Potential

“It’s not aging that forces us to take it easy,
​it’s taking it too easy that ages us”
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 When have you reached your best?

When are you supposed to be content with maintaining the results you have, and not look for a PR with every workout?

I have been thinking a lot lately about getting older and about an individual’s true potential. Would you expect a 70 year old to still be hitting lifetime PRs? It’s a good question. It’s a question that led me to write this article.

I would first like to address some physical changes that take place in all of us as we age; and explain the best that I can in laymen’s terms, why these changes occur.  

One of the reasons for an older athlete to slowdown is that their bodies do not recover and regenerate as fast as they did when they were younger. There are a lot of theories as to why this is.

One theory is that as we get older our maximum capacity to transport and use oxygen declines because of a reduction in your maximum heart rate. This means less volume of blood to carry oxygen and nutrients to the muscles and take away carbon dioxide and waste products of exercise. Consistent findings indicate that your maximum heart rate decreases approximately five to 15 percent per decade beginning around 25-30 years of age.

Another theory that accounts for the slowdown in older athletes deals with the ability to utilize fuel in the muscles as we get older.   During anaerobic exercise (weightlifting), the enzymes that are needed to breakdown carbohydrates, the primary fuel source for this type of activity, declines. This makes hard efforts more difficult the older we get.
Don’t think though, that just because you are getting older you are going to get more out of shape and never improve. Dr. Richard Stein, a professor of clinical medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City, says that without any major health issues, people who were in average shape at 30 might be able to move into the top 40% of 40 year olds and the top 30% of 50 year olds.
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I don’t know about you but I was not at my true potential at age 30. I feel like I am in as good of shape now as I have ever been and still feel as though I can improve. With that being said however the more active your youth was the less room there will be for improvement. If you were a professional athlete at 21, at the top of your game, trained 6 days a week, spending mutable hours each day in the gym, then yes it may be difficult to surpass that level of fitness or even maintain it. But for the most of us this is not the case. Either because we were not able to commit the appropriate amount of time to our training and diet, or we were just doing both ineffectively.

Another thing I discovered researching this article was that as we get older we lose our ability to do things fast. That is if we don’t continue to do things fast.

What? Wait-a-minute, what did I say?

Let me explain. Scott Trappe, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University, discovered that as people age, they lose fast-twitch muscle fibers more quickly than they lose slow-twitch ones. Presumably, Trappe says, it’s a use-it-or-lose-it phenomenon. When people in their 70s or 80s stop doing the high-intensity activities that call for fast-twitch fibers, the unneeded cells shrink and eventually die. Slow-twitch fibers atrophy more slowly because they’re called on for daily activities as simple as maintaining your posture. It is so ingrained in us to take the easier way. It’s not that we’re lazy it’s just in our nature. The smarter we get the less physical life becomes. So it seems that the physical decline associated with aging is not simply the result of getting older. In many respects, it’s a product of becoming less active as we age. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Take football quarterbacks for example, I feel the mental training and experience components are of greater importance to their performance than the physical component. That is why some older quarterbacks can still outperform younger, more physically gifted quarterbacks. The same holds true for Olympic lifting. I feel it is 50% strength and 50% mental. Often the Athlete with the better technique can outperform a younger, stronger, athlete who hasn’t worked on their form.
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So what are the lessons here? What should you take away from my ramblings?

My advice to my 40 year old (and older) peers is to:

• Keep track of your workouts. Younger athletes don’t want to be bothered with writing things down, and end up having to guess at what they did last time and end up repeating (or worse underperforming) past workloads. More mature athletes should keep track of their workouts to know exactly what they have done and should be doing.


• Pick a goal and stay focused on it. Pick something to work on like your Deadlift, or stringing together double-unders, or preparing for an upcoming event, and focus on it until you get to a satisfactory level of proficiency, then go to something else.


• Use your experience to your advantage. One thing I find with Olympic lifting is that learning the proper form and technique is as important as, or maybe even more important than developing the strength. And having the patience and tenacity required to master proper techniques with Olympic lifting is something I think you develop with age.


• Compete against your peers. For the same reason why women don’t compete against men and why there are different weight classes in combat sports. In competitions you want as many things to be equal as possible. By competing with your peers, you will have a much better understanding of your current level of fitness. And it is this same group of athletes that will continue to age with you instead of constantly competing against 20 year olds as you get older and older.​

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• Enjoy the process and be grateful of the incredible shape you are in. If you are not enjoying the process you are missing out. So often people are waiting for one obstacle after another to get over before they can start enjoying their life, and before they realize it their life has passed them by. Right here! Right now! Is your life! Except for what it is. Just like there is always going to be someone better than you, also there is always going to be someone worse off than you and would love to be in your shoes. You ultimately have a choice; you can be optimistic and happy or choose not to be. Either way it is your choice and only yours.​

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 “Age is just a number, but EVERY SECOND COUNTS”
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