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Getting Fitter, Later

A Consideration of Age, Time, and Experience in the Pursuit of Fitness

One of the characteristics associated with aging is the idea that we can no longer do what we used to be able to do, or that we are slower, weaker, less fit. But what about those of us who get fitter later—who, nearing or passing middle-age, are striving to be faster, stronger, and learn new skills? What does age mean for us as we train our fitness?

Levelling Up to Masters

If sport, recreation, or general fitness is important to you, and if you are, let’s say, 35 or over, you may identify as a masters athlete. The athlete identity doesn’t belong solely to the younger crowd, nor to those who compete, whether recreationally or professionally. It doesn’t require a particular level or type of fitness. What matters is how you see yourself.

Those of us who identify as athletes, unless we have dropped out of sport or fitness altogether after our youth, will spend most of our athletic lives in the masters cohort. Though it varies by sport, the masters level, which is defined by age, typically starts between ages 30 and 40. The idea is that those who reach this age are no longer competitive with younger athletes and require an age group restriction to level the playing field in competitive settings. The masters level is often further broken down into five-year groupings extending from the starting age, reinforcing the idea that once we hit a certain age threshold our decline in physical capability speeds up, preventing fair comparison between athletes more than five years apart.

Some sports see athletes peak at very young ages—think of gymnastics or figure skating where teenage athletes often reign. Other sports, like soccer, football, track, and skiing, favour the twenty-somethings. At the competitive level (in open categories not bracketed by age) in nearly all sports (except, perhaps, strength sports), the 30-year-old athlete is somewhat uncommon, and the 40-year-old athlete is a rarity.

It might be the case that, as science and society get better at understanding aging and supporting longevity, athletes will have longer competitive careers. Perhaps we’re starting to see evidence of this now, with 46-year-old Jen Thompson, 39-year-old Venus Williams, 38-year-old Shalane Flanagan, 37-year-old Serena Williams and Samantha Briggs, and many more masters-age athletes competing against their juniors in open categories.  

The thing about competitive athletes, though, is that they typically start their training young. They get fit early and stay fit for the duration of their athletic career. Their peak is the result of many years of hard work, and their decline in sport is the result of many coalescing factors, not the least of which is bodily wear and tear. 

Most of us aren’t competitive athletes, though, and not all of us were especially fit in our younger years. In fact, many of us are just getting started by the time we reach masters status. It may even be the case that levelling up to masters is what has enabled us to finally pursue fitness in the way we want to, whether that means identifying as an athlete or not. 

For us, the training is becoming more intense—not less—relative to what we’ve done before. We may be learning the basics of how to move with good form, how to fuel, or how to work with a coach. Or we may have the basics and are now working on building specific skills and developing a healthy mindset to help us achieve our goals. We’re in the midst of a learning curve.

This might sound daunting, or it might sound exciting. In either case, the great benefit of getting fitter later is that we can draw on our experience gained from other aspects of our lives.

Have you ever made a plan to achieve a goal and seen it all the way through? Have you experienced adversity and come out the other side? Have you applied a skill set learned in one area of your life to another, such as one learned in your personal relationships to your career, or one learned in school to your health? Have you thought about what’s important to you and what you want your future to look like? Yes? Then you have what you need to excel at the masters level.

Age = Time = Progression

Is “masters level” a euphemism for old? Or could it be a recognition of achievement?

Every day, every month, every year, I’m older. This is supposedly an unfortunate thing; we’re told that aging is undesirable. We’ve come to expect that to get older is to get weaker and slower. We’re pressured to prevent aging at all costs (as if that were possible).

But it’s not age, really, that’s so maligned. “Age” is just a shorthand for bodily wear and tear, past injuries, increased recovery time, and the accumulation of years of poor posture, stress, and exposure. Age isn’t actually any these things. Age is simply a marker of time.

If we were to recognize age as the passage of time, and time as the factor that allows for change to occur, could we not see aging as the opportunity to progress and achieve our goals?

It takes time to build muscle and cardiovascular fitness. No matter when I start, if I train for these objectives I will see progress in time—and I will, simultaneously, get older. This is true whether I start training at 15 or 55. Gains can be made in these areas at any age, and if you are new to it but train consistently, you can expect to get fitter as you age. Not because you are aging, exactly, but because it takes time to make progress.

It takes time to establish a habit, such as doing regular training sessions. How long? Some say 21 days. Others, 66 days. In my experience, habits of all types tend to take longer than this, especially if the new habit is challenging. Of course, so much depends on the individual and their specific situation and desired habit. Regardless, new habits take time to form, which I think we can agree on if for no other reason than the definition of habit has time built in: a pattern of behaviour or an action done regularly. Developing fitness requires consistent effort, made easier when it becomes a habit, which takes time.  

It takes time to master a skill, such as the movements required for elite gymnastics or weightlifting. The 10,000-hours rule for success suggests that a master performance requires this amount of practice. Let’s put this into perspective and, for argument’s sake, let’s knock this down to 5,000 hours for a really good performance—not elite, perhaps, but better than most. Okay, so if I were to practice for one hour a day, three times a week, I’d reach 5,000 hours—and a really good showing—after 32 years. Increase this to one hour every day and we can knock the years back to 13.7. Two hours, five days a week, and that good showing comes at 9.6 years. I have no idea how long it will take you, or me, to get this good. This is just a theory, one of many, and neither of us may be striving for that level of proficiency anyway. The point is that whatever it is you’re learning, you will be better at it after many years, which means you will necessarily be that many years older. 

So how is aging an unfortunate thing? It’s the very thing that allows us to progress, facilitating our growth and success.

Drawing from Experience

In addition to being shorthand for the physical changes to our bodies, “age” is also shorthand for experience, which is acquired over time.

The pursuit of fitness at the masters level has a number of advantages, since our “mastery” extends to the many non-physical factors that play a role in our training. This is not to say that we have each achieved control over every area of our lives, but rather that those of us getting fitter later likely have some first-hand knowledge or privilege in one or more of these areas that may assist us in our pursuit of fitness.  

Motivation

With age comes experience, reflection, and, hopefully, a better understanding of our “why”—our reasons and motivations for working on our fitness. My reasons seem different now than they were 10 or 20 years ago, though it may be that they are simply more defined, more strongly attached to the impact they could have on my life. 

What does motivation look like now? I want more function out of an injured hip, and I want to strengthen a previously injured back, to the point where they no longer impede my activity. I want to build bone density. I want to develop the skills and strength needed to settle into a new sport. I want to feel good in my body, energized and capable. Once, I wanted to “get fit.” Now, I want the many benefits that go along with greater fitness because I understand how they will affect my quality of life.

What does your motivation look like? It may look very different from mine. You may want to be fitter to take care of others, to address disease or degeneration, to get after a spot on the provincial team, or qualify for a competition. Maybe fitness isn’t the goal but instead the result of what you need to do to care for your mental health. Whatever it is that motivates you, it’s likely more clear to you now than it’s ever been, and more potent.

Control Over Resources

At the masters level, we may have more control over how we spend our time and money. Formal education is likely complete. Our kids, if we had some, may be independent now, and our parents may not yet need our support. Careers are likely established, and businesses may be past major growing pains. 

We may have made choices, deliberately, to enable autonomy over how we spend our time and money and now, at masters-level age, the work of previous years is paying off. We may have the privilege of organizing our days with fitness as a major focus and may be able to invest in ourselves to a level we weren’t able to do previously. Budgeting these resources may be difficult or easy, but the trick of it is that we are in charge of how we spend them.

The Long Game

Health and nutrition, injury and recovery, skill-building and performance: these are elements of the fitness long game. The masters athlete has likely had experience with most of these, and through both practice and perspective is getting increasingly good at choosing the long-term plan over short-term improvisation as a path to success.

Self-regulation, or restraint, is a big part of playing the long game. Are you in it for today or for the next 40 years? The answer will determine how you approach your training and the decisions you make along the way. The masters athlete has likely made choices in the past that were hasty, or that overreached, and may have paid a price. These are hard-won lessons that can now be used to direct energy into a sustainable approach to training.

The key to applying self-regulation and sticking to a long-term plan is patience. It’s the meta-skill that enables everything else, and those of us pursuing fitness later have had time to practice it in all areas of our lives.

You Are Not Behind

As we get older, we become increasingly aware of that very fact. It’s hard not to. Separate from societal messages that with age comes physical decline and general irrelevance, we experience change in our bodies. Years of poor posture catch up to us in the form of chronic pain. Our mobility is less than it once was and we feel limited in our movement. It takes longer to recover from a workout or heal from an injury. 

This is useful awareness to acquire, because alongside the whiff of decline is the realization that we’ve got to do something about it if we want to maintain what we’ve got. And if we want more than that, if we want to achieve a higher level of fitness than we’ve had before, we need to get serious about making it happen. 

But getting fitter later is not a matter of coming from behind or making up for lost time. It’s simply a matter of working from where you are at. Increasing fitness at any age is time well spent, and if you’re diving in after clearing the masters-level threshold, you are not “too late” to enjoy the process and the benefits. You are also not alone. Look around—we’re everywhere.

The threat of physical decline is certainly not the only motivating factor possible (nor are we obligated to address it by working for higher levels of fitness). Instead, we may be drawn to a new activity that we want to participate in but require an increase in strength, skill, or speed to do it. In other words, rather than feeling pushed by the spectre of age, we might experience a pull toward something new, something exciting, something that requires greater fitness. 

Feeling pulled to an activity, or even to a lifestyle, is something that happens to all of us throughout our lives, repeatedly. If you feel drawn to explore something new, whether an activity that requires greater fitness, a sport, or a more physically rigorous lifestyle generally, you are not behind in your pursuit of it. Our interests change over time. Your new interests are simply pointing you in a new direction, and you are allowed to explore this without being pushed by fear, without a restriction on time, and without comparing yourself to others who started before you. 

. . .

>>Getting fitter, later is a non-obligatory concept. Choosing to pursue fitness, at any age, is not a requirement for worthiness, whether you’ve worked to build your fitness in the past or not. Nor is your fitness—its extent or its value—dependent on or comparable to anyone else’s. And the ability to work on your fitness—again, at any age—is something to be grateful for.<<

10 Things I’ve Learned About Injury and the Importance of Mindset

I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on injury and mindset. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend a long time injured, I don’t know. But while I’m certainly not an expert on the topic, I can tell you with some confidence that how you think about an injury, and yourself with that injury, affects your experience. Mindset matters.

Before we dive in, there’s another mindset piece at play in the reading of this piece, so let’s address that one first: Comparison isn’t helpful. It can be tempting to compare your injury to another person’s and dismiss their experience because they haven’t been injured for as long as you have, or it’s a different injury, obtained in a different way. Or, you may think that your experience matters less if others are more seriously injured than you, or injured more often, or if their injury seems to have a greater impact on their life. If you find yourself comparing, just stop. Stop it now. This is about you (well, actually, it’s about me), not other people. Each of us has an injury experience that is valid and specific.

Go ahead and relate to others, though. Empathize and share your experience. We can learn from each other. 

Okay, then. You’re injured. I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve been injured too, and I thought that by sharing some of what I’ve learned that it may help you.

1. Figure out if you are willing to address mindset

If you are reading this and feeling irritated with the idea of mindset—“Hey, this is a physical injury and what does how I think about it have to do with anything and it’s not like I can just ignore it and it’s really uncomfortable and I’m so frustrated and this is about my body not my mind!”—well, you may have already snorted in disgust and stopped reading.

Or you might recognize yourself in this, be tired of feeling powerless against the demands and limitations of physical injury, and want to tame the frustration.

I didn’t have a good handle on my mindset when I last got injured, despite already dealing with another long-term injury. As time went on and I wasn’t healing, I felt increasingly frustrated and sad, and I experienced some dark days. I was feeling very unlike myself. But it soon became clear to me that I needed—wanted—to do some work to reframe my experience and positively influence my daily mindset and overall outcome.

It’s okay to feel however you’re feeling about your injury. But know that you can choose to make the injury experience easier on yourself by working on your mindset. Are you willing?

2. Hold on to your power

Injury isn’t punishment; it’s not karma in action. You don’t deserve to be injured and you are not being tested.

Yes, sometimes injury is preventable, but sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it exposes a weakness; other times it is simply the effect of an overwhelming force. The injury itself doesn’t have an agenda—it’s neutral. But whether you saw it coming or you were blindsided doesn’t really matter. Your injury doesn’t reflect your worthiness.

Ascribing meaning—like the idea of punishment—to an injury gives your power away.

Why the injury happened is less important than what you are going to do about it now, and taking action requires that you believe in your ability to shape your future.

3. Look for support and participate in your recovery

Other people have a range of skills, perspectives, and good advice that they can share with you—if you let them.

I’ve started to think of this as gathering my team. I will recruit medical doctors, physiotherapists, osteopaths, massage therapists, chiropractors, naturopaths, and coaches, and I’ll keep those on the roster who prove their worth. There are practitioners in addition to these that may be useful to you. Gathering such a team is a privilege, to be sure.

I also recruit friends and family, because these are the folks I will call upon when I need to vent or need a boost or need to share a win. This is a privilege too, of a different kind.

The point, though, is that the team can’t do the work for you. You have to be a team player and contribute what your team needs to successfully provide support. In other words, your job on the team is to follow the protocol, do your rehab exercises, and share your feelings. Others can only help you if you faithfully participate.

4. Get your injury diagnosed

For me, this has been critical, twice over. Some would disagree about the importance of this, particularly if the treatment and recovery plan are the same regardless of the exact nature of the injury. I understand this thinking and I agree with it—generally, at least—in terms of moving forward to address the physical side of the injury, but it may not be what you need to address mindset.

Especially if the injury doesn’t appear to be improving.

Figuring out the nature of the injury allowed me a clearer picture of what I could expect in terms of recovery, which let me adjust my expectations, reset my goals, conserve the energy I was expending on never-ending internet searches, and, ultimately, accept where I was at.

5. Work on your resilience

I’m an optimizer: When something is important to me, I like to do everything I can to support that thing in the most effective and efficient way possible. So with an injury, I want to know what I can do (or not do) to heal faster and stronger. This includes doing work to prevent the injury from happening again.

Even if the injury didn’t directly result from a weakness, there is likely something you can do to strengthen the greater system that will benefit you the next time you are exposed to physical stress or trauma. Getting stronger—or more mobile, or flexible, or skilled—is something related to the injury that you can influence and make progress on. This increases your overall resilience, which may prevent future injury, or lessen its impact, or help you heal faster should it happen.

Doing the work to increase your resilience is about taking action, and taking action gives you something positive to focus your attention on.

6. Relax into the rehab and recovery process

For me, this was only possible once I knew what I was dealing with and had a plan. Prior to that, I couldn’t let go of the search for answers, and it was exhausting.

Knowledge and a plan allowed me to settle into the moment and find a training and recovery groove that left energy for other things. Once I did this, everything felt a little easier, more manageable, less catastrophic. I could trust the process, do the work, and mentally move on.

If you can relax into it without having to first chase down answers, please do. But whenever you manage it, you’ll feel less anxious and have more energy. And you’ll likely find joy in more things.

7. Let go of a timeline

The only thing I wanted more than to know whenI could expect to have healed from my injury was to actually have healed from my injury. The when was critical to my ability to plan for the future, and boy, do I like to plan. I’m also not very patient. So not knowing when I’d be done with my injury was excruciating, until I eventually let it go.

I’m not sure whether I’ve actually learned the skill of patience in a way that I can willingly apply it elsewhere, though I hope so. My experience has been, simply, that some injuries take a really long time to resolve, and there’s a point, after you’ve learned all you can and enacted everything you can think of to hustle healing along, where all that’s left to do is wait for the tissues to heal. 

Waiting is difficult at the best of times, when you know how long it will take. Waiting for something that will happen, at some point, eventually, is impossible to pace. The best thing to do is to stop waiting altogether. And that means letting go of a timeline.

So stop waiting and start working on other things (see #8).

8. Establish new goals unrelated to the injury

Chances are that you can work around your injury to train other parts of the body. See this as an opportunity to work on weaknesses or develop new skills and commit to their improvement.

Like I did, you may discover an affinity for a type of movement or training you didn’t know you could enjoy. It’s even possible that you may like the new focus so much that it takes precedence even after your injury resolves. But at worst, you’ll get stronger or more skilled at something, and that can only be useful.

As you work on your new goals, seeing progress over time, that long wait (see #7) for your injury to heal may diminish a bit in its hold over you, and reaching new training goals even while injured takes much of the sting away.

It’s possible, of course, that your injury is such that physical training of nearly any kind isn’t recommended right now. If that’s the case, respect it, and look for non-physical goals you can pursue.

9. Embrace (or discover) your whole identity

You are not your injury, or your activity.

It can be easy to lose perspective and think of yourself as “someone with hip pain,” for example, as if that could describe the whole you. (It can’t.) You are also not your activity; even while you were running/cycling/climbing/weightlifting, this was never the totality of your identity. You are a whole, complex person, injured or not, doing your chosen activity or not.

A relatively minor injury may sideline you for a while, but don’t let it question who you are; you can be a runner who isn’t running right now. Conversely, a relatively major injury may require that you stop running altogether. This isn’t easy to deal with, and you may feel lost without it, but I can tell you from experience that there will be something else you can get passionate about. You will find it if you look. But this new thing will not become the entirety of your identity either, because you are never only one thing.

So who are you? Who do you want to be? And how do you want to spend your time? If your injury results in you having a little more space to reflect on this, it’s only a good thing.

10. Decide how you want to think about the experience

Injury can have a meaningful effect on your life. It doesn’t have to, but it can, and the effect can be positive or negative. Do you want the sum total of the experience to be negative? Or would you rather look for the positives, the things that enrich your life, the silver linings?

This doesn’t mean that the injury itself has meaning and power (see #2). Rather, you have the power to frame the experience into something that ultimately helps you achieve your goals. It’s a choice. The earlier you can decide how you want to benefit from your experience of injury, the sooner you can focus on those gains and enjoy their benefits. I’m choosing to value the gains made from my experience with injury—in mindset, strength, patience, and new skills—over anything I may have lost.

. . .

Now, am I always successful with my own mindset work? Do I do all of these things, perfectly, all of the time? Hell, no. But I don’t think that’s the point.

This is not a quest for perfection and there’s no need to beat yourself up for taking some time to wallow or for just not feeling like doing your rehab exercises this morning. All things take practice, and mindset is no exception. The more you work on it, the better you’ll get.

The big lesson is understanding the enormous importance of mindset in the experience of injury and that we have the power to influence our own stories. I know what I want my story to be. Do you?

First published as a multi-part series from August 30 to October 2, 2019, Instagram (@shanajstone) and Facebook.

Fitness Is Not a Competition: Fit for What?

Can you identify the exact criteria for fitness? Few can agree on what to measure, never mind the thresholds required, so don’t be surprised if you find it difficult to pin down. Part of the issue is identifying the fitness objective—what is it being used for?

My fitness objectives are likely different from yours, and yours are likely different from your neighbour’s. For example, I’m currently fit to care for myself, do basic maintenance around my home, carry my groceries, walk around town or hike through the forest, go ocean paddleboarding, and learn new gymnastic skills. In other words, my fitness matches my objectives. I have other objectives that I’m also working towards, and my fitness is moving in that direction. Should my objectives change, I would likely work to alter my fitness accordingly.

But I’m a competitive athlete, you say. Well, do you want to run hurdles, or long-distance cycle, or execute a tumbling routine, or fence, or play rugby? Great! Are the fitness requirements the same for each sport? Are you working on fitness specific to your objectives?

There’s no bar for fitness, nor should there be. Fitness is not an absolute. There is only the ability to do the thing you want to do, at the level you want to do it at.

When you picture yourself as a fit person, what activities are you doing? If you’re already doing those activities, mission accomplished. If you’re on the path to making it happen, mission accomplished also. Everything—everything—is a progression.

First published May 14, 2019, Instagram (@shanajstone) and Facebook.