Paul, this is a wonderful article, form of encouragement and education. You my friend are an athlete. With your squash racket background you may achieve your tennis goals. What I might add to the conversation is after 50 the first motivation must be health and wellness. You happen to have the athletic background and base of skills to compete. My 10 cents is most people do not and too many people forego being fit and active beyond a 30 minute walk because they were not an athlete. My encouragement for the masses and those who would say I was never an athlete is becoming active and fit has nothing to do with your skills but instead live to be active and fit in a way that works for your body. You can become an athlete (fit and active) by developing fitness, outdoor and indoor activities that you can become proficient in, experience transformative growth and key…enjoy. Note, final commenting thought would be a common goal for every person over 50 is to enjoy this lifestyle right up to the point of physical death well past one’s 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. 😎
Tom, you words are wise. I've written about how athletes can manage their fitness habits and accumulated pain. I've written about how non-athletes can build up VO2 max and balance for longevity. What I need to write about next is the process of becoming a midlife or late-life athlete, however one defines that term.
I agree, walking is great. Is it enough? Maybe, but developing some upper- and especially lower-body muscle strength is also a big advantage for late adopters of fitness regimens. Thanks for the idea.
Great information and very good reminder to myself. Thank you! I’m a 66 year old female listening to your post while engaging in a jump training session! Feel strongly about maintaining power and ability to decelerate. Grateful I can still leave the ground; however, I also need limitations as it can be a great deal of impact to joints and tendons. Your post was a good reminder.
Ce, even the cheetah knows when to stop chasing the gazelle out of reach, conserve energy and hunt the prey it can catch, instead of that which it can't. Be a cheetah!
Alessandra, thanks for your note. The most important first step is to cement the intent. Which is what you seem to have done. The RIIP Reps is, indeed for organizations only, very unfortunately. I amended my post to say so, after seeing your comment. Apologies for leading you a bit astray on the app. I don't know how to get invited, other than forming an "organization" of you and a few friends and petitioning the app owners to give you access. Not even joking.
I started surfing when I was a teenager but then moved to a city without a coast and spent 3 decades without surfing. I went back to it in 2022, with a hunger to make up for the lost decades. Soon I was training really hard and exhorting myself and getting very tired (and injured). My response to that was training even harder. I started competing again, and I compare myself either with younger women or with women my age that have been surfing and competing (and winning) for decades. I've recently had a really bad result in a competition and it was when it dawned on me that what I'm trying to do is impossible: negate the passing of time and the changes in my body. That's why I felt so identified with your content. You said exactly what I was intuiting but had never heard or read anywhere else. Thanks!
Alessandra, wow, I'm grateful for and humbled by your comment. I've had my own version of continuing to reach for athletic goals that I considered entirely appropriate because, if I could do them 10 or 15 years ago, why couldn't I still do them now?
The question answers itself, of course.
But as we're living our lives, in the bodies we have, it really doesn't occur to us to change things… Until our bodies force us to, often through the voice of injury. I personally have had enough of that, so I am now listening to this corpus of mine, and I think that will be the way I will have the best chance of being an 85-year-old guy who can still walk briskly.
That's not my only physical goal, but it is a big one, because what's the point of having toned muscles or a big chest (something most men want) or bulging quads if you break your body in the process and at 85 need a walker with tennis balls on the ends to make your morning coffee?
This is such a great message. I know who I am forwarding this article to… but definitely this change in thinking has to come from within, you cannot force someone to change his thinking and for some it is an aha moment, for others it is a gradual understanding.
7 surgeries? I guess you win! I want to find out more abour neuromuscular training. I think it is a common thing for people who have been active throughout their younger lives to start some sort of intense training routine, either to learn a new skill or simply follow a new fitness routine. The issue is that our bodies often can't deal with the same level of stress from hard training and repetitive movements and the worse part is that because of prior training we can often tolerate pushing harder and ignore the building warning signs that creeping up before the injury occurs. I have not had surgeries, just lots of accumulate injuries from being able to push way too hard for too long.
I have switched over from hard martial arts training+heavy weight lifting to daily walking (dogs are a great motivator), tai chi, yoga, and a light core strength workout combined with various physical therapy maintenance exercises. I teach tai chi class. What yoga and tai chi really taught me was to constantly work on body alignment using only the muscles that need to be activated for movements. It took years to build that awareness and I'm still working on it. I don't think the average, untrained person understands what it means to develop body awareness. When I teach students tai chi I can see so many asymmetries in their movements that cause a lack of balance, over compensating their movements, and a general lack of proprioception. Its really fascinating to observe this. Most people are totally unaware of the habits they have developed. These habits translate into doing exercise movements with very poor form, which is definitely one path that leads to injury, especially if its combined with repetition and physically challenging movements. If I had to guess I would be that some of the neuromuscular training might involve building the proper movement awareness and changing habitual movement patterns into more functional movement patterns. I have frequently found that when people need to learn harder movements they want to try and do the whole thing initially but what some people need is to break down the movement into a few things they can train separately so they can develop the proper awareness without dealing with a more complicated move. Even simple things like doing a slow kick with great balance and form is usually well out of range of most adults. For some of the older students I give them homework of standing next to a counter for a bit of support and working on lifting leg only a little bit, while standing straight, not leaning, noticiing how they must activate their core and drop their tail bone, keeping their chin tucked in, and their head straight (like its suspended). They all want to do a high kick right away and everyone of them loses their balance in some way. But even this simple one leg exercise can help regenerate the proper nerve paths so you can be aware of what you are done and work to learn a new way to do the move. For those students that are willing to do some work at home they do show improvement over time.
I do strongly suggest that people consider yoga as another way to work on developing better body awareness while also gaining some strength, mobility and flexibility. But only if you can find really good teachers who incorporates the proper cues and directions in so you actually begin to understand how to build the body awareness into your movement. The quality of a yoga class is 100% dependent on the teacher and I can say with reasonable authority that yoga classes that are taught more as group exercise classes where the movements are beyond the students abilities and there is not sufficient feedback and corrections are not going to help anybody. They simply reinforce improper movement patterns and do not help you develop the proper awareness.
Pilates, when properly taught is also another form of exercise that works on developing awareness.
Mark, yes. I win the competition I don’t really want to win. Hopefully I’m done with all this winning….
Interesting point you make about the difference between people who have a long history of physical training vs those who don’t. Which category are you in, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m wondering if I should write more specifically to people who don’t come from a history of persistent training but who want to begin a physical training regimen in midlife/older adulthood.
There’s a YouTube channel, Mover’s Odyssey, that is consistently good and that did a 10-minute introduce to neuromuscular fitness. It’s by a really thoughtful guy whom I want to bring on as a podcast guest. If you search Mover’s Odyssey and neuromuscular fitness, you’ll find it. A good place to start. Also, the hand-drawn illustrations are more fun to watch than actual people, imo.
I've trained in martial arts for decades,since I was 13, with some long interruptions due to work and having kids. Of course when there was a long gap in martial arts practice I did weight training (pretty intense for a while), various forms of cardio and other exercises. I learned how to push myself very hard physically and, in hind sight, that has been a double edged sword. Martial arts can be hard on joints and when I started there was next to no information on injury prevention. So, now at age 64 I have shoulder issues, some minor knee issues and several back/neck issues. I suspect some of these are related to years of pushing and some are simply my bad luck/genetics. Yet, I have found new ways to exercise that are better suited for me now because movement is what helps keep me grounded.
I don't know if you can focus on people who have trained in some way for years versus those that haven't much at all. They are 2 very different demographics but many of the things that you write about apply to both groups. Each group might interpret different aspects of your writing differently though or pay more attention to some things more than others. What you can do is be mindful that the people have different needs. Some people might consider the exercises you show to be insanely difficult. Others (me!) might take 10 of them and put them to together in a routine that has lots of other exercises. People that have never pushed themselves need to learn a bit more about how to ease into movement. People that have pushed themselves need to learn that more movement can be the enemy of enough. I think there is room to write separate articles, over time, that address both of these groups and there will always be something relevant for each group if done properly.
George, swimming is an excellent, low stress, full body workout that has the added benefit of boosting your VO2 max, one of the strongest correlates to decreasing mortality risk. Keep going.
Believe me, at 50 and 60, you are still young. At that age, I started with a trainer and was quite agile playing competitive tennis. Today at 76, I’m keeping up with the 50 year olds on the court just in different ways as described in your article. I tried accessing the RIIP Reps app to no avail as I’m not a member of a club or group. I’d like to share with my peers as there are many of us still in shape to play competitive tennis. Can you help? And thank you for the great advice and positivity!
Paulette, yes! I've learned to regard my current age as young relative to my age 5 years, 10 years from now. I learned that lesson over years, thinking back to when I was, e.g., 39 and hauling a heavy backpack around Morocco thinking, "I'm getting too old for this." Well, 20 years hence, that seemed premature and wrong. So, I'm young now, I'm young tomorrow and it will be a while before I'm not young anymore.
Good essay! Being in nursing school is like being a walking version of the cliché person “holding a hammer,” in that everything looks like a nail…but I’ve been struck lately by how often the goals we set for patients at the start of a shift are “avoid injury,” “keep pain to a 0,” “avoid falls.” Then we come up with interventions to do those things. I feel like this can apply to being a midlife athlete just as well…but doesn’t mean you can’t also set ambitious positive goals at the same time.
Anna, I appreciate your note. I think the “keep pain to a 0” ship sailed on me a while ago. But i’m a regular passenger on the “avoid injury” train. And that’s about it for metaphors for the evening.
The shift from power-based training to neuromuscular training is such an importan mindset change. Pattern recognition and movment efficiency are real advantages that get overlooked. Seven surgeries is a powerful reminder that pushing through isn't always the answer.
Pushing through can work — until it doesn't. I've found that pushing through requires being able to know one's body, its strengths and weaknesses (not just muscular or performative) and, importantly, its compensatory habits. Because the compensating is what often causes the breakdown when "pushing through" too much.
This is great. I’m certainly more in tune with my body at 54. I have to be smarter with how I exercise. I do a HIIT class once a week, a pilates class once a week and Lagree once a week. Just started a couch to 5K to build cardio. After hearing Stu McMillan talk about adding in skipping as part of the jogging interval gonna try that tmrw.
Skipping as in what kids do spontaneously to travel across a schoolyard or playground? I love that, Mike. I can't remember the last time I saw a "grown up" skipping without a child in tow. But you're right: why aren't we? It's fast, efficient and is terrific neuromuscular training. Damn it, I'm skipping home from the office tomorrow....
Paul, this is a wonderful article, form of encouragement and education. You my friend are an athlete. With your squash racket background you may achieve your tennis goals. What I might add to the conversation is after 50 the first motivation must be health and wellness. You happen to have the athletic background and base of skills to compete. My 10 cents is most people do not and too many people forego being fit and active beyond a 30 minute walk because they were not an athlete. My encouragement for the masses and those who would say I was never an athlete is becoming active and fit has nothing to do with your skills but instead live to be active and fit in a way that works for your body. You can become an athlete (fit and active) by developing fitness, outdoor and indoor activities that you can become proficient in, experience transformative growth and key…enjoy. Note, final commenting thought would be a common goal for every person over 50 is to enjoy this lifestyle right up to the point of physical death well past one’s 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. 😎
Tom, you words are wise. I've written about how athletes can manage their fitness habits and accumulated pain. I've written about how non-athletes can build up VO2 max and balance for longevity. What I need to write about next is the process of becoming a midlife or late-life athlete, however one defines that term.
I agree, walking is great. Is it enough? Maybe, but developing some upper- and especially lower-body muscle strength is also a big advantage for late adopters of fitness regimens. Thanks for the idea.
Great information and very good reminder to myself. Thank you! I’m a 66 year old female listening to your post while engaging in a jump training session! Feel strongly about maintaining power and ability to decelerate. Grateful I can still leave the ground; however, I also need limitations as it can be a great deal of impact to joints and tendons. Your post was a good reminder.
Ce, even the cheetah knows when to stop chasing the gazelle out of reach, conserve energy and hunt the prey it can catch, instead of that which it can't. Be a cheetah!
so good to read this. i’m seriously needing to redesign not only my training strategy but my expectations about what i can still do. thanks!
(the RIIP Reps is only for schools or organizations, do you know how can one get invited?)
Alessandra, thanks for your note. The most important first step is to cement the intent. Which is what you seem to have done. The RIIP Reps is, indeed for organizations only, very unfortunately. I amended my post to say so, after seeing your comment. Apologies for leading you a bit astray on the app. I don't know how to get invited, other than forming an "organization" of you and a few friends and petitioning the app owners to give you access. Not even joking.
I started surfing when I was a teenager but then moved to a city without a coast and spent 3 decades without surfing. I went back to it in 2022, with a hunger to make up for the lost decades. Soon I was training really hard and exhorting myself and getting very tired (and injured). My response to that was training even harder. I started competing again, and I compare myself either with younger women or with women my age that have been surfing and competing (and winning) for decades. I've recently had a really bad result in a competition and it was when it dawned on me that what I'm trying to do is impossible: negate the passing of time and the changes in my body. That's why I felt so identified with your content. You said exactly what I was intuiting but had never heard or read anywhere else. Thanks!
Alessandra, wow, I'm grateful for and humbled by your comment. I've had my own version of continuing to reach for athletic goals that I considered entirely appropriate because, if I could do them 10 or 15 years ago, why couldn't I still do them now?
The question answers itself, of course.
But as we're living our lives, in the bodies we have, it really doesn't occur to us to change things… Until our bodies force us to, often through the voice of injury. I personally have had enough of that, so I am now listening to this corpus of mine, and I think that will be the way I will have the best chance of being an 85-year-old guy who can still walk briskly.
That's not my only physical goal, but it is a big one, because what's the point of having toned muscles or a big chest (something most men want) or bulging quads if you break your body in the process and at 85 need a walker with tennis balls on the ends to make your morning coffee?
That's kind of my logic in a nutshell.
Looks like you need to be part of a team before you sign up
Alan, thank you for that. Yes, I amended my post to reflect the unfortunate lack of access to the app for individuals.
this is awesome.
This is such a great message. I know who I am forwarding this article to… but definitely this change in thinking has to come from within, you cannot force someone to change his thinking and for some it is an aha moment, for others it is a gradual understanding.
7 surgeries? I guess you win! I want to find out more abour neuromuscular training. I think it is a common thing for people who have been active throughout their younger lives to start some sort of intense training routine, either to learn a new skill or simply follow a new fitness routine. The issue is that our bodies often can't deal with the same level of stress from hard training and repetitive movements and the worse part is that because of prior training we can often tolerate pushing harder and ignore the building warning signs that creeping up before the injury occurs. I have not had surgeries, just lots of accumulate injuries from being able to push way too hard for too long.
I have switched over from hard martial arts training+heavy weight lifting to daily walking (dogs are a great motivator), tai chi, yoga, and a light core strength workout combined with various physical therapy maintenance exercises. I teach tai chi class. What yoga and tai chi really taught me was to constantly work on body alignment using only the muscles that need to be activated for movements. It took years to build that awareness and I'm still working on it. I don't think the average, untrained person understands what it means to develop body awareness. When I teach students tai chi I can see so many asymmetries in their movements that cause a lack of balance, over compensating their movements, and a general lack of proprioception. Its really fascinating to observe this. Most people are totally unaware of the habits they have developed. These habits translate into doing exercise movements with very poor form, which is definitely one path that leads to injury, especially if its combined with repetition and physically challenging movements. If I had to guess I would be that some of the neuromuscular training might involve building the proper movement awareness and changing habitual movement patterns into more functional movement patterns. I have frequently found that when people need to learn harder movements they want to try and do the whole thing initially but what some people need is to break down the movement into a few things they can train separately so they can develop the proper awareness without dealing with a more complicated move. Even simple things like doing a slow kick with great balance and form is usually well out of range of most adults. For some of the older students I give them homework of standing next to a counter for a bit of support and working on lifting leg only a little bit, while standing straight, not leaning, noticiing how they must activate their core and drop their tail bone, keeping their chin tucked in, and their head straight (like its suspended). They all want to do a high kick right away and everyone of them loses their balance in some way. But even this simple one leg exercise can help regenerate the proper nerve paths so you can be aware of what you are done and work to learn a new way to do the move. For those students that are willing to do some work at home they do show improvement over time.
I do strongly suggest that people consider yoga as another way to work on developing better body awareness while also gaining some strength, mobility and flexibility. But only if you can find really good teachers who incorporates the proper cues and directions in so you actually begin to understand how to build the body awareness into your movement. The quality of a yoga class is 100% dependent on the teacher and I can say with reasonable authority that yoga classes that are taught more as group exercise classes where the movements are beyond the students abilities and there is not sufficient feedback and corrections are not going to help anybody. They simply reinforce improper movement patterns and do not help you develop the proper awareness.
Pilates, when properly taught is also another form of exercise that works on developing awareness.
Mark, yes. I win the competition I don’t really want to win. Hopefully I’m done with all this winning….
Interesting point you make about the difference between people who have a long history of physical training vs those who don’t. Which category are you in, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m wondering if I should write more specifically to people who don’t come from a history of persistent training but who want to begin a physical training regimen in midlife/older adulthood.
There’s a YouTube channel, Mover’s Odyssey, that is consistently good and that did a 10-minute introduce to neuromuscular fitness. It’s by a really thoughtful guy whom I want to bring on as a podcast guest. If you search Mover’s Odyssey and neuromuscular fitness, you’ll find it. A good place to start. Also, the hand-drawn illustrations are more fun to watch than actual people, imo.
I've trained in martial arts for decades,since I was 13, with some long interruptions due to work and having kids. Of course when there was a long gap in martial arts practice I did weight training (pretty intense for a while), various forms of cardio and other exercises. I learned how to push myself very hard physically and, in hind sight, that has been a double edged sword. Martial arts can be hard on joints and when I started there was next to no information on injury prevention. So, now at age 64 I have shoulder issues, some minor knee issues and several back/neck issues. I suspect some of these are related to years of pushing and some are simply my bad luck/genetics. Yet, I have found new ways to exercise that are better suited for me now because movement is what helps keep me grounded.
I don't know if you can focus on people who have trained in some way for years versus those that haven't much at all. They are 2 very different demographics but many of the things that you write about apply to both groups. Each group might interpret different aspects of your writing differently though or pay more attention to some things more than others. What you can do is be mindful that the people have different needs. Some people might consider the exercises you show to be insanely difficult. Others (me!) might take 10 of them and put them to together in a routine that has lots of other exercises. People that have never pushed themselves need to learn a bit more about how to ease into movement. People that have pushed themselves need to learn that more movement can be the enemy of enough. I think there is room to write separate articles, over time, that address both of these groups and there will always be something relevant for each group if done properly.
Inspiring. And also I'm happy I'm into swimming, 0 injuries but maybe I'm not pushing hard enough
George, swimming is an excellent, low stress, full body workout that has the added benefit of boosting your VO2 max, one of the strongest correlates to decreasing mortality risk. Keep going.
thanks I will. The only problem is my kid has started tennis so I need to get into it… and now that you mentioned tournaments that gave me ideas
Believe me, at 50 and 60, you are still young. At that age, I started with a trainer and was quite agile playing competitive tennis. Today at 76, I’m keeping up with the 50 year olds on the court just in different ways as described in your article. I tried accessing the RIIP Reps app to no avail as I’m not a member of a club or group. I’d like to share with my peers as there are many of us still in shape to play competitive tennis. Can you help? And thank you for the great advice and positivity!
Paulette, yes! I've learned to regard my current age as young relative to my age 5 years, 10 years from now. I learned that lesson over years, thinking back to when I was, e.g., 39 and hauling a heavy backpack around Morocco thinking, "I'm getting too old for this." Well, 20 years hence, that seemed premature and wrong. So, I'm young now, I'm young tomorrow and it will be a while before I'm not young anymore.
Good essay! Being in nursing school is like being a walking version of the cliché person “holding a hammer,” in that everything looks like a nail…but I’ve been struck lately by how often the goals we set for patients at the start of a shift are “avoid injury,” “keep pain to a 0,” “avoid falls.” Then we come up with interventions to do those things. I feel like this can apply to being a midlife athlete just as well…but doesn’t mean you can’t also set ambitious positive goals at the same time.
Anna, I appreciate your note. I think the “keep pain to a 0” ship sailed on me a while ago. But i’m a regular passenger on the “avoid injury” train. And that’s about it for metaphors for the evening.
Keep pain to a 3 works too!
Three is the new zero, for me. I have a pretty high pain threshold so 3 works.
The shift from power-based training to neuromuscular training is such an importan mindset change. Pattern recognition and movment efficiency are real advantages that get overlooked. Seven surgeries is a powerful reminder that pushing through isn't always the answer.
Pushing through can work — until it doesn't. I've found that pushing through requires being able to know one's body, its strengths and weaknesses (not just muscular or performative) and, importantly, its compensatory habits. Because the compensating is what often causes the breakdown when "pushing through" too much.
Really appreciating this reframe. Thank you, Paul!
Heather, I'm so glad you find this helpful. Keep going.
This is great. I’m certainly more in tune with my body at 54. I have to be smarter with how I exercise. I do a HIIT class once a week, a pilates class once a week and Lagree once a week. Just started a couch to 5K to build cardio. After hearing Stu McMillan talk about adding in skipping as part of the jogging interval gonna try that tmrw.
Skipping as in what kids do spontaneously to travel across a schoolyard or playground? I love that, Mike. I can't remember the last time I saw a "grown up" skipping without a child in tow. But you're right: why aren't we? It's fast, efficient and is terrific neuromuscular training. Damn it, I'm skipping home from the office tomorrow....
Yep like when we were kids! Stu explains it as doing plyometric bounding because most adults can’t actually sprint.
Once my knee is back to normal, I'll try some skipping. Jumping rope is also a great 5-minute workout that also helps drain the lymphatic system.