How to Adjust Training as You Get Older

On today’s Extra Kick, Coach Dylan explains why our training and recovery needs change as we get older and how to adjust for healthy, longterm running.


Audio Transcript

Coach Dylan: Hey Runner Connect fans. Welcome to the Run to the Top Extra Kick podcast. I hope you guys are off to a great start to your day.

Today we have a great question from Ross. He says, “I’m from Melbourne Australia and I’m a mid-forty’s runner. I have been running for about 20 years.

I have a very good idea of what sort of training sessions work for me. I am enquiring about what sort of training should I be focusing on once I get a bit older?

Is it trying to focus more on speed, more tempo runs, more hill reps? I can imagine I’ve had to do a bit more strength training, my muscles and bones get a bit weaker.

I am interested in how I should customize my training to suit my advance in years. Thanks very much.

Dylan: Wonderful question Ross and thank you so much for submitting your question for us today.

I’d like to share a story with you about my very first athlete that I ever came to coach. While I was in college, I learned a lot about athletes in their prime and we spent many hours in the labs and performing tests upon 18 to 20-year-old college students.

As a student athlete, I understood how training affected me and my teammates. As an aspiring coach, I was interested in a wide variety of age ranges. I wanted to know how I could coach the other ends of the spectrum specifically in youth athletics and older athletes.

I felt the need to be challenged in the right setting to gain knowledge and experience which I had never had before. I enrolled in a program called H.O.P.E (Helping Older People Exercise).

I was paired with a man who was 50 years my senior who had never run before and done little exercise. Over six months, I learned more about this man as an athlete and as a human being.

We had to do to think very creatively and think outside the box about some of his training. It was very stimulating, and it allowed my mind to expand in ways in which I had never had to apply.

We focused on a few things in particular: strength training, quality of his runs, rest between efforts, and plenty of cross training activities.

He ran only two to four days a week and we strength trained two to three days a week. We spent the other remaining days doing cross training activities which were often between his harder efforts of running.

By the end of the six-month period, my athlete ran a 26-minute five K and we were ecstatic. It was a very rewarding period.

Over this period, there are a few things that I learned to apply to my future training with older and aging athletes.

First, it’s important that we try not to compare ourselves to others and we have to understand that what works for us, is for us.

We don’t have to compare how our training was 10 years prior as a youth because it’s different, our body is always changing.

We work very independently and individually. Sometimes we have to be creative and try different stimuli to promote adaptation as we age. What works for us then, may not work for us now.

It’s always important to remind ourselves that improvement is always possible. While we may not be running our fastest times compared to when we were younger, there are still ways in which we can become healthier, stronger athletes and still run well-respectable times and achieve our goals.

When taking time to train older athletes, we must understand that there are certain factors physiologically that we must focus on to ensure that one is able to train with the most strength and longevity as possible.

As we age we know that our running is affected by a decreased muscular power, a decrease in stride frequency, and, a loss in stride length. It’s important that we become enrolled within a strength and mobility training program.

A proper strength and mobility program will be one that focuses on total body and enhanced running specific exercises that will help promote our stride length, help increase our muscular strength, increase our bone density, and ultimately to better able us to become more resilient and fight the forces that we become used to when we are running.

Next thing we are looking at, when analyzing our training program is that we must find a proper balance and training.

This means we must find the proper amount of stimulus and recovery as well as supplemental exercises to help ensure that we are strong and resilient in the long run.

I like to have my older athletes spend more time dynamically stretching and performing drills prior to beginning their runs.

An increased pre-run routine can help alleviate initial fatigue and ultimately prepare the body for the running portion.

This also relates to the cooldown period where one must take more time to bring the body back down to normal.

This may include: a longer duration easy run before and after the harder run section. Priming the body or activity in older athletes or aging athletes is very important.

We want to make sure that we are primed and ready to go for the harder section and that we are biomechanically and as efficient economically as possible before beginning the exercise.

With this, we must also take more recovery time between extensively hard efforts.

We often must refocus our energy on easy days or days between harder efforts to promote the minimum affective dose for the mass or the maximum amount of benefit.

This often means that we will not run long on our easy days, but will run just enough to get the most benefit and the right form of recovery between harder sections.

Minimum effective dose relates to reducing the workout volume, but keeping up with added quality.

Many people believe that older athletes should avoid certain types of workouts, but I tend to disagree.

I think as individuals, we can still make promising gains from a wide range of types of efforts and hitting the spectrum will be important for us as we progress into our desired distance and race outcomes.

While speed may naturally decline as we age, we can still test the system here in the right doses to get the desired benefit.

It’s all about finding the right amount of dosing for the maximum benefit. This can be wholly individualistic.

Many older runners who have many years of running under their belt may not get the most benefit from a longer base period or longer and intense workouts.

Instead, we may need to refocus our energy on getting quality out of our runs, but also adding in supplemental work that will help us achieve our goals.

It is important for older athletes to work with a coach who understands your current physical condition and is understanding and willing to work with you to succeed in meeting your expectations and goals.

A good coach, who works with older athletes, will work to improve including but not limited to, strength gains, mobility work, running economy, as well as finding the right formula or training balance to find ways to continually improve your training outcomes.

To recap, I think it’s important for an older athlete to be realistic with their goals and to understand that there’s much that’s going to change between when we were younger and when we’re older.

We must understand that sometimes less is more.

Adding more quality and getting the most out of each run-in terms of minimally effective dosing your runs in your workouts, is going to be incredibly important for not only the adaptation and the stimulus period, but also the recovery period that comes along with training.

We must understand the aspects, some which become harder to work on as we age, and we have to spend more time focusing on that so that we can be as strong as possible and achieve our goals in the long term.

While training may be individualized, I think it’s important that we take the amount of time to obviously recover between our harder workouts and take those easier runs easy and make sure that we’re getting plenty of time and focusing our energy on where it needs to go.

I believe that working with a coach is going to be the best way in which we can be understanding and knowing what we can do.

We can always still improve as aging athletes.

There’s ways in which we have to think outside the box, be creative, and think of ways in which we have not applied in ways in which we can adapt that maybe we haven’t done in a long time.

Our body is constantly changing so it’s important to know this and it is important to become aware of this and of course, working with a coach and being aware of your body and how certain training affects it is going to be increasingly more important as you age.

Thank you, Ross, for submitting your question to the podcast today and I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day.

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