How Should the Masters Athlete Train?

Last week I wrote about the increase in the number of people taking up some form of activity that fit the definition of being a masters athlete. This week, I want to shift the way that we think about people exercising in mid-life, i.e., 50 years of age and above. In doing so, I want to highlight that while ageing creates some specific issues for older athletes that dictate their training frequency, volume and intensity which might differ from a younger athlete, these are differences by degree not by distinction.

In other words, if the aim of training for the younger athlete is to challenge the boundaries of what they can achieve physically and mentally, this aim is as true for the masters athlete as it is for the 25 year old. The masters athlete won’t run anywhere near as fast, lift as much or produce the force of their younger counterpart, but the older athlete will aim to be faster, stronger, and more powerful than others of the same age.

Older athletes are setting new records all the time. So, let us do away with the idea that sports and competition are for young people only. Let’s dispense with the belief that older people should be retired to yoga, golf, and other low-impact leisure activities. Instead, let’s replace those old images with older people performing pull-ups, burpees, Olympic lifts and short-burst max-effort cardio efforts. I think that shifting the dominant representations will not only more accurately reflect what a lot of older people can do, and are doing, but it will encourage more people in their 50s and above to head to their local gym, sporting club or run club and join in. If this happens, they’ll be better off, the gyms and clubs will benefit and so will society with less people incapacitated from preventable diseases and musculoskeletal issues.

How should a Masters Athlete train?

So far on this site, I’ve written quite a lot about why older people should exercise and why they should exercise by lifting weights and their heart rate. I’ve said a bit about how to start and what are the exercises or movements everyone should be able to perform. What I haven’t really touched on is how training for older people, elite and non-elite, might need to differ from younger people.

While, I have stated that older people should push beyond the physical and mental limitations of ageing to run faster, lift heavier, jump higher etc., and I believe this wholeheartedly, the reality is that as people age, there are changes that occur that have an impact on their training and especially on their recovery. According to Gent and Norton (2013), from the age of 30, both aerobic capacity and anaerobic capacity decline. The aerobic system declines at a rate of 6-12% per decade and the anaerobic system by 6-8%.

Chris Hinshaw, who is considered one of the top endurance coaches in the world, and a former elite triathlete, has particular expertise training older athletes and has a couple of words of wisdom for those above 40. He argues that there are 4 main issues for older athletes:

(1)  Older bodies don’t recover in the same way that younger bodies recover.

(2)  Older people who do not exercise or cease exercising lose muscle mass, strength and aerobic capacity at a faster rate than younger people. He makes the claim that for a fit 50+ 12 weeks of non-exercise could mean they will need to start from almost zero when they return to their training.

(3)  For older people mobility and muscle elasticity deteriorate over time.

(4)  Older people lose type 11 muscle fibres at a significant rate.

Regardless of the differences, the same rules for programming all clients/athletes; specificity, progressive overload, supercompensation/stress- adaptation, variability, phase potentiation, and reversibility.

By bringing together Chris Hinshaw’s explanation of the issues faced by older athletes, a few other sources, and the rules of programming a few things become obvious immediately.

Specificity: the loss of muscle elasticity and type 11 fibres for older clients means that a coach or PT should consider including more mobility work into their programme and being more diligent in emphasising range of motion, prehab exercises, etc., Similarly, with the loss of type 11 fast twitch muscles,  Olympic lifting, plyometrics and other exercises that require activation of type 11 fast twitch muscle fibres, PTs and coaches will need to be given more emphasis in programming. As they say, you get what you train for, and for older athletes this is even more important as we lose mobility, fast twitch muscle fibres, strength, etc., at a faster rate than younger athletes. 

Supercompensation/stress-adaptation: given what Hinshaw says about stress and recovery, especially in relation to volume, it will be necessary when programming to give particular consideration to the workload that an older athlete can sustain across a meso-cycle. Active recovery and off days, deload weeks and the length of a phase/block might need to be more frequent, longer for older athletes given they cannot stress-adapt as quickly as their younger counterparts.

Reversibility: Following Hinshaw’s point about the impact of prolonged absences from training for older athletes, the ‘use it or lose it’ principle is even more crucial than it might be for younger athletes who might take a break after the season of competition ends. It will be very important to find ways to keep older athletes in a maintenance phase post-competition to minimise the losses that would otherwise occur if an older athlete took a proper off-season holiday. While we all need a break from the arduousness of intense exercise, the older athlete needs to be using their bodies, almost continuously, or it will be lost and take longer to regain than it does for younger athletes.

The literature on athletic performance and older athletes remains fairly limited. But this is changing, I found a bit of recent research and informed commentary starting to emerge.

I have already used Chris Hinshaw as an example of a well-regarded authority on fitness providing his expertise on this issue. Charlie Hoolihan, a PT, fitness writer and presenter, published a thorough and well researched piece on this topic a few years ago titled “Training Techniques for High-Performance Masters Athletes” drawing on a number of interesting studies about physical decline in older people and how exercise can reduce the impact/slow down the decline, etc., That said, his contribution is still mostly based on literature dealing with ageing people and the effects of not exercising on their health.

Christina Nowak, is a doctoral student and physiotherapist in the US., focusing on this issue in her research. Her post titled, “Why the Masters Athlete is Taking over the Fitness Industry” also spends time explaining the reasons older people should exercise and that masters athletes are ever increasing in number.  Nowak turns to the matter of how to program most effectively for the masters athlete and identifies specificity, reversibility, and recovery as the main issues. Her suggestions are that for masters athletes, prescriptions need to be more careful, thoughtful, individualised but beyond this, however, beyond those few suggestions, her advice remains vague.

Conclusion:

In brief, the masters athlete is fast becoming a larger group across many different sports and categories in their own right. No longer is there the occasional entrant or exceptional older athlete. Sports and fitness competitions have had to create specific categories or events to cater for the increasing number of older people taking up competition. Despite this, research in this area lags behind the reality. More is starting to be published. And, as fitness experts and researchers themselves enter their 50s and 60s, their own insights into how to train the ageing body are emerging.

While not everyone will become a masters athlete, the trend is that the number of people who do is only going to increase. Research into how best to train the masters athlete will also expand. But for now, focus on training to turn the clock back as far as possible on declining levels of muscle mass, strength, power and aerobic fitness, recover properly and when on a break from the kind of exercise or sport you do most of the year round, don’t lose it all by doing nothing at all. 

For now that is it, but I’m learning more in this area every day. As Brian Tracy says, 1 hour of study in a field a day makes a person an international expert in 7 years. I’m far from an expert on how to train the masters athlete. But at this rate, I will be in about 6 years time. Until then, I’m doing my best to be Herculean. I hope you are too.

See you next week.