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Keep Challenging Yourself
As I write this, I have just celebrated my birthday. I am 49 years old. The statistics where I am in Scotland are that about 67% of adults aged 45-54 are still physically active[1] . That's not too bad although it does mean a third of adults around my age don't partake in regular exercise.
Not all of those people are lifting weights, and other sources paint a different picture. According to a report completed by Pure gym[2] the stats are bleaker with less than half (48%) of adults in the UK actually engaging in regular exercise. The guidelines in the UK are for adults to engage in strengthening activities at least twice a week and at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity per week (or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity). It's very easy as we get older to think or say "I'm too old for this". No one is immune to the little niggles, for myself my left knee clicks when I go down a flight of stairs, some mornings my back will feel a bit stiff and occasionally I’ll just get a random pain somewhere. This I guess is life. Talking to other people in their 40’s that’s pretty normal stuff as we get older, we do tend to accrue the odd injury as we go through life.
For me though the key is to not just roll over and to accept it. That’s just not how I roll. We must, as my friend Carl Linich says, “keep breathing defiance”. Keep challenging yourself while you can. Try and lift a little heavier, try and do one more rep. Eventually we will reach a point when we can’t hit new lifetime personal bests, but until then we say “not today” and keep driving forward.
One thing I use from powerlifting is the idea of a age category PB. Powerlifting is divided into age categories over 40, some associations use 10 year gaps, the one I lift with uses 5’s ie Masters 1 = 40-44, Masters 2 = 45-49 and so on. I can continue to count a personal best, for my age category, as I advance in years. You don’t have to compete to use this, this can be a takeaway for anyone. It doesn’t have to be for just for the three powerlifts, it could be any lift, or calisthenics, any metric you can conceivably challenge yourself against.
Age will slowly rob you of your muscle mass and bone density, unless you do something about it. If you don’t that’s when you start to become frail. Frailty is not just a risk to your life, it reduces the quality of you life. No one wants to be the youngest person in the old peoples home.
So, you see, you don’t stop because you got older, you got older because you stopped. Keep challenging yourself
left: Birthday training session aged 49.
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