This was originally a newsletter was ended up going down a big rabbit hole. We’ll consider this a Part 1 to a multi-part series that we’ll follow up with later.
Also, ELEVATE Strength & Performance achieved it’s nine year anniversary this year, and we are excited about that milestone.
Are you the least bit concerned about your overall health as you age? If so, what are you doing or going to do about it?
Risks of disease start increasing at greater rates from age 40 on up.
Our metabolic function begins to decline and becomes less efficient with age.
Recovering from exercise, nutritional choices, alcohol, illness, travel, lack of sleep and many other factors begin to take longer.
We lose overall body mass, muscle mass, and bone density. Our ability to generate explosive power decreases along with strength. Body fat accumulates easier because of the respective decline of our metabolic function.
Here it is – you are in control of how rapidly you decline, or how resilient you become as you grow older.
We need to look at everything involved in the metabolic process like they’re spokes on a wheel. The spokes of the wheel include your environment, nutrition, sleep, activity, recovery and well-being.
Each of these individual spokes plays an important role for our metabolic resilience.
For the purpose of this newsletter, we’re going to focus on one spoke of the wheel – your activity and exercise routine.
We need to exercise regularly and at an intensity that allows us to be able to return and do it again the next day. General recommendations are 150 minutes per week. You can make great progress with an effort or rate of perceived exertion around 70%.
How much you can or choose to do is based on whatever fits your schedule and lifestyle. If you exercise at the gym three times a week and each session is 45-60 minutes, you’re nailing it.
Understand there is no upper limit to this general recommendation, as long as you’re able to recover and repeat your activity regularly.
A well-rounded program will include hip hinging, squatting, lunging, pushing, pulling, carrying and ground-based work to strengthen your trunk (core).
Your training will include bilateral (both limbs or sides of the body working together) and unilateral (one limb or side of the body working at a time).
Bilateral exercises are efficient for building overall strength, muscle mass and useful for beginners to learn and develop a strong foundation.
Unilateral exercises address muscle imbalances, correct strength discrepancies, develop stabilizing muscles, which helps improve balance and coordination.
It’s important to also get in conditioning work, also called “energy system development” and more commonly referred to as “cardio.” General recommendations for conditioning vary based on goals, experience and general health.
Conditioning can be broken up into shorter durations after your strength work or on its own for longer periods of time.
Your conditioning can be lower in intensity and longer in continuous duration or higher in intensity and shorter in duration with lots of rest between rounds.
There are three components of conditioning: anaerobic, glycolytic and aerobic.
Your anaerobic system is best worked with short bursts of 5-12 seconds of high intensity work with at least 5-6 times that in rest, in some cases even 10 times the amount of rest to work.
We like fan bike sprints for 5 seconds of work against 30 seconds of rest for 10-20 rounds, or 10 rounds of 10 second sprints with 50 seconds of rest.
Kettlebell swings and snatches x5 reps every minute on the minute is also effective, which works out to 8 seconds of work with 52 seconds of rest. You could do something like this for 5 minutes to 30+ minutes.
The glycolytic system is dependent on the prescribed intensity but usually includes a greater work to rest ration. If you’re a kettlebell enthusiast, the 5-minute snatch test is a glycolytic event, and it’s terrible (for most people).
For most glycolytic work, the work to rest ration isn’t balanced in your favor and is 2-4:1 or there’s more work and inadequate rest.
Four to five rounds of hard jiu jitsu rolls for 6 minutes with only a minute and a half of rest is what leads me to have anxiety before each class.
Your aerobic activities are lower in intensity and heart rate and can go for 15-minutes up to 90-minutes. Zone 2 heart rate has been the most talked about conditioning target recently and fits in the aerobic category. Zone 2 activities are easily maintained for longer periods of time. Depending on the person, this could be step-up training, riding a stationary bike, rower, walking or light treadmill running, swimming, going for a ruck, hike or walk. A general heart rate target range is between 120-150 beats per minute based on each unique individual.
The best metabolic outcomes place more emphasis on the aerobic and anaerobic systems and only touch the glycolytic system once every other week or so or 1-2 times per month, at the most.
Getting in 2-3 shorter but more intense anaerobic sessions per week along with 2-3 aerobic sessions per week is a great target for most.
In summary, exercise regularly. You will improve your fitness level in a way that helps you feel more athletic, maintain your mobility, build strength and protect your metabolism to be more resilient, reducing the likelihood of injury and disease.
The frequency, intensity and activity choices all comes down to your unique goals, health status, skills, schedule and environment.
If you want to gain an advantage in the game of life, and defend yourself against your diminishing metabolic function, you must check all the boxes from your environment, activity, nutrition, sleep, recovery and well-being.
You’ll gain a huge advantage and age gracefully if you are actively pursuing an exercise program.