That’s my spine when I was 14. I had a congenital defect that led to spinal instability and an eventual fracture…then body cast, surgery, and body cast again. Starting high school in a full body cast and having to take the elevator with the obese boomers did wonders for my social status as you can imagine (it did seem to work on Marci, though, maybe because she felt sorry for me). But, I was only 15 and thankfully my body recovered quickly. Despite starting freshman year in a cast, by senior year I was playing football (much to my mom’s and my surgeon’s dismay). My strategy then was simple: My spine was weak, vulnerable, so I needed to train harder to make my body stronger. Physical therapy was pretty basic in the early 90’s, so I did what I thought best: joined a gym and did what the big muscular guys were doing. I was an idiot.
More is Just More
Despite the asinine way I went about it, my extensive injury recovery did push me into a career in training and coaching. So I’m still grateful for that. In school we studied proper training and nutrition (albeit in 1996 terms), but all of our research was based on 18-22 year old male students, most of them athletes (women’s data was discarded still common practice in research and an entire article by itself). If we wanted better results, we trained harder, longer. That’s what the athletes were doing. It seemed to work. We rarely got injured, but then again we were 20 years old. The problem? We never shifted this strategy as we got older, and the coaching that worked for me at 20 did me absolutely no good when it was time to coach bodies over the age of 35…including mine.
Longevity is the Long Game
Pushing limits works through our late 20’s because younger bodies can afford to focus on performance (heart rate, V02, speed, distance, reps, sets). What we really should have been keeping track of was the cumulative impact we were placing on our joints and connective tissue…the parts of our body that would be vulnerable to injury later on. We thought we were getting results, but we were just setting our bodies up to break.
The ‘push harder’ strategy breaks down because as we age our limits are no longer performance related. They are durability related. In our 20’s, the time frame for improvement was so short: next week, or even next season. Nobody was thinking about the next 40 years, when injury would become our single biggest risk. To make bodies last for the long haul, we’ve got to build durability and resilience. I can build the perfect program for a client, but if I compromise her body’s durability for the sake of improving her V02 max then I’ve done her no good. She’ll just get hurt, which will sideline her from exercise and from life. Injury keeps us from fully participating in the life we want. Injury puts us on the sideline. Could that be why we lose fitness as we age, regardless of how fit we start out?
Of course I’m saying all this at 48. I didn’t figure it out in my 20’s. Not even my 30’s. I kept pushing. I ended up in the hospital with back-to-back intestinal surgeries. Luckily I was 35 at that point, still young enough to make a full recovery (although it still took over 2 years). Had that injury happened to me in my 50’s or 60’s, who knows how much more difficult and prolonged my recovery would have been.
Want to Win the Longevity Game?…Prevent Injury at All Cost
Being sidelined from activity and work for that long showed me how vulnerable my body was, that I needed to do a much better job taking care of it. So I completely changed my approach to coaching. I started to train myself and my clients for durability and resilience rather than short-term performance. I prioritized recovery, not when we were injured but well ahead of time so that we didn’t get hurt in the first place. Now we focus on the long game: the next 40 years of an active, injury-free life. As a bonus, our bodies feel so much better. The drawback? I’ll admit…our workouts definitely have far less sex appeal.
Smart Training Isn’t Sexy
Training appropriately has zero sex appeal. It’s not instagrammable (don’t worry, it’ll be a word soon enough). Nobody will line up to watch you do bird dogs and slow yoga. The key to remember is that if we want to be active for the next 40 years and prevent injury, we have to train smart…not hard, not long, just smart. What if we don’t need to keep improving performance to have a high functional quality of life and be able to do all the activities that we love? What if we stopped pounding our bodies with spin class and boot camp and just trained smarter? Here’s the secret: if we stay injury-free we get to keep exercising, keep playing, and keep having fun. We have a much longer runway to meet fitness goals if we can just stay in the game. What’s life worth if you don’t get to play?
Stay in the game.