Training and competing when you're over 60

Q: What changes in fitness, training and recovery do we need to make for over 60’s who still want to compete?

Competing at any age puts you in the 1% but competing when you are over 60, it probably puts you in the top 0.01%, so well done if that is you! But with that statistic comes a reality: it gets harder to compete as you get older.

Thankfully, in multisport, we compete in five-year age ranges so getting to the number 60 can be a relief to get out of the Age Group that is full of super-humans. You have that brief moment of elation and then realise the people in their 60’s can still beat the people in their 50’s.

I know when I was in my mid 40’s, I took it as a huge win if I came in before the first woman over 60! How do these people do it? Do they have a secret that us mere mortals don’t know? What should we do to emulate them? What can we do differently to give us the best chance of getting to the start line in our best shape to race?

Biomechanical issues

The good athletes are the ones who have suffered the least injuries. Tim Don credits his World Championship winning race in Lausanne, 2006, with him managing to have a more consistent year of training than any of his rivals. How simple is that as advice?

But how do we have less injuries?

Our muscles atrophy as we get older, our bones get weaker, our cartilage and ligaments degrade — in short, we do start falling to pieces. But with proper Strength and Conditioning we delay the aging process significantly.

Lift heavy shit. This is a mantra repeated over and over again by all the best coaches. Lifting increases bone strength, muscle strength and mental strength. It improves power and explosive speed. These will make you faster as well as giving you the real life benefits of preventing you getting old. It doesn’t have to be in the gym. If you are carting tonnes of soil around to do your garden or building a treehouse for the grandkids, it all counts.

Along with lifting, we need to stretch and do our rehab. Yoga, pilates, or legs, bums and tums — it doesn’t matter how you get it but years of sitting too long (on or off the bike) shortens our muscles so your early morning flexibility routine becomes crucial.

Rehabbing the niggles and prehabbing the potential issues: balancing on one leg whilst cleaning your teeth or doing your calf raises every time you go up the stairs.

The most likely areas to fail are hips, knees and ankles so find ways of working all those little muscles that protect the joints. Your feet and ankles will track in a straight line and there will be less pressure on your joints, so less likelihood of injury.

Technique is critical in running and swimming to prevent injury. At least once a week do a technique session in the pool and do your run drills to make your ground contact time shorter and your springs (achilles, ankle, calf) more springy.

If you are time limited, you are better off sacrificing a long swim for a 30 min technique swim followed by a 20 min run that includes 10 min of posture/gait improving drills. These sessions don’t put fatigue in your system, prevent injury and promote good movement patterns which are more likely to make you faster.

One of the biggest risk activities you can do is downhill skiing — consider foregoing that ski trip if you have an early qualifier or take up cross country skiing instead. Elite XC skiers have some of the biggest lung capacities of all athletes so it is not only less stressful than downhill skiing, but also builds your fitness (especially run fitness).

Lastly, the easiest to say but the least followed piece of advice to avoid injury: warming up and cooling down properly. Include activities that elevate the heart rate and increase mobility specifically tailored to the sport you are doing. This honestly decreases the chances of in-sport injury hugely.

Consistency comes from managing fatigue

There is no doubt we slow down as we get older, but do we slow down in our real lives to match our body’s need to slow down?

I was talking to one of my 60+ athletes this week and she had just finished two huge weeks of training and wasn’t as tired as she would have expected to be. How did this miracle happen? She was dog sitting so she had cancelled some of her social engagements. She didn’t flit from training to coffee, to helping someone out, to picking up the grandkids from school to run with her friends, to wolf down tea to get to the pool. All she pretty much did was walk the dog and do her training. She achieved huge fitness gains with no associated increase in fatigue. Having a couple of weeks where she slowed down her life increased her capacity to train.

Life Stress (LS) + Work Stress (WS) + Training Stress (TS) = Overall Stress (OS)

Your body can only cope with a finite amount of stress. When it maxes out it can no longer produce hormones correctly so you have no energy but can’t rest or recover either. You never want to max out your stress as this leads to chronic overtraining.

How can you avoid fatigue?

Learn to say no! Create space in your life to train with capacity to spare
Listen to your body
Don’t do too much, too hard in your training (Polarised training)
Get to your next session in shape to do it properly
Be realistic about how much training load you can manage

Men especially think they can continue to train the same way they did in their 30’s or 40’s but a lot of women do too. Younger coaches can fail to recognise the changes needed in training requirements for older athletes but here are the things you need to change:

Do lots of easy training Zone 1/Zone 2 – walking, jogging (MAF or Jeffing), social cycling, technique swimming. At least 80% of your training time like this.
Avoid threshold training except for race practice sessions. This tires you out without making any physiological adaptations.
Do a small amount of high-quality high intensity training (HIT)

See Steven Seiler’s 80/20 training Hierarchy of Training Needs.

Adapting high intensity work

For older athletes, the intervals of work should be reduced, and the rest periods extended. The reason for this is we find it harder to get outside our comfort zone in our 50’s. We protect ourselves from going too hard to be able to finish the session.

How about a “Job and Knock” session where you can stop the session when you can no longer execute the high intensity intervals as they were intended? This is a great incentive for you to go really hard and only do 2-3 intervals if necessary.

Where you would have taken 60-90 seconds rest between intervals as a younger athlete, listen to how much rest your body needs. Get full recovery which may take up to 3 minutes and in this way you can try to go harder in the hard bits.

The hard training is where your muscles break down to allow them to recover stronger (over-compensation model) — but the recovery takes longer during the sessions and between sessions so you may need to take more rest days or fewer hard training days each week.

Overtraining is so much more likely an outcome as you get older. Overtraining is when you do not get full recovery on the over-compensation model and chronically continue to train before your muscles have rebuilt stronger.

Recognise that recovery takes longer. Denying it doesn’t help. Remember to circle back to: the fastest older athletes are the ones who are most consistent in their training and can get to the start line without injury.

Six months of consistent weekly training at 70% of what you used to do is still more than 4 weeks of 100% training followed by six weeks off with injury, or a cycle of two weeks at 100% and a week off because you are too tired.

Think outside of the box when it comes to your training load. Instead of having three weeks build training with one recovery (rest) week, consider having a lower but more consistent (70% load) training or a “14 day” week where the rest is balanced better — two rest days on week 1 and one rest day on week 2.

Recovery and Repair

In prehistoric times our bodies were designed to walk slowly a long way and then run fast for short periods to kill the prey and then walk a long way home — so emulating this can help to keep us young.

Recovery sessions do not have to be running. Convert some of your runs to walks, do some pool running or better yet get on the elliptical trainer. These alternatives keep your movement patterns going without the high impact of running so reduces your injury risk significantly.

One of my good female athlete friends can run a 1:32 half marathon at the back of a 70.3 with one outside run a week. The rest of the time she trains on the elliptical.

Technique sessions reduce the intensity and duration, with a double bonus of improving your movement patterns. Run drills, swim drills, just do them regularly.

Of course, there is free speed to be gained on the bike through skills sessions. If you can descend without pulling the brakes on, can get round the corners quicker than other cyclists or can get up the hill in an efficient manner, you can literally take minutes off your bike time. Why wouldn’t you put the cones out to practice or “dick about in a car park”?

On top of recovery sessions, you need to repair. This is the good sleep and nutrition. These on their own could be the subject of a book but it is your periods of sleep where you heal — so if you don’t get your full quota of sleep, you are under-repairing.

Your nutrition is the building blocks for your recovery of muscles etc. and is a good way to reduce inflammation. Athletes generally need more protein than we think so making little changes like adding more peas, chicken, vegetarian sources such as high protein yoghurts will make a massive difference to you.

Conclusion

We slow down as we get older. We take longer to recover as we get older, but we also get more stubborn. Being realistic about how much you can do during training and in your real life, combined with thinking outside the box and listening to your body about what works for you, will transform your ability to keep going.

Once you have that consistency, do that small amount of higher intensity than you are used to and avoid that fatigue-inducing threshold training and you will be fitter.

Finally, get those technique and rehab sessions in and you become an all-round better athlete who has also future-proofed your body into your 70’s and 80’s.

Happy Training

Coach T xxx