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. 

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>>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.<<