Ageless Strength: Strong and Fit for a Lifetime

By Jeff Horowitz

Ageless Strength shows athletes and active people how to build sustainable fitness for a lifetime of active pursuits. It’s a myth that our older years only bring physical decline. While it’s true that we lose strength, bone density, and balance, our bodies react the same way to training at any age. The answer is not to go easy on our so-called fragile bodiesthat traditional approach of gentle, easy fitness just guarantees loss. The key is to push our bodies in the right ways. A smart mix of strength training can counteract the physical effects of agingand keep you strong and fit for years. With the program in Ageless Strength, you can get into the best shape of your life at any age. In his proven program, coach and trainer Jeff Horowitz reveals exercises that fight back against the years. His dynamic and engaging mix of 50 simple strength exercises will build strength, bone, and balancecombating the top three physical changes that lead to injury and loss of strength. These effective exercises use bodyweight or minimal equipment so that no gym membership is required. Each functional strength move mimics a real-life motion so you’ll know it will help your day-to-day fitness. The 6-week quick-start program will get you up to speed, then you can follow the long-term strength program or select from the color-coded exercises to design your own. In just two 30-minute sessions a week, Ageless Strength offers a simple, effective way to get strong and fit for a lifetime of active pursuits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781937716899

Jeff Horowitz

Jeff Horowitz is a certified running, cycling, and triathlon coach and a personal trainer who has run 200 marathons and ultramarathons across six continents. Formerly an attorney, he quit law to pursue his passion for endurance sport. He currently teaches running at the George Washington University and works with runners from ages 14 through 80. Horowitz is the author of Quick Strength for Runners, Smart Marathon Training: How to Run Your Best Without Running Yourself Ragged, and My First 100 Marathons: 2,620 Miles with an Obsessive Runner.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

AGING BODIES, AGELESS STRENGTH

There’s a common belief that once we cross over the great divide of 40, the years bring only greater physical decline as we journey toward the big dirt sleep. Vitality drains away year by year as we sit idly by, like crabs in a pot of water over a flame. As we become more and more reliant on canes, wheelchairs, and caretakers, we lose strength, independence, and quality of life.

This isn’t a pleasant view of the golden years. I don’t buy it, and neither should you.

Yes, physical changes come along with age. But we don’t have to accept all of these changes as inevitable, and we certainly don’t have to give the Grim Reaper a helping hand before our time. With a little focused effort, we can maintain vitality and strength throughout our advancing years, and in some cases achieve the best fitness of our lives.

To understand how this can be true, we need to understand how the body works and the difference between our potential fitness and our actual fitness.

The body functions on a use it or lose it basis: Without a challenge to fight against, the body wastes away. This process is called atrophy, and it’s a natural law of conservation. What our bodies don’t need, they lose. That includes muscle, bone, endurance, and fitness.

Luckily, it doesn’t take a lot of work to keep our bodies working well. As we go about our daily routines, our bodies are being challenged in many ways, and they respond appropriately. Like a big city that never sleeps, the body is never truly at rest, despite appearances to the contrary. Every minute of every day, for example, our bodies fight off invading microbes. While we sleep, our bodies are in their highest repair mode, releasing human growth hormone to trigger the repair of damaged and injured tissue, and rebuild worn-out muscle and bone. If we had to monitor all of this activity consciously, we’d be overwhelmed, but our bodies handle these monumental tasks in stride.

At least they do when we’re younger. As we get older, things begin to change. Our bodies begin to release less human growth hormone during our sleep,¹ and we need more time to recover from big workouts.

Discouraged? Don’t be, because that’s not the full story. Even with a diminished capacity to repair, the body can always change for the better. At any age, it can respond to physical stimuli—that is, exercise—by resculpting itself to handle a new challenge.

Consider this example: If a teenager and a 50-something both began a running program, each would probably feel a bit sore at first, but the older runner might need an extra day of rest every week. Yet after a month or two, they’d both find their earlier workouts to be much easier and would be ready for more challenging runs. During their weeks of training, both would experience a wide range of changes, whether they were aware of them or not. These would include an increase in blood volume to deliver more nutrients and oxygen to working muscles, an increase in the number of mitochondria in their muscle cells to deliver more energy to power contraction of muscle cells, and an increase in sweat rate so they could cool off more efficiently.

This is the essence of exercise: the gradual, measured overload of the body’s capacity to do work, which triggers an adaptation response. Work a little harder, and your body will change itself to make your job easier.

Here’s the important point: That process is not limited to the young. It can occur any time, for anyone.

Unfortunately, this works in the other direction as well. If we fail to do the minimal amount of work necessary to trigger maintenance of our fitness, we lose the capacity to do that work. That, too, is true at any time, for anyone.

This phenomenon is perhaps most dramatically demonstrated by astronauts living on the International Space Station.² Their bodies lose muscle mass and strength while they are in space since they no longer have to fight against the demands of gravity. These changes could compromise their long-term health and make their adjustment back to living on Earth difficult, so they spend hours of every 24-hour day tethered to fitness machines to keep as fit as they can.

For those of us stuck on Earth, the challenges are less dramatic but no less real. The demands of office jobs and the temptations of our virtual reality–based culture have made us increasingly sedentary, with the result that our bodies no longer feel pushed to maintain high levels of strength and fitness. This trend only accelerates as we enter middle age and beyond.

You might think that when faced with this situation, people would conclude that they need to become more active to restore health and vitality. But that’s often not the case. Many people seem to believe that as they get older, they should be more careful about what they do and take even fewer chances with their bodies. Believing that exertion can bring strain and injury, they avoid challenging activities.

But as we now know, following this path leads to the exact opposite result. Instead of being safer and healthier by avoiding exercise, older people become less fit and more at risk for injury and disease. Their lifestyle then yields a self-fulfilling prophecy: They slow down because they think they should, given their age, and then their bodies lose fitness and slow down too.

Instead, they should ramp up their activity. They might need to be smarter about what they do—that’s what this book is all about—but middle age shouldn’t mark the end of challenging activity. It should instead mark the start of the next chapter. In fact, rather than being a time of declining fitness, our mature years can be a time for improvement.

Take a look at the chart, Potential Vs. Actual Fitness Through the Years. The vertical axis represents fitness, and the horizontal axis represents age. The higher the point on the chart, the greater the fitness, and the farther the point is to the right, the older the person is. A single point on this chart represents a person’s fitness level at a particular point in time, and a connected series of dots—the arcs in this chart—represents a person’s fitness during the course of his or her lifetime. In a chart like this, the person whose fitness is being measured has two arcs: one representing potential fitness and another representing actual fitness.

We’ll define potential fitness as the theoretical upper limit of a person’s strength and fitness. In the chart, the arc represents our collective potential fitness. In reality, potential fitness varies from person to person, mirroring the differences in our physical gifts and life situations. But in general, the shape of this arc reflects potential fitness for nearly everyone.

As you can see in the chart, arc peaks in our mid- to late twenties, and then it begins a steady decline, with a sharp drop-off late in life.⁴ You might look at this curve and conclude that your physical peak was early in life and that you’ll never be as strong and fit as you were back in your youth.

In all likelihood, you would be wrong. That’s because most people don’t come close to their potential fitness. This is particularly true earlier in life, when the temptations of junk food and alcohol, combined with a lack of knowledge about healthy choices, can leave many people well below their ideal fitness levels.

Now look at arc . That curve represents a hypothetical person’s actual fitness throughout his or her life.

The gap between and is shown by the blue shaded area, which represents our fitness gap. It marks the difference between where we actually are in life and where we could be if we worked to improve our health and fitness.

As luck would have it, arc mirrors my own fitness history. I spent my high school and college years well above my ideal weight, with only a passing interest in regular exercise. As you can see, that left me well below my potential.

But then a curious thing happened. I discovered a love for running and exercise. I lost weight and got fit. As time went on, I learned more about what worked for me and what didn’t. Even as I entered middle age, when I was supposedly past my peak potential fitness, my actual fitness was still on the rise.

For some people, late-life changes in their actual fitness can be even more dramatic. Look at arc . Let’s call the person represented by this arc Sarah. For many years, Sarah was stuck in an unhealthy lifestyle. Let’s imagine that Sarah spent those years pursuing her career and raising a family. By necessity, Sarah put her health on the back burner, as many of us do, since there are only so many hours in a day and there is so much to be done.

But when Sarah turned 50, she resolved to get her health on track. She began exercising regularly and eating better. By the time she hit retirement age, she was actually healthier and more fit than she’d ever been, and feeling great.

Now what if Sarah had known about her potential fitness arc? Her feel-good story might have turned out very differently. She might have gotten discouraged and never started her program. Instead, she didn’t think about how her potential fitness was lower at age 50 than at 25. And as a result, she began working out in middle age, and she changed her life.

The key fitness goal for each of us is to do what Sarah did: reduce the difference between our potential fitness arc and our actual fitness arc, at whatever age we find ourselves. However, just as perfection is a laudable but ultimately unattainable goal, so too is the goal of fully living up to our physical potential. This shouldn’t stop us from aiming for it and raising ourselves up as high as we possibly can.

Whatever new level we achieve allows us to enjoy our lives to the greatest degree possible.