Greg and I feel incredibly privileged to get to do Mid Life Athlete podcast. We started out musing why people like us were still doing incredible things in sport and exercise in their mid life. We also wanted to find any answers to whether we should still be exercising as we were; whether we should adjust how we did things and what might the effects be in 20 to 30 years when we reach our later life. Over the last 2 years we’ve interviewed some astonishing people, either athletes or experts in their chosen field. I’ve been spending the Summer reflecting on bringing all of this knowledge and experience together to try and answer some of our original questions. Finally I think I’m getting somewhere.
The first thing that struck me is that the world is getting ever more specialised, but the issue with that is we sometimes miss the bigger picture. Interviewing an exercise physiologist or an oncologist is great but they are incredibly focused on what they do and don’t link different expertise areas together. There is a fascinating book by David Epstein called “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World”. I’ve been applying my generalist tendencies to see what we’ve learnt over the last 2 years.
Mid Life Athlete framework
The starting point was outcomes. What are the outcomes we as mid life athletes are looking to achieve. Trawling through the podcasts we can categorise these into 2:
Training for a specific event/competition/challenge; &
Training for the ‘Octogenarian olympics’ - basically being fit & healthy in later life. Not necessarily living longer but being healthy for longer (healthspan)
Short and long term outcomes.
Can we train for both & if so how? Here’s my first version of a framework for training for both of these outcomes.
There are 3 domains that you need to operate in - physical, cognition and autonomic system. The physical one is obvious and it’s what many mid life athletes do. Cognition is about the mind and preventing any degenerative conditions such as dementia. We know, generally, there is an incremental decline in cognition from mid life onwards so just as we train for our physical conditioning we can do the same for our mental facilities. The third domain I’ve termed ‘autonomic system’ but could also be called emotion. It’s essentially about the mind - body connection that sometimes manifests itself in things like stress. As we get older we become a little less resilient; we worry a little more etc and that causes an imbalance in our autonomic system and sometimes chronic inflammation. Just like the physical training we’re all doing, we can also train in this latter domain.
The next level down is the 3 major levers that influence all 3 domains. We can probably rank these in terms of importance: (1) Exercise (2) Nutrition & (3) Sleep. The evidence is now indisputable that these 3 levers, both singularly and together, have significant influence over all 3 domains. Whilst I’ve ranked these in terms of importance, they are interlinked. We can be perfect with our exercise and nutrition but if we neglect sleep then it will impact all 3 domains.
To use these levers effectively there are a number of things we need and should do which are listed in the third tier. Whilst I’ve listed these under the specific domains these are all interlinked. For example, if I’m training hard for most of my sessions I’ll be accumulating a training load (probably chronic) which will be placing stress on my autonomic system and over time will result in either a lack of progress with my physical exercise or worse lead to overtraining. I can measure the effects of this training stress by measuring my heart rate variability (HRV). If my HRV is going down then that should be a signal to back off my training. Monitoring my HRV also means I can time the hard sessions when HRV is high, ensuring the session is one of quality. The same can apply to sleep. If I try and exercise outside or against my circadian rhythms it’s likely to have a stress influence on me which will also affect my physical training.
All of these factors are trying to maintain a state of balance across two planes: (1) short and long term outcomes and (2) the 3 domains. VO2 is a perfect example. If we’re doing any endurance sport, the higher the VO2 the better. We’ll specifically train for it to hit our short term goals, but it also turns out that training to reduce the rate of VO2 decline has benefits to us in our latter years. Those benefits also stretch across the 3 domains helping our cognition and autonomic systems.
As I said, this is just version 1 and I’m sure can and will be tweaked as we go along. I’d love to get your feedback on this v1 framework so please leave your comments. I also intend to do some further posts looking at these factors in more detail. I’m also thinking of whether we can even supply some sessions on areas like stability. Again keen to hear from you on what you’d be interested in.
I am not much of a reader, I prefer to listen or watch! 😉 But I will be reading this!
This framework is brilliant Jase, and even though I may be a bit biased, I’m looking at this with distance and objectivity. Roll it out and trademark it darling!!!