Here at TLA, we talk a lot about training. All-around fitness. Complete athleticism. Developing strength, speed, power, agility, and endurance. We train for health, longevity, and performance in all aspects of life. But we also give equal consideration to sports.
We train for sports. We participate in sports. Play. Compete. Win. Lose. There are unique benefits from sports. While we train to perform better and compete successfully, it is the sports themselves that give back to us magnificently. Sports truly make us athletes in both attitude and expression. In celebrating sports and athletes of all kinds, let’s discuss a number of key points.
Sports help us to develop an athletic identity. A positive physical self-esteem comes from being an athlete. You’re capable. You’re confident. Athletic in every sense of the word and in every part of your life.
Sports participation increases motivation and consistency. This gives us a reason to train and to have regular, effective habits. The sneaky back door into better fitness and health.
Sports provide a critical social element for the Lifetime Athlete. These gatherings have been a part of our ancestry since the beginning. Participating is best, but being a sports fan and spectator is also incredibly human.
Sports nurture the natural competitive drive in the human beast. We’re built to feast, flee, and fornicate. We’re also made to fight. In a general sense, sports cultivate this trait in a way that is productive and not harmful.
Sports are fun. They keep the essential element of play alive in our existence. Sports contribute to a life of joy, which everyone deserves to live.
Sports exist at the apex of the movement pyramid. There is a continuum or sequelae in which movement is optimized for the human. It starts with JUST MOVE. This is related to general daily activity, step count targets, and overall health. Then we progress to MOVE MORE. Actually a lot. The curve of movement volume goes a long way before there are diminishing returns. Metabolic health and body composition do best with relatively generous amounts of movement. Next is MOVE WELL. This gets us into training, developing the 5 Capacities of Athleticism (speed, strength, power, agility, and endurance), and using periodized programming, varying levels of intensity, and specific goals. Ultimately, there is MOVE BEST, which is the pinnacle of this model. Play sports, compete, and challenge yourself. Achieve peak performances and add meaningfulness to your life through sport.
After all this talk about sport and its many bennies, we have not yet attempted to define the entity. There are multiple layers here, and of course, they are all good. It just depends on the person, where they’re at in life, and things like that. We should approach this concept without judgment, and with an open mind. There are many passion pursuits which are considered sports that may not meet everyone’s definition. That’s OK. They are still immensely important to the participants.
At the most basic level, a sport must give us joy. A focus and something to look forward to. This might even be a solo affair. As long as it makes you happy. Taken further, a sport should have a playful element. It should make you happy. Sports should involve skill and a quest for mastery.
Getting deeper into the richness of sport, it should support competition and challenge. If the only sports you ever do are in the quest of peace and relaxation, you’re missing out on the evolutionarily-consistent behavior of the competitor. Being frank here, I find that folks who shudder at the thought of competition and always see it as a turnoff to steer away from are actually out of balance in their lives. They have so much sympathetic stress in their existence that the only type of movement they can seek is calming in nature. Again, no judgment…just recognition. Living a balanced life isn’t necessarily easy and sometimes we need to do precisely what I just described. But the goal is to eventually be able to embrace the athletic way. That’s why we’re all here in this community.
Fun and playful first. Challenging and competitive (at least sometimes) next. Your sport could be the major thing that you focus on, perhaps year-round and year to year. It’s not just what you do, it’s who you are and that’s totally fine. You consider yourself a serious cyclist, runner, hunter, powerlifter, bodybuilder, golfer, or any of hundreds of other athletes. A lot of your life is wrapped up in training, gear, lessons, traveling to events, and the like. Or it could be something that you’re much more casual about. You occasionally jump into a little pickleball with your neighbors or frisbee with the kids or grandkids. Something seasonal like boating, mountain biking, skiing, etc. It really doesn’t matter as long as your chosen sport fulfills you in those play and challenge categories.
Some sports do increase fitness, but honestly, that’s really what training is for. We don’t just do random exercise, we train for comprehensive fitness. And we train to be good at our sport(s). Most sports allow us to express our athleticism but they also give us all those positives around identity, purpose, and contentment.
Having rambled on a bit there, I want to narrow down to think of sports in a more traditional sense, and that’s most court and field – and particularly ball and implement – sports. Soccer, football, tennis, basketball, rugby, baseball, softball, cricket, volleyball, hockey…and so many others. Sports that are recognized as games, yet meet all the criteria we’ve been discussing, and then some. No doubt these are the sports many of us played growing up, competed in during high school or college, and continued in recreational leagues for a while.
A major issue for Lifetime Athletes, especially maturing “adults” (big kids who need to keep playing) is access to these sports. The opportunities exist, but they are not as prevalent as they are for youth. This may be one of my (and I’m certainly not alone) crusades. Even if it is just informal “pick-up” play (in fact this may be the best choice for most of us), regularly participating in this kind of sport is so good. The reason is quite obvious. These court and field sports allow us to not only use our speed and agility, they preserve those capacities. Change of direction, hand-eye coordination, balance, explosive qualities, rapid decision making ability…and many more characteristics are enhanced. You can’t quite get all of this in a basic fitness workout. You either need to play a sport, or really gamify your workout to accomplish these objectives.
Back to the opportunities. There are tons of group fitness classes and sessions with a personal trainer one could jump into. But you don’t see very many flag football meetups for 60 year-olds. There should be more. But most of the time, we just need to organize it ourselves. It doesn’t have to be football. Pickleball is a phenomenal option. The message here is to put in a little effort to find a sport and a few peeps who are motivated and knowledgeable (having read this article) to pursue this incredible (and what should perhaps be nonnegotiable) lifestyle.
If you’re a parent or a grandparent, keep a box of balls, badminton gear, and other goodies in the garage. Create athletic family traditions where sports are valued as not just good but entirely necessary.
Of course the elephant in this room is safety. We need to be very cautious to avoid and prevent injury from sports participation. In our TLA Training Tribe programming, we have a philosophy regarding all training and athletics. Have fun. Get results. Don’t get hurt. This is one of the major reasons why sports participation trickles off for many as the decades advance. Life gets busy and you don’t play often. Or maybe your conditioning is decent but not comprehensive enough. Back to those 5 capacities. If you are stiff, or weak, or imbalanced in some ways from doing too much of only 1 thing, you may be a time bomb in sports. Let’s say you are a super-fit cyclist who finds herself at the company picnic softball game. You get a hold of the ball, bang it into left field and are rounding first base and heading to second when the hammy blows. That actually really blows. After the pain and recovery, you just decide never to play sports like that again. Wrong choice. Train for complete athleticism so you can do what you like with the peeps you love.
Beyond appropriate Lifetime Athlete training, however, there are a number of things to keep in mind when successful lifelong sports participation is your goal.
- Warm up well for any sport. Show up early. Do as much as necessary to ready your body. Wear a sweatsuit. Go through a general to specific process of preparation. Make sure everything feels good to go before the game starts. Whatever this looks like for you.
- Gauge your abilities on the day. As you get going and your rhythm and concentration are settling in, consider your investment ability. Is it an “A” day? Go ahead and bring the A game. But if it is a “B” day, downregulate and soft pedal, saving the trash talk and high expectations for another day. If you deem it a “C or D” day, it’s probably best to do a light recovery workout and save sports participation for later in the week.
- Adapt as you evolve. Getting older isn’t exceedingly glamorous. Despite our best efforts, we lose abilities here and there. Injuries. Surgeries. Life. While I’ll always make the argument that Lifetime Athletes age better than the sedentary genpop, we have to make accommodations. There will be frustrations, but working with our bodies and around (not through) certain conditions will allow us to keep enjoying, and benefiting, from sports.
If all of this information still doesn’t have you jazzed that sports can or should be your jam…that’s cool. There is a way to gamify fitness training that can turn it into a sport. CrossFit certainly comes to mind but in reality I’m talking about something a little less official and possibly a bit more creative. Turning a workout into a game. We frequently do this with our T2 programming. The options are limitless, but here are a few ideas.
- You can play by yourself, but all our childhood memories will support getting a few Lifetime Athlete training partners to join in the fun.
- Incorporate a basketball shootaround, spikeball, hacky sack, or something similar into your warmup. This could be for a few minutes or until a “score” is reached. We’ve even placed a hula hoop on the field and made it a target for various medicine ball throws.
- The main or primary portion of the session can be any type of circuit, ladder, pyramid or other sequence which has definitive (not necessarily all but a few) parameters regarding reps, sets, load, bout duration, rest interval, and the like. This doesn’t always have to be a race for time. You can focus on quality of execution such as performing an exercise under balance-challenged conditions without an LOB (loss of balance). Or you can intersperse a skilled task, such as shooting (making) a free throw between burpees (or whatever).
- Create a goal or outcome target for the competition. Recognize and celebrate a winner.
- Assess what was most popular and adjust/refine for future use.
- Make the accessory or cooldown component a communal affair.
You know this is working when you hear laughter and see smiles as everyone is getting fit. We’ve got hundreds of workouts in our T2 library that facilitate gamified fitness. You don’t have to do this all the time either. 1-3 times per week is great.
You never want to become a slave to your workouts or training program. Sure, doing hard things has value. But they don’t have to be boring. Your workouts should serve you…in all ways.
Sports for Lifetime Athletes. It’s what we do. It’s who we are.