The traditional advice from the medical community is that older people (usually meaning age 50 and up) should avoid strenuous exercise. Instead, once we reach that doddering age, we should walk – not too fast, mind you – work in the garden and, at most, square dance on occasion or participate in water aerobics classes.
I suspect that since you are reading blog that you don’t listen to such advice. Your parents may have, but not you.
If you’re on the AARP mailing list then you are helping to redefine the expectations of aging by training and competing at a high level. Fifty-plus Boomers, as a whole, are more active and fit than their parents were at age 20. Why the change? That’s way beyond the scope of this post, but I suspect it has something to do, in part, with people such as Kenneth Cooper, David Costill, Frank Shorter, Albert Salazar, Mark Spitz, Julie Moss, Dave Scott, Mark Allen, Greg Lemond, Gary Fisher, Jacquie Phelan and other endurance-sport trend setters and athletes from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The rise in popularity, at least in the US, of fitness, running, swimming, triathlon, road cycling and mountain biking can be traced to such people. The change didn’t come from science.
Sport science has a poor record when it comes to leadership. It almost always lags behind the most obvious changes that happen in sport. For example, sport science didn’t come up with the Fosbury Flop high jump technique, but later on explained why it was so much more effective than the previous eastern and western roll methods (the jumper’s center of gravity passes under the bar rather than over it). Now all high jumpers do the Flop. Sport science didn’t invent the bicycle aerobars. That was the brainchild of a Montana ski coach by the name of Boone Lennon. Sport science later reported on why they worked so well (they greatly reduced drag caused by the body which is the greatest impediment to going fast on a bike). I’ll bet you have some in your garage and wouldn’t think of doing a time trial or triathlon without them. And the list of things sport science learned about after the fact could go on and on. It’s rare when science leads the way on anything.
There are rare exceptions. Training periodization came from sport scientists in the Eastern Bloc countries in the early 20th century based on the work of scientists such as Tudor Bompa, PhD of Romania. But he was also a coach. More recently we’ve seen the development of power data analysis tools (WKO+ and TrainingPeaks.com) from the American sport scientist Andrew Coggan, PhD. Of course, he's also an athlete - road cyclist. There’s no doubt that such contributions to sport have had a significant impact on how athletes train. But such breakthroughs aren’t common. It’s largely athletes and coaches, not scientists, who do the innovating.
And so we come back to aging and how athletes are revising the way we think about “old” people.
In my last post here I listed some of the performance-detracting consequences of aging that sport science has identified for us. It’s rather demoralizing – and this is only a partial list:
- Declining VO2max
- Reduced maximal heart rate
- Decreased volume of blood pumped with each heart beat
- Lowered lactate threshold
- Less economical movement resulting in wasted energy
- A decrease in muscle fibers and strength
- Less effective and less abundant aerobic enzymes
- Reduced blood volume
- Decreased growth hormone production
- Loss of muscle mass
With sport science’s record of lagging behind sport in general it’s no wonder that we should question their conclusions. There’s little doubt, however, that our physiology changes as we get older. The issue is, by how much? I’ll examine some of the above age-related changes in the next post.