I absolutely love this topic. It represents the crux of our quest at TLA. At some point, every Lifetime Athlete ponders some version of the following question: “How can my lifestyle interventions and behaviors, including but not limited to training and nutrition, impact both the length and quality (health, functionality, performance) of my lifespan?”
What matters most? Living as long as possible? Living as well as you can for your days on earth? Each of us is entitled to his or her opinion on that. But one thing’s for certain. We can’t live forever. Which brings us back to the conundrum that seems to have 3 potential choices. I see these as paths which we can select for our journeys through life. There are two extremes and one (broad) middle road.
- Live now with no concern for future wellness. Burn ye ole candle. Be a rockstar. Eschew any preventative or maintenance practices. Eat and drink whatever you want. Smoke. Sleep when you’re dead. Practice reckless abandon. You get the picture. The problem with this approach – excepting rare individuals with genetic gifts – is that it has been shown to both shorten overall lifespan and to make the final decade (or three) somewhat morbidity-ridden.
- Live now with an eye on the horizon and the goal of staying functional and healthy as long as possible…potentially right up to the end of the trip. This merits making lifestyle choices and ingraining practices (adjusting as you go along) which optimize health and performance. There is no actual guarantee that doing this will necessarily make you live longer than your genetic potential but it almost certainly optimizes life participation and enjoyment.
- Don’t really live now, but do everything in your power to stay alive as long as possible. Be a bubble girl or boy. Obsess and worry about everything and scrutinize all elements of your life for their value in your quest to amass the max number of birthdays. Have no fun. Be no fun to be around. This pursuit can be successful in its primary objective, but it probably does not represent a life of joy.
Those examples, with the extremes being intentionally polarized, set the stage for the consideration of healthspan versus lifespan. Healthspan has become a popular term over the past decade. It defines the portion of one’s lifespan (total length of life) in which you are healthy, functional, and relatively high-performing. I’ve presented this concept in graph format multiple times, but the principle is simple to describe with words alone. We need to maximize health for as much of our lifespan as possible, such that healthspan is just as long (or nearly so) as lifespan. Making all of our years good, to the extent that we can, is the objective.
I often speak about making the human organism (the beast) robust, resilient, durable, and versatile. Accordingly, these properties relate equally well to physical and mental performance and they essentially exemplify healthspan. A robust critter performs at a high level in life (and sport and work) situations. Her resiliency allows her to recover fast, bounce back, and rapidly return to readiness (for anything). His durability makes him fatigue resistant, and practically impervious to wearing out, giving up, or breaking down. And their versatility supports these functions across an impressively wide variety of situations.
Given the aforementioned data, a long healthspan appears to be the desirable goal for most human beasts. So, one way or another, most of us choose that broad middle road and put our signature on it. We apply sound nutrition, proper sleep, harmonious relationships, and good decision-making to a life filled with accomplishment and contribution. But in addition to those and other items, training is the changemaker. Training doesn’t necessarily make the athlete (give a major nod to genetics here), but it certainly preserves the athlete through the lifespan…and thus healthspan.
Training is exercise done with a purpose. It stems from a vision to a goal to a plan. It relies upon programming, periodization, and workouts which target specific outcomes. And when the objective is maxing out the healthspan, training takes on some very unique characteristics. And naturally that is developing the requisite robustness, resiliency, durability, and versatility of the Lifetime Athlete.
There are folks, although generally not those in our community (in which everyone is welcome), who bristle at that suggestion. But think about this for just a moment. We’re not talking about just being generally healthy, fit, and athletic in sports. We’re really going after athletic, plaque-resistant blood vessels. Athletic, fast-thinking and dementia-free neurons. Athletic sexual function. And an athletic, engaged presence in joyous relationships. This is total wellness and the only way to get there is to get on the road to maximum healthspan. At TLA we call that the Athletic Avenue into Wellness.
We use The Lifetime Athlete 5-3-1 system to get and keep ourselves on that Avenue. Rather than being a rigid framework (those never work), it’s a flexible guide that can (and actually must be) adapted to each individual. Gotta get healthy first. Training doesn’t really take or stick in an unhealthy person. Build the foundation with the 5 Components of Lifelong Health. Those are food, movement, sleep, ergonomics and awareness. For some, this takes little time because they’ve already got everything in place. But for most, we have an area or two that can benefit from a little comeuppance. Then, and only then, we can really dive into the 3 Essential Elements of Peak Performance that are training, mindset, and recovery. That’s how we become and remain Hard to Kill (Reaper-resistant) athletes for life.
Back to training because that’s what I want to emphasize. We need to ensure that every Lifetime Athlete (those who really want to play the long healthspan game) has baseline (and above) levels of the 5 Capacities of Athleticism or Human Performance. Strength, speed, power, agility, and endurance. Put them in any order because they all matter.
We use the Athletic Capacity Rating System (ACRS) to evaluate the trainee with respect to absent (suboptimal), low (baseline), moderate, and high (maximum) levels. That’s a score of 0-1-2-3 respectively and we sum the total in all 5 areas. Most athletes will naturally excel in one or two areas but this of course varies due to genetically-driven individual differences. Consequently, a total score of 7-12 is typically seen. No athlete scores a perfect 15 because it’s not possible to be at absolute peak performance level in every category. Although some elite and professional athletes can potentially reach 13 or 14 on the ACRS.
The goal with the ACRS isn’t necessarily to max out your score. As long as you have baseline levels in all 5 areas, you are addressing the healthspan requirements. But when we look at genetic gifts and body types, and then manipulate training in regard to fitness and sport goals, we can optimize those ratings for best individual outcomes. Healthspan is more about general, all-around fitness than extremely high specialization. The minute you start putting all your training eggs into one basket…you begin to sacrifice the other areas. This is undeniable. Concentrating training only on one’s major goal or strength can be done, but with two caveats.
First, this works quite well in younger athletes (let’s arbitrarily say those under 30 years of age) because, due to youthful vitality, all capacities can be kept at baseline levels (even those not being emphasized during training) with very little effort. Second, the practice of maxing out training in one category can be applied at any age as long as it is relatively brief and cyclical. In other words, you can take an older athlete and “train them up” for a focused event for, let’s say 3-6 months, and then return them to more balanced training to restore the diminished properties before they become problematic. Because they will if they are not attended to regularly in the maturing athlete.
A neglected property becomes a deficiency and it invariably rears up and bites the beast in the buttock. This is going to take some explaining, but we’ve got plenty of time here and I’m going to pull from decades of real-world experience. If we look at things through an AnimalFIT (my body type training book) lens, your genetics will give you one of nine specific inner beasts, or athletic mechanotypes. Each of these animals will have a different score on the ACRS. For example, a bear would max out strength, a panther speed, and a coyote endurance. Each one of those animals, as well as the 6 others in the kingdom, has the ability to express a capacity uniquely higher than the others. Concomitantly, no matter how many reps and roids a coyote consumes…he will never be as strong as a bear. And none of those critters will be quite as agile as an otter. We celebrate the gifts of the beast and recognize them as the strengths (relative term in this case as opposed to defining force production) they are.
With younger, highly motivated athletes, we encourage using a Max/Min approach to training. That is, maximize effort in your strength and pay very little attention to your weaknesses. This allows you to achieve ultimate potential in your gifted area. But as an athlete gets older (you can define) the strengths, having been honed for so long, don’t require too much attention to stay pretty respectful. On the other hand, more investment must be made in shoring up the deficient areas because once they go below baseline, the organism is at risk of not only poor performance, but breakdown and injury. Consequently, we apply the Min/Max approach at that point. This type of application also works very well with any athlete of any age who is interested in a sport that is just not their natural, easy place. You can turn a bear into a marathoner or a coyote into a powerlifter. The outcome might not be world-class, but it can still be “pretty good” depending on your standards. As long as the athlete has fun and doesn’t get hurt…it’s a glowing success.
I’ve had a lot of these discussions with well-meaning critics, so I believe further clarification would be valuable. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a great passion in fitness or athletics. If you have something you love, which gives you great fulfillment, you should do it as much as you want for your entire life. Where I come in as a coach and health care professional is in helping you to be able to do exactly that. Not having to give up what you love because you can no longer do it.
The secret to being a successful, long term single-sport athlete is the use of personalized, balanced training. There is a key amount, at any given point in the lifespan, of the primary “thing,” that a human can absorb and recover from. If we are always keeping a keen eye on this recoverable volume, we can avoid direct overload. And, if we apply the appropriate amount (given the individual circumstances) of complementary, supplemental conditioning…the athlete stays healthy and high-performing. But do too much of the one thing (and remember we are acknowledging it as a good thing) and not enough of the other things (the supplemental work on the deficiencies or neglected capacities), and bad things begin to happen. Thank you for bearing with the “thing-talk.”
Avoiding degradation of performance capacity is an artful dance, to say the least. We can accept gradual decline over the healthspan, but our intention is always to make this as incremental as possible. I’ve got some suggestions for athletes in different areas which can help to preserve the qualities of robustness, resiliency, durability and versatility through the lifespan. I look at these training additives as secondary supplements which prevent the athlete from becoming truly uni-dimensional in ability. This allows us to cruise through life enjoying our main sport but also getting a confirmative response when we ask ourselves “Do I still have enough (enter a capacity here like strength or endurance) to get by on if I need it?” Most thinking athletes already do the training we are recommending so this might just serve as a reminder to avoid doing only one thing, for too long of a time period.
Avid cyclists, perhaps inspired by the current dominance of Slovenian wonderboy Tadej Pogacar, are quite fit from a cardiovascular and lower body fatigue resistance standpoint. But in a quest to avoid neck and back issues and to maintain ground-based functionality, they would do well to utilize a mix of gym-based training focused on postural restoration and multidirectional movement competency.
We’ve all known runners who only run. It’s probably the most portable and simplest form of exercise, and it allows natural human locomotion to be a sport in and of itself. But in a quest to avoid eventually becoming weak, stiff, and slow critters that move awkwardly or even painfully, a little agility and resistance work can keep them going, in all probability, for most of the duration of the long run known as LIFE. And at a higher performance level to boot. If elite marathoners like Eliud Kipchoge do this, there’s no reason any recreational athlete should not do the same.
Swimming is awesome, especially if you are proficient in stroke mechanics like Katie Ledecky. Water as a medium for exercise in any form is uniquely beneficial for humans. Older swimmers should continue to model the training practices of younger, competitive swimmers who consistently perform dry-land training. The youngsters do it for performance enhancement and that’s certainly an objective for maturing athletes, but overall athletic balance and bone density should also be major targets.
What if you are a devotee of the Westside Barbell methods of training popularized by the late Louie Simmons. Strength training is your jam. As you age it will be important that you devote a little more time to aerobic fitness and mobility work so you don’t lose function outside the rack. Lifting is awesome but it can restrict movement variability and aerobic capacity if you only lift and do nothing else.
Let’s say you read Scott Johnston’s Training for the Uphill Athlete and you’re really into aerobic base development and muscular endurance training. You’ll benefit from balancing that (primarily) slow-twitch focused exercise with some explosive speed and agility work. This might not make you faster up the hill or more enduring on the mountain (although it can help), but it will keep you comprehensively capable for life.
Maybe you follow the teachings of B.K.S. Iyengar and you have a dedicated yoga practice. Your mobility is outstanding. Consider adding in some resistance training for strength, muscle mass, and joint stability.
As you can see from those examples (and there are many more we can consider), a Lifetime Athlete can be a single-sport athlete. You just have to train in a manner that supports peak performance in your sport yet still preserves the orthopedic system and diverse athletic function.
Swinging the conversation back to healthspan, the preservation of all the major athletic properties keeps us on the most functional path. Intrinsic motivation is tied to personality and this varies broadly across the population. Competitive desire stays consistent in some through the entire lifespan. In others, our focus evolves to concentrate less on performance and to place more emphasis on generally feeling good, being diversely capable, and enjoying life’s experiences to the fullest.
In any case, training in the manner we’ve discussed, as well as combining the other important lifestyle items, can maximize healthspan and lead to the life best lived. The Lifetime Athlete’s life.