The
traditional advice from the medical community is that older people (usually
meaning age 50 and up) should avoid strenuous exercise. Instead, once we reach
that doddering age, we should walk – not too fast, mind you – work in the
garden and, at most, square dance on occasion or participate in water aerobics
classes.
I
suspect that since you are reading blog that you don’t listen to such advice.
Your parents may have, but not you.
If
you’re on the AARP mailing list then you are helping to redefine the
expectations of aging by training and competing at a high level. Fifty-plus Boomers,
as a whole, are more active and fit than their parents were at age 20. Why the
change? That’s way beyond the scope of this post, but I suspect it has
something to do, in part, with people such as Kenneth Cooper, David Costill, Frank
Shorter, Albert Salazar, Mark Spitz, Julie Moss, Dave Scott, Mark Allen, Greg
Lemond, Gary Fisher, Jacquie Phelan and other endurance-sport trend setters and
athletes from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The rise in popularity,
at least in the US, of fitness, running, swimming, triathlon, road cycling and
mountain biking can be traced to such people. The change didn’t come from
science.
Sport
science has a poor record when it comes to leadership. It almost always lags
behind the most obvious changes that happen in sport. For example, sport
science didn’t come up with the Fosbury Flop high jump technique, but later on
explained why it was so much more effective than the previous eastern and
western roll methods (the jumper’s center of gravity passes under the bar
rather than over it). Now all high jumpers do the Flop. Sport science didn’t
invent the bicycle aerobars. That was the brainchild of a Montana ski coach by
the name of Boone Lennon. Sport science later reported on why they worked so
well (they greatly reduced drag caused by the body which is the greatest
impediment to going fast on a bike). I’ll bet you have some in your garage and
wouldn’t think of doing a time trial or triathlon without them. And the list of
things sport science learned about after the fact could go on and on. It’s rare
when science leads the way on anything.
There
are rare exceptions. Training periodization came from sport scientists in the
Eastern Bloc countries in the early 20th century based on the work
of scientists such as Tudor Bompa, PhD of Romania. But he was also a coach. More recently we’ve seen the
development of power data analysis tools (WKO+ and TrainingPeaks.com) from the American sport
scientist Andrew Coggan, PhD. Of course, he's also an athlete – road cyclist. There’s no doubt that such contributions to sport
have had a significant impact on how athletes train. But such breakthroughs
aren’t common. It’s largely athletes and coaches, not scientists, who do the innovating.
And
so we come back to aging and how athletes are revising the way we think about
“old” people.
In
my last post here I listed some of the
performance-detracting consequences of aging that sport science has identified for
us. It’s rather demoralizing – and this is only a partial list:
- Declining
VO2max - Reduced
maximal heart rate - Decreased
volume of blood pumped with each heart beat - Lowered
lactate threshold - Less
economical movement resulting in wasted energy - A
decrease in muscle fibers and strength - Less
effective and less abundant aerobic enzymes - Reduced
blood volume - Decreased
growth hormone production - Loss
of muscle mass
With sport science’s record of lagging behind sport in general it’s no
wonder that we should question their conclusions. There’s little doubt,
however, that our physiology changes as we get older. The issue is, by how
much? I’ll examine some of the above age-related changes in the next post.
