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Get Older, Stay Awesome
Want to stay fit and strong as you age? Here's how to adjust your training. Don't worry, lifting weights is still a big part of it.
As I get older, instead of focusing mainly on being the biggest and strongest guy around, I’m shifting my focus toward pro-longevity training. Should you? Let’s talk about it.
Pro Longevity Training
- Increasing lifespan beyond what you could achieve in a healthy state is a slightly different, complex topic. Exercise may not be as important as increasing telomere length, increasing the number of satellite cells, maintaining hormone levels, etc. Pro-longevity training, however, means maintaining or improving your level of fitness and functioning as you age.
- The key is to train the things that naturally decrease as you get older: muscle mass, power, strength, speed, mobility, and endurance. Of those, aging impacts speed, agility, and power more than endurance. Strength and muscle fall somewhere in the middle.
- Minimizing or preventing sarcopenia (loss of muscle) is certainly part of it, but basic hypertrophy training will take care of that. Most dedicated lifters maintain decent levels of strength and conditioning because it’s part of what they already do.
- However, few lifters work on power, speed, and agility, important parts of pro-longevity training. These capacities tend to “go first” as we age.
- Explosive work prevents the conversion of fast-twitch fibers to slow-twitch fibers, which comes naturally with aging. It also increases neurological efficiency (preventing brain degradation) and improves insulin sensitivity.
- Mobility is a huge part of pro-longevity training.
- For conditioning, many do steady-state work, which is good, but they neglect harder conditioning: anaerobic capacity. How much hard work can you perform in three minutes?
- A good program should address all of these aspects in some regard. We’re not talking about maximizing your potential in each of these areas, which would require a periodized approach focusing on different aspects at different times. Rather, we’re talking about concurrent training, increasing everything simultaneously, though to a lesser extent.
- Do two or three hypertrophy-based workouts per week and two athletic days (one for power and anaerobic capacity, one for conditioning with some skill/explosive exercises). Low-intensity cardio can be performed at any time.
