I asked Dr. Stephen Seiler to join me on Wise Athletes to discuss Athletic Performance Longevity. We discuss his research and speculate about how older athletes can keep the machinery healthy for performance today while also doing the right things for athletic longevity, which is way more than just healthspan. You and I, we all want to be strong, healthy, and athletic as long as we live.
Guidelines for Older Athletes Seeking Athletic Longevity
- Do What You Love, what gives you joy. If you do the thing that provides camaraderie or whatever you love, you’ll keep doing it. If you are not smiling and enjoying yourself while doing your training or sport, at least on most days, then figure out why not.
- Be Kind to Yourself. You can’t go hard every day. And you shouldn’t wrap your self-worth in your ability to go hard all the time. Enjoying it is far more important than extracting the last 1% of performance. If you enjoy yourself, you'll be better in the long-run.
And here are some details to get it right:
- Keep At It. Exercise is good for your quality of life and longevity, and stopping will just make it harder to start again.
- Tone Down the Risk Taking. Don’t "die of stupid", but also don’t get hurt because then you’ll have to stop exercising.
- Seek a Flow or Rhythm in the Training Process that accommodates actual (which might be slower) recovery from the hard efforts. Earn the right to go hard by going easy and recovering well. Working out too hard, too often can turn exercise into an unhealthy behavior.
- Lengthen the Workouts to Emphasize Muscular and Cardiovascular Endurance over pure power to compete better with the younger athletes
- Adopt a Preventive Maintenance Mindset to keep the machine healthy and avoid nagging pain and injury that will interrupt consistency and sap the joy from athletics. Take time to do some strength training, some mobility work, some core work and some daily stretches to keep you in the game. And do some body weight-based, speed/power and agility/balance work to hang on to it longer.
- If You are Not an Athlete yet, then Get Going. It just gets harder later. You'll never be as young as you are today. Find one or more things you love and get going. And, as a bonus, the newer athlete can make fast progress, and keep getting better for a long time.
Dr. Stephen Seiler YouTube presentation on Aging Athletes
Dr. Seiler published a YouTube presentation called “Does Our Endurance Machinery Slow Down At Different Rates as we Get Old?” Dr. Seiler's presentation concluded that athletic performance does drop due to 3 primary factors:
https://youtu.be/bzphy5EN8lg
My Notes from Dr. Seiler's presentation:
(1) Maximum Heart Rate Falls As We Get Older. The drop is steady after age 30 but accelerates after 55. The good news is: (1) at VT1 (the maximum endurance pace, older guys can achieve higher % of VO2Max at the same lactate as younger guys. And, at VT2 (FTP), while older guys have less range in BPM above VT1, old guys can still use a higher % of VO2Max (less advantage than at VT1), perhaps due to larger proportion of slow twitch muscle fibers.
More good news, looking at multiple biometric factors for older athletes vs. younger athletes with the same performance, older athletes seem to have better cardio adaptation from more years of trai
