How to train as you get older

On the face of it, this topic is pretty simple: You should continue to train as you always have, allowing for the fact that you will inevitably get to a point if you train long enough, where you start to get worse.

However, that statement is a very tough pill to swallow for many (maybe all) of us.

If you’ve trained for a large part of your life, and especially if you’ve trained your whole life, you have likely become pretty damn fit. Instagram may have you believing that nothing you’ve done is that impressive, but if you’ve squatted over your bodyweight, run a sub 27/29 minute 5k, or done a few strict pull ups, then you’re in the top 30% of people in terms of physical fitness, potentially even higher!

The fact is, that we will inevitably get worse as we age. At some point, we will have done our heaviest lift, run our fastest 5k, and we won’t repeat that. When that is, is very hard to pin point. But it will happen to all of us. I’m not going to sugar coat that, and it’s important to face that head on, because denial of this will only make it hit us harder.

So what then? Do we just give it all up and take up golf and knitting? Absolutely not.

The human brain loves black and white, because its simple and easy. But the reality of life is it’s the grey bit in between. So we need to be able to hold 2 concepts in our mind at once: The First is that fact, that yes, we will at some point get worse. The other is much more optimistic, that it’s not a cliff edge that we fall off, and that its a very slow and gradual decline, that is only slowed by us continuing to exercise and push ourselves, that physical activity is something we all all born to do and can continue to be a great part of who you are as you age!

So, how to shift our mind in training? Well the first is we need to be careful of some major traps.

The first trap we all fall in to is that we are pack animals, and pack animals are always comparing themselves to those around them. And in a CrossFit gym, there are people of all sorts of abilities AND ages. However, we have natural negative bias, which means that we tend to actually compare ourselves unfavourably to those few individuals in the gym who are absolutely crushing it at any one time.

What we ignore is that it is completely irrelevant how someone else is performing. Their performance, good or bad, has absolutely no influence on our own. There are a million reasons why they’re doing well right now including age, free time, lack of stress, lack of kids and of course, their age. Whatever it is, it doesn’t actually matter. We need to be able to put the blinkers on and focus on ourselves.

The other trap is continually comparing to our old numbers. As discussed, we will have to let go of these at some point. We should instead focus on how much energy we have in a given session, and what we’ve been hitting in the last few months, to give us a much more realistic