which is essentially that entity that keeps you from staying productive or doing those things that will change and revolutionize your life for the better. He also talks about becoming a professional as opposed to an amateur when it comes to anything in life. Making this transition means detaching your self-worth (which tends to bring a host of fears of failure) to things in life, and instead of personalizing it, just doing them. That’s what it means to grow up; you get over yourself and just get things done. Don’t over-identify with your job.
Another fantastic book I recently read, “What I learned losing a million dollars”, carries a similar, and critically important lesson: Don’t personalize your failures. Take them for what they are, but don’t tie in your aspirations with your ego. Just like a stock trader might stay in a given market because they are attaching their self-worth and ego to their business decision… even when it’s drowning, don’t attach yourself heavily to the results of your latest training program you came up with. (Also, rabbit trail, but if you are a coach, don’t tie your ego to your training programs. Take them for what they are! I can hardly believe how protective some coaches are of others finding or “stealing” their programming methods.)
It’s the same deal with training. Don’t attach your self-worth to any given training day. Did the training day suck? Get over it; doesn’t mean you are a failure at life, it just means that you are human, and you’ll do better next time. Keep a stoic attitude towards the weekly training grind, and you’ll be rewarded. Letting your emotions rise and fall like the waves over great and lousy training efforts, and you’ll stay in “amateur mode” in the weightroom, and maybe even in life. Charles Staley also wrote a fantastic article regarding this topic last year on T-Nation that I consider a classic.
10. Realize the tendency of your strengths to shift
As we get older, we naturally get a little slower… but we also get stronger. A lot of the best powerlifters today are in their 30’s, and I know guys in their 40’s and 50’s lifting as much or more than they ever have.
Getting slow sucks, but getting strong is pretty awesome. #Old Man Strength!
It is a great thing when athletes focus on maintaining their speed to their highest level; particularly masters track and field athletes. At the same time, I know that I want to find out the best things that my body can accomplish in the course of my lifetime, and as my body and training environment changes, so does my outcome goals.
Now that I am 31, high jumping 7 feet again isn’t worth trying to drop 20lbs of muscle as well as the time investment of routine technical practices and extensive plyometric work. At the same time, being in an environment where I can regularly strength train to my limit with good training partners means that I want to try and take my barbell training to a new level, while maintaining some of my elastic and explosive qualities the best I can. I cleared 7’ in high jump weighing 175lbs, and I am up to about 200lbs now… and honestly, I really don’t want to go back to 175… I’d rather go the other way, towards 210, and get a heck of a lot stronger. As long as I can still dunk a basketball, I’m happy.
Jumping bars a foot over my head was an incredible rush that I can’t explain in words, but getting bigger and stronger is a heck of a fun ride too. A big part of the reason I train the way I do now is because the environment I train in now has opened the door to improving my abilities in powerlifting. If I was immersed in a community of dunkers or sprinters, it might be a different story. This is just an example of me playing to my own strengths as my body changes over time, but it is different for everyone.
A quick addition to this: Don’t dwell on what you did 15 years ago, 5 years ago, or even last year. Think about now and what you can do to be the best you can be today. Compete against what you are doing this year.
11. Be aggressive: don’t settle into the 24 hour fitness mindset if you can help it.
As we get older, we get into routine behavior. This is by design, as it helps us to live more efficient and productive lives, but it can also have negative caveats. One of the easiest things to do in a routine is to train by yourself in a low-energy environment. For most people like this, a hefty dose of high-octane, aggressive training is in order. Whether this means learning a combat sport, such as boxing, finding a new gym with lots of strong, hungry lifters, or finding new motivation on a daily basis, some way of ramping up the testosterone factor in workouts is going to pay off big time.
All-American badass president Teddy Roosevelt has said: “The joy of living is his who has the heart to demand it”. Part of demanding a better life (and athletic experience) is to find new places and environments to do the thing you love. Athletes moving through life know that the best way to gain the maximal experience from one’s craft is to experience it in as many mediums as possible.
Fire in the Belly
In conclusion to all of this, I’m sure if you are reading this, you are motivated, and have fire in your training belly. That being said, focusing hard on a few things can cause a loss of sight regarding the big picture, so that is something I hoped to accomplish with this article. Cover all your bases with these 11 points, and you won’t regret what your body might have accomplished over the course of your lifetime.
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