Get Older But Don’t Be An Old Man

by Tom Furman

It usually happens one morning. You wake up, sneeze, turn your head and something seizes up. You feel injured, immobile and well, really impotent. Your ability to hunt, kill and defend your tribe has been stripped by Father Time. Just yesterday you could wake up early, earn an income and then play rugby on the weekend with little training other than your ego. Now you have to be careful wiggling your leg to get it in your shoe or sciatica pain runs down your thigh.

The fix or cure, if you will, is addressing the issues, following a healthy lifestyle and developing good habits. Far easier to type than to install. Besides, it’s all so confusing to the average consumer. There’s yoga, running, lifting, spinning, Crossfit, aerobic kickboxing, Booty Funk and more. That is just the training. Then there are the diets. Carnivore, Paleo, Keto, Vegan, Lacto-Ovo, Zone, Pritikin, Fasting and the ever clever Intermittent Fasting. TMI. Too much information.

Perhaps it’s time to take a break and think of something that was unplanned, dynamic and yet always seemed to work. Mom making a cake. Back in the day, Mom ignored box cake mix and simply knew how to mix flour, sugar, eggs, shortening and other ingredients and put together a cake. The cake was like no other. If some ingredient was short, somehow the others made up for it. The madness to this method is understanding what you actually need to make a cake. It can’t be all shortening or all sugar, it has to be optimal and it has to work together.

Let’s look at the fitness ingredients of fitness -

Muscular Strength and Size. Muscle size and strength diminish with age. Even if you weigh the same as in high school, there are less and weaker muscles, with more fat. The panacea of course, is resistance training.

Cardiovascular and Muscular Endurance. Our capacity to endure diminishes with age and inactivity. There is both general endurance and specific endurance. Your ability to run a 10K as a young man is quickly humbled when you are outworked while breaking up concrete using a sledgehammer next to a beer bellied, chain smoking, seasoned laborer.

Flexibility and Mobility. The ability to actively move body segments through a proper range of motion becomes shorter and shorter because of age, injury and inactivity. It may be limb specific, since we’ve all seen guys in the gym in retirement with big guns and pecs, only to see them walk with great effort to their car parked in the disabled spot.

Both bodily proportions and neurological efficiency are genetic in nature and not subject to change. Playing basketball will not make you 7 feet tall. Specific training will optimize your nervous system, but you have to play with the cards you are dealt.

Let’s also look at movements rather than exercises or methods -

Running. While this category can be sweared by or sweared at, it’s part of what we do. Those who run may consider it the only thing that matters. Those who can’t run find every ridiculous way to disparage it. Here is the thing. It should not be prescribed recklessly. As well, if you are an outspoken critic, don’t brag how you will run out of a fire or away from street assault if you don’t at least practice it. Listed in this category are rope skipping, rucking, walking, rollerblading and yes,… biking.

Jumping. The ability to jump decreases dramatically with age. The exercise base of jumping is squatting and lunging. However practice is needed. Many 40 year olds can squat way more than they did at age 20, but their ability to dunk a basketball may be gone forever.

Climbing. This means pulling yourself up by your arms. Rope climbing, pull ups or rowing type motions. The inability to do a bodyweight pull up means you are aging. It’s a power to weight thing and means you are too weak or too fat. This can be remedied and essentially is de-aging.

Crawling. This seems silly, like something you would do as a child or a young man in wrestling practice. However it means pushing frontally. So you can crawl or push up or bench press or overhead press. Even swimming is crawling. Children crawl a lot and seniors have a hard time getting up and down from the floor.

Lifting. Picking things up is something we don’t think about much when we are young. When we age, anytime we do it, the peanut gallery shouts, “Watch your back! You have a bad back!” So it’s a sign we are weaker in our posterior chain and possibly injured. We are old.

According to fitness author, Dan John, there are three basic ways to lift. Pick something up from the floor. Pick something up overhead. Pick something up and carry it. With these categories, you are beginning to see overlap between movements.

“Progress, not perfection.” — Robert McCall, The Equalizer

Here are some general rules to start the baking process -

1. Don’t neglect a category of fitness (strength, mobility, endurance) nor a category of movement, (running, jumping, climbing, crawling, lifting).
2. If you have an old injury or new one, get aggressive treatment. Injury ages and aging injuries. Do what doesn’t hurt and get really proficient at that. Major injuries are repaired, not fixed. Chew on that.
3. Changing modalities season to season, prevents boredom and adds balance.
4. Bigger, stronger, strength athletes, as they age, might devote more time to endurance and mobility.
5. Leaner and smaller athletes need to promote strength and maintain lean body mass as they age, without giving up on endurance and mobility.
6. Treat sleep like the items that are in your safety deposit box. Very, very, valuable.
7. Consistency will beat intensity. That doesn’t mean you can’t push the intensity. It means that showing up and doing the work creates magic. Rx’ing the WOD does not. That’s a single frame of film. You need a movie.
8. Eating. As you age, less is more. It has to be nutrient dense though.
9. Avoid partiality. We all know guys in the gym who are on the treadmill 10 minutes and then do only curls. As well as the guy down the block who does pushups and walks with ear buds playing classic rock. Train every movement. Train all the qualities, even if it is in mini dosages. (using the stairs often)
10. Some aging studies have linked muscular qualities to age. Getting up from the ground, standing on one leg, doing push ups and grip strength have all been mentioned. This is why you need strength, mobility AND endurance. There is no free lunch.

“If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.” — Clint Eastwood, The Rookie

The next part is the strategy to implement the methods. Here are some common ones -

1. Having a singular workout that covers most everything. This usually involves a commercial gym or a well equipped home gym. That means showing up and doing a warm up of light cardio and joint mobility for 10–15 minutes. Then going through a strength workout. The next step is a cardio device like a bike, stepper, treadmill or rower. Then some focused static stretching to end it all. The problem with this workout is possible length or when you get too busy and don’t go to the gym. Then you do nothing.
2. Taking a class. The great part of classes is that they remove thinking and planning. Someone is doing that for you. The bad part is they are not complete. No lifting from the ground (unless it involves weights or kettlebells), a lack of pulling, unless there are chinning bars, etc. The exception would be Crossfit boxes or Kettlebell oriented gyms. Yoga is about stretching, Bootie Boxing is about aerobics and Street Funk is about dancing. They are all fun, but you will only get a butt like the instructor if you have the same parents.
3. Bodybuilding. The good thing about bodybuilding is you can tailor it for your body. The bad thing is that it’s usually tailored around what is enjoyable, rather than what is needed. The training distribution in the over-50 muscle guy is usually 80–90% chest, shoulders, arms and upper back. The remaining time is spent on crunches and the obligatory stationary bike or treadmill warm up next to a girl his granddaughter’s age. But remember, a bicep with veins are man’s version of cleavage.
4. Crossfit. This is the most divisive category. At the worst end is Rhabdo, SLAP tears, chemistry and never shutting up about it. The good side is variety, variation, new skills and a support group. Saner versions are taught widely and common sense application should prevail, but often, sense is not too common.
5. Rehab Based. This is from either being terribly injured or that someone sold you a bill of goods that you sucked since birth and will never be able to really train. Rehab movements have a place, but training should be based on improving qualities and movements. Not someone’s ideas from a rehab course. As to someone who is injured or will be potentially injured, this might have value. For example Keanu Reeves had such a program through the John Wick filming. He’s already had a permanent ankle injury causing a limp and a fused cervical vertebrae. Keanu was training hours per day doing Tactical Shooting and training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu with the Machado brothers. So the program was designed to streamline the process of holding his body together and preventing more injury in his 50’s. So in this case, it is very valid.
6. Endurance Centric, Strength Centric, Flexibility Centric. Each practitioner will give you many reasons why they are correct in their singleness of purpose. They might even provide a spreadsheet or chart, to strip the emotion from their argument. However specialization makes you very good at what you approach. It has its place. It’s not optimal for, in the case of this article, the aging male, but it works. The idea is to be as balanced as possible. In your youth, ignoring any one quality doesn’t have the massive impact that it does in the cocktail hour of life.

My prescription will be vague and open to much adjustment. Let’s talk about frequency.

• Endurance 4 times per week, give or take.
• Strength 2+ times per week, depending on needs.
• Mobility 5 times per week, with variations in intensity.

The only rule is not to avoid any category. We are talking aging and health, not sports performance. Maintaining a rewarding level of active play allows you to avoid having a disability sign to hang from our rear view mirror that looks like a Mr. T air freshener.

In the area of movement, this is critical — find something in each category listed above, running, jumping, etc and include it in your weekly program. If you have injury or are obese or de-trained, find a substitution. Rock climbers and Street Workout guys need low back and leg work. Powerlifters need to comprehend that, while anything over 5 reps is cardio, pushing a sled for 15 seconds hardly fulfills the heart’s needs for conditioning. The older you get, the more important this becomes.

The biggest part of training is that it gives you power. You are in control over outcomes. These outcomes are becoming healthier or perhaps living a longer life. You cannot control genetics, some accidents and perhaps emerging and yet vaporous technologies. The other component you have power over is diet.

“Power doesn’t corrupt,… it reveals.” — John Danaher

My favorite statement on diet is, “Eat a nutrient dense diet of wide variety and don’t get fat.”

There are some simple rules. Most like trendy, exotic solutions, but they fall into the realm of magical thinking.

1. Stick to fresh, whole and raw foods as much as possible.
2. If you carry excess body fat, you consume too many calories, period.
3. Fat loss is driven by diet. You won’t be successful at working off that whole cheesecake you ate. It’s over 9000 calories. Simple math.
4. Avoid liquid calories. They are an elegant delivery system for calories. Best to chew calories, not shotgun them.
5. Consume adequate protein. A rule of thumb is one gram of lean protein per pound of lean body mass. Athletic activity, dieting, etc, requires more.
6. Adequate vegetables and fruit daily are necessary.
7. Visceral fat (under the muscles, around the organs), is closely associated with heart disease and diabetes. The individual’s abdomen may be solid, but the fat around the organs will shorten their life.
8. Meal frequency, from 8 small meals a day to fasting are about personal convenience. There is nothing magical about them.
9. Excluding entire food groups is about personal preference and not about science.
10. Waistlines (measured at the umbilical) above 40 inches in men, and 30 inches in women, are more closely related with disease. Add the age factor of being over 40 and you are entering Heart Attack Country.

This article: https://bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/how-we-get-fat is one I highly recommend for the basics.

The last part of the formula is hormonal. It requires examination, testing and prescription by a qualified physician. Preferably someone who is experienced in hormone replacement therapy and with a background in internal medicine, urology or endocrinology. Chiropractors, Dentists and X Ray technicians are not the group you should be seeking advice from in this area. This whole area is beyond the scope of this article.

Avoid advice from bodybuilding websites that offer anecdotes from Chemists. If you are on a training forum or social media group that is organized for the senior athlete and see someone who appears quite advanced in age and is still jacked to the gills, they are probably on HORMONE REPLACEMENT PLUS+ Basically read between the lines and do the math.

“There is always free cheese in a mousetrap.” — Way of the Gun

This article just contains a general structure to maintaining vigor as you age. Best to seek the best advice available and if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

For any questions or more personalized Online Fitness Coaching, please contact me at physicalstrategies@gmail.com