Do I have to change how I workout as I age? Well, the short answer is, yeah... probably somewhat. The truth of the matter is that as you age, your body becomes less resilient and recovers a little slower. The aging process begins at the cellular level, and your body starts to get less efficient at repairing damaged tissue. Plus all those little injuries you've had throughout the years start stacking up! And when that happens you then have to compensate for them, which causes imbalances, and those imbalances can lead to more injuries. Such a fun circle, huh!?
It's more about strengthening your weak muscles and creating proper muscle recruitment (meaning making sure you're using the right muscles and the right types of muscles at the right time). So if you're doing a push-up and your shoulders are taking over all the work, you need to work on recruiting the right muscles and in the right order. This will help minimize any muscle imbalances, which is important because muscle imbalances can lead to overuse injuries, inflexibility, and other issues.
Then let's talk about muscle loss as we age. After age 30, you begin to lose as much as 3% to 5% per decade. Most men will lose about 30% of their muscle mass during their lifetimes, what the...
But listen, it's not all bad news. Age means experience, and with experience comes practice, and with practice comes good form! Therefore you have stronger muscle memory and muscle maturity as you age. Woohoo! So, you can resistance train for less time or at a lower intensity and your body should show results sooner. So, that's cool.
The thing is, you gotta keep on keepin' on. You gotta take care of yourself, and that means making exercise a major, unconditional part of you until the very end. So let us help you out with these tips.
5 Tips to Help Keep Exercise Safe & Effective as You Age:
1) Pre-Workout Do a Longer Warm up with Dynamic Stretches (see more info here:
2) Post-Workout Always Cool Down & Perform Static Stretches (see more info here:
3) Do Strength Training to Fight Muscle Loss
4) Be Mindful of Imbalances & Work on Them
5) Don't Let Your Age Stop You! Note I didn't say "slow you down"
5 Tips on How You Might Adjust Your Goals:
1) Try to Focus on Your Health Over Your Body Image
2) You Don't Always Need to Workout for an Hour - Consider doing cardio for 20 to 30 minutes a few times each week.
3) Switch to Low-Impact Workouts - Your joints have had enough pounding so, for example, to get that runner's high you love... get it on a Spinning® bike. I promise you can!
4) Consider Adding in More LISS Workouts - Low-intensity (LISS) workouts are a safe way to burn fat, work the muscles, and increase cardio capacity. They do take longer to perform though.
5) Do Things You LOVE to Stay Active - Golfing, swimming, hiking, biking...you decide!
The good news is that has SO many amazing options that you're sure to find the ones you love. They might just be one-click away! And, yes, it's hard to not be able to do things like you used to, but try to focus more on the fact that you can still move as well as you do. Take the activities that you can do at whatever age you are and embrace them. Take the good with the bad and just try to focus on the positives, because as we're learning... life is too short to have a bad attitude. We're gonna make the most of the one we have and take care of the one body that we've been given.
Cat Kom
Founder Studio SWEAT onDemand
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