Fitness After 50 & Beyond

Fitness After 50 & Beyond

By Josh Proch, CSCS

It is inevitable that as you age your body will change. Sure, it would be great to go back to how you looked and felt in your 20’s, but that really shouldn’t even be the goal. The goal should be to be the best version of what you can be today.

Getting older does not mean that you cannot ski, hike, workout, and be intimate with your partner on a regular basis well into your golden years. Fitness promotes all of these and more.

However, the way the fitness industry has approached fitness over 50 sucks! A Google search will turn up numerous articles about walking, some even with hand weights. Or worse yet, sitting in a chair lifting tiny vinyl coated dumbbells. We are not living in 1980’s anymore, people have changed and changing how they age by choosing to live more active lifestyles doing what they enjoy and on their terms.

And exercise needs to reflect this, not be some watered down, soft nonsense. In fact, it is stuff like this that is patronizing, rather than helpful. People can still exercise hard, lift heavy weight, and bang out push-ups and pull-ups well into their 80s. If trained to do so, and not led to believe that they can’t because they are “old”.

As the body ages it needs strength training more than ever to maintain muscle tissue and can still be pushed and challenged with exercise. The biggest difference is in the frequency. While a 20-something maybe able workout every day, eat pizza, drink beer, and stay out late and not miss a beat in their workout, as you get older you just can’t recover quiet as fast. But three challenging workouts per week based around strength will do wonders for the body.

Maintaining strength and mobility is the secret to aging well. We have no control over getting older it’s the only option we have. But staying fit and strong with age is a choice. You can choose to look at age as only a number and challenge yourself through exercise to stay strong and mobile, or you can buy into the B.S. that someone this age shouldn’t be doing this.

Age is only a number, the way we train is a mindset.

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