The fitness industry is largely targeted at the 18 to 35 age group and often neglects the population that needs good physical activity the most urgently – those aged 50+.
There seems to be a fallacy that in your 20’s and 30’s everyone should want/have six-pack abs, and that after the age of 50 all we want/need is leisure activities to stay active.
That’s gross misrepresentation.
The 50+ population needs physical fitness solutions urgently because by their 50’s most people will have been living sedentary lifestyles for 30+ years, and they will be paying the cost with reduced strength, mobility and fitness, translating into increased incidences of injury, chronic pain and poor health markers such as high blood pressure and cholesterol.
50+ exercisers also need a different approach, because you cannot train a person in their 50's (not to mention 60's and 70's) the same way as you train a person in their 30's without risking injury, frustration and disengagement that will result in abandoning the exercise programme.
An additional problem is that so many forms of physical activity popular amongst populations aged 50+ are limited in their value as comprehensive exercise systems, and fail to address the full range of physical skills we need to maintain physically robust lifestyles.
As a result, far too many people find themselves unable to make the most of retirement when it comes, and find themselves unable to participate in a great many activities due to physical limitations (bad back/hips/knees) and increasing infirmity.
So just as we put money into our pension savings to spend later, we need to invest in training our body in order to reduce our physical limitations in our retirement.
We need to participate in physical activities that help us maintain the 10 general physical skills:
Cardiovascular/Respiratory Fitness:
This is what has traditionally been perceived as the measure in fitness but is actually a single facet of it.
It is our ability to increase physical effort efficiently and sustain it for a prolonged period. If you become easily out of breath walking up a hill or stairs, then it is a red flag. If you become fatigued after doing moderate physical activity (house chores, gardening), then it is another red flag.
We know that cardiovascular fitness is essential to reduce the risk of heart and lung conditions as we get older. Just as important is that your cardiovascular fitness is effectively your “Battery life” throughout the day. The better it is, the more you can do with less tiredness.
You don’t need to run half marathons. Simply training it 3+ times a week at a moderate intensity level (including perhaps once per week at a high level, fitness permitting) will hold you in good stead.
Strength:
Strength is, in my opinion, the most overlooked element of 50+ exercise, that could also be the most easily improved.
Strength as a measure is our ability to exert force. From a practical point of view it dictates our limitations in terms of moving objects (including our own bodies).
Studies have found that a sedentary lifestyle results in the loss of 1% of our strength every year from the age of 35. For women, after the menopause, that doubles.
This means that if a man is sedentary from the age 35 to 70, he will have lost 35% of his strength. By 90 he will have lost 55% of his strength. For women it could be 60% to 80% respectively. That’s terrifying.
Strength training doesn’t have to be extreme. No one’s asking you to become a bodybuilder, powerlifter or strongman/woman*. It’s simply a case of use-it or lose it.
A basic strength training regime will do wonders to arrest and even reverse the loss of strength in a couple of months. I’ve trained people in their 60’s who have become stronger than they were in their 30’s. The progress isn’t as quick, but it’s still significant and the results can be incredible with the right programme.
* Unless you want to! The internet is full of videos of male and female bodybuilders and powerlifters in their 60's, 70's and even 80's!
Stamina:
Stamina is our ability to repeatedly exert strength at sub-maximal loads. Sorry, that got technical there. What this means is that it’s how many times you can perform a movement before your muscles fail.
A classic example is how many push-ups a person can do (assuming they can do 1, which I find most people can’t - which is indicative of general population strength levels to begin with). I find that stamina is a useful training tool, but has a law of diminishing returns; being able to do 10 push-ups is a good indicator of robust physical strength and stamina – it probably puts you in the top 10% of the general population. Being able to do 100 push-ups puts you in the top 0.001%, but it’s not really going to make your life that much better. In truth it’ll probably result in over-training injuries.
Speed:
Stating the obvious here: speed is about how quickly you move. With respect to the 50+ population I’d argue that increasing speed is less important that avoiding the loss of speed.
In practical terms the ability to sprint 100m isn’t really a priority for most people, but the ability to dash 20 meters without falling over might be very important to catch a pet or grandchild before they run into the road.
Speed is often a by-product of other physical skill development, but it is again a useful training tool at times because it stimulates increases in strength, power and cardiovascular fitness.
Power:
Power is the marriage of speed and strength ie: how quickly you can move an object from static. It may seem that this is another non-applicable to the 50+ population, more relevant to athletes, but it is also another useful training method. Sometimes we need to exert power in our daily tasks such as heaving a heavy object from the floor to a surface.
Flexibility:
Flexibility is an older term that causes people to think about whether or not they can touch their toes, but the modern focus is more on “mobility” which is the ability to move safely and effectively through full range of motion.
I’ve known plenty of people over the years who have been extremely flexible, but they have also been prone to injury (either because they were hypermobile or because their flexibility relied on lack of muscular development).
We’ve moved on from just addressing flexibility via static stretches. Now we know that good movement improves mobility.
Lack of mobility is a prime indicator of both chronic inactivity, and imbalanced training regimes. It increases the risk of movement-based injury. It increases the risk of chronic pain due to muscular and posture imbalances.
Just as I’ve known many flexible individuals prone to injury, I’ve known plenty of very fit people who have appalling mobility (usually those with a background in endurance sports).
Coordination:
In my opinion, coordination is a criminally neglected aspect of physical training. Coordination is our ability to get our body to perform complex movements effectively.
“Complex” is a technical term that does not necessarily mean complicated – but rather differentiates from “simple” movements.
Simple movements are defined as movements requiring the employment of just one muscle and joint of the body eg: the classic bicep curl (works the bicept muscle through the elbow joint).
Complex movements involve multiple muscle groups and muscle joints eg: a pull-up employs the bicep and back muscles through the elbow and shoulder joints. Similarly picking up a grandchild will employ the bicep plus a host of other muscles to support movement.
Coordination also dictates the ease with which we can pick up new physical skills. Perhaps more relevant though is that the “uncoordinated” are often the more “clumsy” and therefore prone to accidental injury.
I’ve always set value in the studies that have found that training exercises that require coordination has also been found to combat the onset of cognitive diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Balance:
Balance is, to me, a facet of coordination. We don’t just train balance by standing on one leg, but also by moving objects relative to ourselves (eg: kettlebell swings) and moving ourselves relative to gravity (eg: a lunge). Balance is a skill that good training can develop alongside others, if you are doing the right things.
Again, those with poor balance have increased risk of injury from accidents, slips trips and falls.
Agility:
Agility is our ability to quickly and effectively change our direction of travel. I see it as an extension of coordination. As you can imagine, it’s extremely useful on a tennis court, but also in avoiding accidents.
Again, this can be a simply trained and maintained skill as part of a regular training regime, or it can be taken to the highest level in the pursuit of championship performance.
A simple example though is what I call compass-stepping – starting standing with your feet together, then practicing stepping to with one foot to the different points of the compass and quickly returning to the central standing position. This is good practice for dodging/sidestepping hazards, and for catching ourselves if we trip on something.
Accuracy:
Accuracy is a hard physical skill to define in the everyday. I’d define it as our ability to control objects external to our body in travel and placement.
In sporting terms we might think about it as the ability to throw a dart to a board, kick a ball into a goal, sink a putt or direct a tennis return to a space on the court.
From an everyday perspective I would suggest that it is yet another facet of coordination. The simple act of putting your keys in the keyhole when you get home may be the most mundane of examples. More important would be our awareness of how our body moves relative to things around us (called proprioception) such as whether or not we knock ourselves on furniture in an unfamiliar environment.
I’d argue that the most obvious application is probably our ability to park a car with minimal errors due to good special awareness.
Training the 10 General Physical Skills after 50:
To cite a health and fitness truism: the most effective type of exercise is the one you enjoy doing.
Comprehensively training the 10 general physical skills will result in optimal physical capability and health, but you don’t need to live in exclusive pursuit of that. Rather, it’s important to find something that you enjoy doing, that you can (and will) do regularly (and that ideally helps to maintain social connections).
It is useful to reflect on what physical skills your preferred activity is employing, and which it is neglecting. Supplementary training to your preferred form of exercise will help eliminate physical weakness and deficiencies, and frequently results in improved performance and enjoyment of that exercise in any case.
Here's a sample table of popular forms of exercise and which physical skills they do and do not address:
If you would like to learn how to train so that you are addressing all 10 of the physical skills, we can provide exercise programming for the gym or home, and deliver individual and group personal training.
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