You’re Not Too Old For Sports, You’re Just Not Preparing Correctly (Part 2)
What to incorporate in your physical preparation plan to prepare correctly
In part one, I shared my client’s long-term goals of wanting to maintain his athleticism throughout life from a consultation we had a few weeks ago.
I went over three of the biggest components to being able to accomplish, or at least increase the probability of, this goal:
Participate - Continue to do the activities that you want to be doing in your future
Train - Include the appropriate principles to your training program that transfer to those activities
Prioritize - manage your life around being able to do what’s most meaningful to you
*Bonus: Mitigate the downsides by working on your fundamental health through
sleep, nutrition, recovery, and stress
If you need to catch up with this article in detail, go to Part 1 here
Today I’ll be going over with you what I incorporate into this client’s training programs to set him up for long-term success.
It’s important to understand that I’m using this one client as a representation of my overall point that if you have long-term goals of staying active, playing sports, or doing physical activities outside of the gym well into your future and old age, you have to prepare appropriately.
That means that every one of you would need a form of individualization to the broad and general points of participation, training, prioritization, and general health.
So take these individual training concepts I’m about to share as general ideas, but not to be included in your plan precisely as written.
(If you are interested in fine-tuning your plan and would like guidance, please consider working with me by requesting a consultation here)
PARTICIPATION
This one is mostly self-explanatory. If he wants to play basketball for decades to come, he should keep playing basketball regularly.
What’s a regular basis? At least once per week.
Now, we don’t need to become obsessive over this suggestion. If you miss a week here or there or even have a short period (one to three months) where you don’t get to play much, this isn’t a huge deal.
It’s not like he is looking to be the best recreational league player on earth. He just wants to play, play well, have fun, and not get hurt.
Not getting hurt is the underlying goal here. Injury is the most common thing that reduces longevity in this endeavor. So the point is to maintain the specific fitness qualities of the demand itself. And nothing does that better than playing that sport.
The self-explanatory part is to stay up to date with recreational leagues in his area and maintain relationships with those who also have the same interests. That will keep the ball rolling and frequency high.
But the other suggestion I made was to also be aware of other sports and activities that have a high transfer rate and will help maintain these qualities in case a league doesn’t happen or he goes through a period where it’s hard to get everyone together.
Playing sports like pickleball, spike ball, volleyball, or any other sport that has agility and plyometrics involved such as sprinting and jumping will cover most of his bases for basketball.
Swimming, pool, bowling, and yoga won’t do that.
Recreational sports like basketball and soccer aren’t too hard to come by. The harder recreational sports to remain consistent with are seasonal and expensive sports, such as skiing and snowboarding.
This client wants to snowboard into his older age. He loves it more than anything, getting out into the mountains, and enjoying both a passionate hobby and peaceful nature at the same time.
I can fully relate to this as I feel the exact same way.
But, like I said, this is not an easy activity to stay frequent with unless you live in an area that has snow and mountains all year round. Not only that, but it’s expensive relative to playing basketball.
So how do we manage this one? Well, the main thing is to make sure his training program is set up with this activity in mind.
Since most people only do snow sports during about one quarter of the year, he only needs to be fully prepared for that time of the year. So in what you could essentially call the off-season, it’s all about maintaining general strength, conditioning, and movement abilities.
But when we’re nearing the season and getting closer to an actual trip, we’ll want to increase the specificity of the demands he’ll face so that it’s a nice ease-in process when he hops on his board and the preparation reduces injury risk.
At the very least during his season, he should try and get as many trips as he reasonably can and try to maintain this activity year after year.
TRAIN
Training is different than exercise.
Exercise is different than movement.
Training involves exercise and movement. But the main differentiating factor is it is a progressive, scalable design process. What I mean by that is a training program has targeted outputs attained by intentional inputs that are meant to be repeated frequently, progressing the demands to make improvements.
This is important to understand because the participation part of this involves both movement and exercise, but does not involve training. And that’s where many people will find themselves in constant pain or with many injuries. Some of which will end your recreational activities for good.
So when I say “train,” to be able to involve yourself in recreational sports or activities, I mean that your training program should involve things that directly prepare you for those demands and you frequently and progressively repeat those training parameters.
(Hence why I am a physical preparation coach)
Now, to the more practical part.
What should go into a training program to be ready for adult rec league basketball and snowboarding activities might seem obvious to you.
Strength training….check
Conditioning….check
Mobility….check
Sounds good, right?
Wrong!
This is the common and traditional approach to pretty much all adult training programs you’ll see, regardless of their function and lifestyle choices.
I know this because I live in this industry. We think we are covering the bases by checking off these three boxes in a training program. We’ve been told time and time again that these are the foundations of movement, health, and performance.
To be honest, the ability to create force is a fundamental aspect of function.
Having enough cardiovascular and metabolic fitness is a fundamental aspect of function.
Having control through maximal ranges of motion is a fundamental aspect of function.
But there are other aspects that are also foundational to human function, to athleticism.
These are speed, plyometrics, and agility. And they aren’t only reserved for athletes who play sports by the way.
So when it comes to putting together a training program that comprehensively covers all bases of human capacities, let alone the specific demands that functions like basketball or snowboarding require, we can’t ignore these major buckets.
(If you want to read a little more about why I think these three components of fitness and athleticism are a necessity for ALL people to train in their general programs, check out my article “Three Proven Ways Athletic Training Will Improve Your Health and Longevity”)
In the end, what does this client of mine receive in his training program to make sure he’s properly prepared for a long life of playing basketball, snowboarding, and other sports?
Strength training - lifting and holding (isometrics) weights for max strength, strength endurance and hypertrophy
Conditioning - zone 2 and HIIT as well as general metabolic capacity and muscle endurance
Mobility - flexibility, control, and joint capacity through various ranges of motion
Speed - sprinting, jumping, and throwing
Plyometrics - extensive (volume) and intensive (load) rebounding in various positions, directions, and ranges of motion as well as both upper and lower body
Agility - reactively changing direction based on emerging environments, AKA playing a sport with other people
Specificity - fluctuating the training parameters throughout the process based on in and off-season periods
These are the main principles of a comprehensive athletic development program. And this isn’t a high school, collegiate, or professional athlete. This is a client who has a full-time job, family and social life, and important obligations that he has to tend to daily.
But he has goals of remaining athletic. So his training program should prepare him physically for these goals.
PRIORITIZE
As a physical preparation coach, you may wonder why this is part of the process of coaching. The first answer is that I work comprehensively with my clients within three pillars:
Training
Nutrition
Lifestyle
We covered the physical training part already.
I will quickly touch on nutrition later on.
So, lifestyle is what’s left. Part of lifestyle coaching is goal setting, which comes down to prioritization.
It doesn’t matter what we’re working towards in life, if we don’t have our priorities straight, we become aimless which results in a lack of productivity and lack of success.
This means it’s essential to write down your priorities in life (or concerning whatever goals you have) and rank them so you can align your process towards accomplishing optimal success.
This shouldn’t be a passive process. You should take proper time and care to think about how to order these. And this is a never-ending process
The majority of my client's goals over the past 10 years looked mostly like this:
Family
Work
Physical fitness and health
The order of these may vary individually, but the vast majority of people I’ve ever worked with put these three on their list, and as the top three.
You don’t have to stop at three either. This list can be five, 10 or even 15 items long.
But, you have to keep in mind that both time and energy are finite. So as the list goes on, you may have to start thinking if you will have to cut things out or just really not have high expectations for them.
That’s where the true process of planning your priorities boils down to, which is an article for another time.
For today, let’s stick with the main three that are also a part of this client’s priorities.
If the goal is to continue physical activities into his older age, 20 to 30+ years from now, then he has to try and keep this goal as a top three to five priority all the time. The key word here is “try!”
Participating in recreational sports like basketball and snowboarding takes resources. Mainly time and energy. Both of which, like I already mentioned, are finite, but replenishable.
With respect to his other priorities, which are family (social life) and work, he has competing demands of time and energy. It’s not like life is linear. Both family (social life) and work will demand different amounts of energy and time daily. Sometimes completely out of his control.
So the basic premise I live (coach) by is, “Life is in constant flux. Therefore, training must be in constant flux.”
Although we come up with a structured plan, a routine, and a basis of frequency, we must remain flexible because the way of life has the ultimate say.
We know consistency, long-term consistency, is one of the main proponents of success in health and fitness. But we also need to keep in mind training and health residuals.
This means knowing the rate of regression of our abilities. Or a better way to look at it, how long can we hold onto certain capacities without training them before we regress significantly.
These are major concerns when prioritizing your life around health and fitness and can help you cope with time away from these when life has a different thing in mind for you.
These two things are what I refer to as pillars of prioritization. They continue to hold up the process and create a stable foundation regardless of how life changes.
Along with these pillars come your expectations. These need to be set up personally for yourself, they need to be realistic, and then they need to be shared with the people in your life.
If you fail to share your priorities and your expectations of them with those who share your other priorities, such as family, friends, and work, then they will constantly demand time and energy from you to the point you won’t have enough to put into your other goals.
Now, let’s keep this within the bigger scope and not the details. I’m not suggesting I would ever tell this client to skip out on a family gathering, a holiday, or a work trip so he can get his training in.
But from a big-picture point of view, there is almost always a way to work around those priorities.
Such as:
Shortening the workout session from 60 minutes to 20 minutes
Shifting your schedule for the week
Adjusting the training split down from five workouts to three
Trimming the fat off the workouts and focusing on the main priorities
And so on.
The main point is that you don’t have to have an all-or-nothing mentality. You can survive….actually, you can thrive off of an all-or-something mentality.
So, in the end, when we talk about priorities, we all know that we only have so much time and energy in our lives to commit to certain things.
We know that we can’t always be in control of everything.
We know that our plans can get blown apart at a moment’s notice.
We know our priorities might shift without our say.
But if we have basic guidelines within a process of prioritizing, we’ll know how to juke when life throws that punch. And we can remain consistent with our process in the long term.
BONUS: Nutrition and Lifestyle
As I mentioned, I wanted to quickly touch on two other components of my client’s progress that will help setting up hi for success.
The reason I work with clients on a comprehensive basis is that training, nutrition, and lifestyle are all integrated. They all affect each other in many ways.
So when you ignore these other two components simply because you value your training more and don’t think the other two matter that much, you’re leaving a lot of performance on the table and setting yourself up for failure.
Just like with training, my client’s nutrition process is individualized to his lifestyle. Macro suggestions based on energy expenditure, food quality suggestions based on his intake and food preferences, meal planning and prepping tools and skills for execution precision, and mindset guidance as the psychology around nutrition is a constant battle.
When I speak of lifestyle, I’m referring to things like stress management, sleep, recovery and mindset.
So my client has certain guidelines he tries to follow to make this happen, such as:
7+ hours of sleep, 7 days per week, going to bed and waking up at the same time
Reducing or managing volume, intensity, and frequency in the training program to off-set an overload of stress from other lifestyle factors
General mobility and light aerobic sessions for recovery purposes
Playing sports and remaining physically active requires a lot of energy and time and has a component of unpredictability that increases the risks of injury. Having sound nutrition and lifestyle guidelines will help round out the process of building robustness and resiliency.
Without going into the details of how to accomplish these, you can still see how important these are in the big picture of increasing health and fitness and reaching for these long-term goals.
CONCLUSION
Most people I work with only look so far ahead in their health and fitness goals. Not very often do I hear people talk about how they want to be when they’re old. They may reference longevity, but you need to get specific with that for yourself.
So when I get to work with someone who brings up how they want to live in their later years of life, I get very excited as I share the same far-sighted thought process.
How we want to live in our future is directly related to how we are living it now. I am a huge advocate of participating in sports and physical activities outside of the gym throughout our adult lives. Not just when we’re kids.
But the main reason I hear that people give up on or don’t pursue these activities after the ripe age of 30 is injury.
And it’s because your training program isn’t preparing you correctly.
When you have the tools, skills, and know-how to work on these components, you are lethal in your quest for optimal health and fitness, participating in sports regularly, and building a life of athleticism!