Every workout has a potential risk and also a possible reward. 鈥淩isk鈥� refers not only to overtraining but also to injury, illness, mental burnout, and other breakdowns that may occur because a workout or a closely spaced series of workouts is overly challenging. 鈥淩eward鈥� has to do with the fitness and performance benefits that result from training. In your training you should seek to balance these two variables.

You can鈥檛 have a reward without taking some risk. That鈥檚 just the way life is. For example, using these same terms, we could be talking about making investment decisions. You could put your hard-earned money into bonds that have low risk. They also tend to have a small reward, and you cannot expect to become rich overnight by investing this way. Low risk almost always means low reward. On the other hand, you could choose to invest in a start-up company that has great promise in a new field of technology that has vast potential. If the company and the new technology succeed, you could multiply your investment a hundredfold. Then again, if the company fails or the technology doesn鈥檛 pan out, you could lose every cent. High risk means a potentially high reward. It鈥檚 much the same with training.

This graph illustrates the risk鈥搑eward curves of training. Your goal should be to put in a lot of training in the 鈥渙ptimal鈥� zone, only a little training in the 鈥渃aution鈥� zone, and none in the 鈥渁void鈥� zone. The 鈥渓ow return but safe鈥� zone is primarily for recovery sessions, aerobic-threshold development, and maintenance. Unfortunately, this latter part is where most of us who are north of age 50 increasingly spend our training time. To avoid training without improvement, we need to put in time in the 鈥渙ptimal鈥� and 鈥渃aution鈥� zones, which is where high-intensity training fits in.

How do you determine which zone you are in during a workout? Much depends on variables that include your current level of fitness, your sport experience, how well rested you are, your recent diet, and the psychological stress in your life. The proper workload for any workout is based largely on what you know about yourself. As an experienced athlete, you can pair your lifelong response to training with your knowledge of intensity levels, using whichever method you have employed to monitor intensity throughout your athletic career. But if in doubt about how long or hard a high-intensity session should be, err on the low side. As you learn more about such training and how your body responds to it, your workouts will become more refined and will more closely match your needs.

Risk

The riskiest training most commonly involves the possibility of overuse injuries. Running is perhaps the riskiest endurance sport due primarily to the orthopedic stress, or pounding, associated with it. In fact, runners without a history of injuries are rare. Soft but firm running surfaces, such as trails, grass, and dirt, moderate some of the risk of running. But running is inherently risky due to its eccentric muscle contractions, wherein a muscle lengthens as it is trying to shorten. This sounds impossible, but visualize a reverse arm curl in which you slowly lower a heavy weight. As the weight is lowered, the biceps gets longer at the same time that it is trying to shorten to prevent gravity from making the load fall too fast. The strain on the muscle is tremendous. The runner鈥檚 calf and quads experience this phenomenon with every step. That鈥檚 why a runner鈥檚 legs are so sore after a marathon. Essentially, the muscles are being pulled apart.

Cycling, Nordic skiing, rowing, and swimming, on the other hand, rely primarily on concentric contractions, meaning the muscle only gets shorter as it contracts. Visualize your arm curling a heavy weight from hip height to shoulder height. The strain on the muscle is reduced. It鈥檚 not being pulled apart, so the risk of injury is lower.

Runners must be extremely cautious with risk in their attempt to reap a reward. Workloads that have a low to moderate risk in other sports may be in the 鈥渁void鈥� zone in running. If you are a runner, you should be especially concerned with training moderation. Should you also have a history of overuse injuries, you must do everything you can to mitigate risk by training with caution and moderation while getting adequate recovery.

Swimming is one of the lowest-risk sports. While overuse injuries certainly occur among swimmers (mostly in the shoulder), the rate of such setbacks is low compared with that of runners. Poor technique and the use of paddles and drag or resistance devices increase the risk for swimmers, as does rapidly increasing the volume and intensity of training.

Cycling is a similar story, although here the knee is the body part most commonly injured from too much training stress. Risk is increased in cycling first and foremost through poor bike setup. The most common bike setups that are high-risk for the knee have the saddle too low and too far forward. These errors are common for novices, but older athletes can fall into the same mistakes when they make adjustments to compensate for limited mobility in the shoulders and neck. Also raising the risk for cyclists is high-gear pedaling, especially on hills in the seated position. Inadequate gearing, meaning not enough low gears, is often associated with knee soreness and loss of training time due to injury.

Another potentially rewarding activity that carries a high degree of risk for athletes in many sports is plyometrics, especially the kind that includes a lot of landings at the end of downward jumps鈥攋umping over objects or off high platforms, for example. Jumping up from the floor to land on a knee-high box has a much lower risk but also a lower reward. Be cautious with plyometrics, and progress at a quite moderate rate.

Lifting weights is also risky, especially when the loads are high and the reps low. As with intervals, the key to managing the risk is progression鈥攈ow quickly you increase the loads. The key, as always, is to take a moderate approach when doing reps and adding weight. Stay below the risk curve by doing fewer reps than you think are possible鈥攄on鈥檛 go to 鈥渇ailure鈥� on a set鈥攁nd be patient about advancing to the next level of training. Be especially cautious with exercises that place great loads on the knees, shoulders, and low back. Injury to these areas is quite common in weight lifters who don鈥檛 moderate the risk.

Athletes who continually experience breakdowns because they overinvest in high-risk training will never achieve their potential. Likewise, those who do only low-risk workouts will never come close to their potential. Some risk in training is required to reap a reward. You need to control that risk with moderation to be successful. You are the only one who knows what the risk is and what 鈥渕oderation鈥� means for you. If you are unsure or don鈥檛 trust yourself to make wise decisions in managing risk, you should hire a coach or trainer. Find someone who is experienced in working with senior athletes in your specific sport.

Reward

That鈥檚 the risk side of training. How about the rewards? Exactly what positive outcomes can you expect as a result of high-intensity training? There are solid benefits of increased aerobic capacity from doing intervals and greater aerobically active muscle mass as a result of weight lifting. All of those deliver greater performance for athletes. But there鈥檚 more to expect from high-intensity training that is especially enticing to senior athletes. This enticement has to do with hormones, those chemicals the body produces in the glands that regulate our health and physiology.

As with most aging conditions, we have some degree of control over our hormones. You can somewhat speed up or slow down your body鈥檚 anabolic hormone production based on your lifestyle and training. The hormones involved include testosterone, human growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor. When these are released into the body by the glands, they stimulate tissue growth and repair. In fact, without them there would be no improvement in fitness and performance.

Another anabolic hormone underproduced with advancing age is erythropoietin (EPO). That鈥檚 also the name of a synthetic drug cycling has been dealing with since the early 1990s that was involved with the fall from grace of Lance Armstrong and numerous other athletes. While synthetic EPO is to be avoided, erythropoietin is produced normally by the body and controls red-blood-cell production. Interestingly, it鈥檚 also associated with memory. And, perhaps more importantly, it is related to your aerobic capacity. Less naturally occurring EPO means fewer red blood cells, resulting in less oxygen being transported to the muscles and therefore a reduced aerobic capacity.

Unfortunately, all anabolic hormone production, including EPO, . This accounts for much of the physiological change that鈥檚 taking place in our sports performance north of 50. But here鈥檚 the good news: High-intensity training more than does low-intensity, steady-state training. Heavy-load strength training . Following such workouts, hormonal secretion also remains high during the extended recovery period. The results of studies using both older and younger subjects and females as well as males found across the board.

Hormone secretion is , the key being the consistency of sleep over time rather than the duration of your snoozing. Just as with the average intensity of your workouts, getting to bed at a regular time appears to be important for natural hormone production. Irregular sleep patterns and a steady diet of only long, slow distance year after year while avoiding the weight room is likely to result in a significant and steady decline in hormonal activity and therefore fitness-related performance. If you鈥檙e like most older athletes, sleep isn鈥檛 the problem; training intensity is.

The latter point is why I encourage you to do some of your training near your aerobic capacity with intervals while also lifting heavy weights. Both of these must be done regularly and consistently if you are to reap the hormonal rewards. There is no doubt that such training can be risky, so you must be conservative when starting this sort of training and cautious with increasing the workloads. I can鈥檛 emphasize enough how critical this is. Always think in terms of moderation as you train in order to minimize risk. Be patient. No injuries. No overtraining.

Adapted from听听by Joe Friel with permission of VeloPress.

https://www.velopress.com/books/fast-after-50/

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Fitness results from training, and training is quite simple. There are only two components.

Training = Stress + Recovery

Getting the mix of these two right is not so simple, however.

It鈥檚 not easy to determine how great your training stress should be in order to produce fitness, especially while making changes such as including more high intensity in your workouts. There are two common mistakes made by serious athletes, regardless of age, when they enthusiastically make the shift toward more intensity-based stress. They make the workouts too hard, and they space them too closely together. This combination is certain to produce a breakdown such as an injury, illness, or even overtraining.

The solution to this training dilemma brings us to the twin topics of 鈥渄ose鈥� and 鈥渄ensity.鈥� Dose has to do with how great the training load is on any given day. High intensity is high dose. High duration is likewise high dose. On the other side of the coin, low intensity and duration are low dose.

Density is how many high-dose workouts you do in a given period of time, such as a week. The older you are, the less dense your training should probably be. A 30-year-old athlete can typically manage more density than a 60-year-old can. As age increases, the density of training typically needs to decrease. The same is true for dose.

Dose is the controlling variable, and density is adjusted in response to it. As dose rises, meaning the individual workouts become harder, density must decrease to allow for recovery and to avoid breakdown. Conversely, as dose decreases, density can increase.

While both dose and density are concerns of the senior athlete, I鈥檝e found that density becomes the one that gives us the most trouble as we get older. That is due to our slower rate of recovery following high-dose workouts. We can generally do a high-dose session, perhaps even as hard as when we were much younger, but we can鈥檛 do several of them in a few days鈥� time. We need more recovery than younger athletes do after similar workouts.

Like the pause between the notes in a song, inserting recovery days between high-dose workouts gives training a rhythm. Inserting breaks ensures that the density is manageable. As with all things related to recovery鈥攁nd just about everything else when talking about aging鈥攚e each have unique requirements, so I can鈥檛 tell you exactly what your dose and density should be. You鈥檒l have to figure that out for yourself based on experience and perhaps even trial and error. But I can help you get started down the right path.

Let鈥檚 begin by reviewing the workout dosage for high-intensity workouts.听The following table provides examples of high-, moderate-, and low-dose versions of aerobic-capacity, lactate-threshold, aerobic-threshold, and strength workouts.

Optimal-Density Training

There are two concerns in planning for density. If the density of your workouts is too great, meaning the hard sessions are spaced too closely together, then you are likely to break down in some way; you may suffer an injury, illness, burnout, or overtraining. If the density is too low, with unnecessary recovery days, your fitness and race performance will suffer because you鈥檒l be undertrained. Given the choice, I鈥檇 prefer to see you slightly undertrained than chronically overtrained.

Getting density right is specific to your unique situation. The factors involved include not only the dose of your workouts but also your general lifestyle. If you have a job that is physically or emotionally demanding, density may need adjusting so that the highest-dose workouts have adequate separation between them with plenty of time for recovery. If you go through times when emotional stress is high for any reason, such as a divorce, financial issues, changing jobs, moving, or anything else that upsets you, then the density of training must also be adjusted so that you get more recovery.

Even if you don鈥檛 have anything in your life that requires making such adjustments, getting the density of training right is always difficult and somewhat of a moving target. Things change in your life from time to time. Trial and error is about the only way to find out what your baseline density should be. Some weeks it will be spot-on, and at other times it will be all wrong. So once you decide on a density plan that fits your current needs, you may still have to tweak it occasionally as the stress in your life ebbs and flows.

Adapted from听Fast After 50听by Joe Friel with permission of VeloPress.

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There鈥檚 no question that aging is a blend of genetics and lifestyle鈥攏ature and nurture. No one knows the exact proportions of these two factors鈥�60-40, 70-30, or something else. Nor do we yet know for certain which has the most to do with how we age. Research on aging demonstrates that lifestyle has a big impact on biology and largely determines your physiological age. That鈥檚 important information because lifestyle鈥攕pecifically our approach to training鈥攊s something we can control.

So what can you do in training to slow aging while maintaining or even improving fitness and performance? The answer is not all that difficult: What drives the physiology of training for high performance when you are old is no different from what it was when you were 30 years younger. The principles of training don鈥檛 change: namely, the duration, frequency, and intensity of the effort.

Changes in Performance over the Decades

Many athletes tend to decrease their volume (miles run or biked per week) and training intensity as they get older. But it鈥檚 not simply working out that maintains fitness and therefore, in part, race performances; instead, it is how much training you do and how intensely you do it. This is a critical lesson for getting faster regardless of your age.

Here鈥檚 another. In 1987, Dr. Michael Pollock and his colleagues at the Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, reported an astonishing finding that lent further credibility to the idea that very strenuous exercise was an aerobic capacity preserver. Well-trained, competitive endurance runners with an average initial age of 52 were able to totally maintain VO₂max values over a 10-year period.

In the full group of 24 athletes, VO₂max went into a tailspin, with an average 9 percent decline during the 10 years of the study. However, Pollock discovered that 11 of the 24 had continued to train vigorously and were still competitive a decade after the initial testing. When he categorized the results, he found that the more active athletes had absolutely maintained their average VO₂max at a steady 53 ml/kg/min (10 years earlier it had been 54) despite being now in their early 60s. The less active subjects had seen their VO₂max values plummet by 12 percent. In Pollock鈥檚 paper, 鈥渕ore active鈥� meant that athletes continued to do high-intensity workouts while maintaining their volume.

Long, Slow Distance Isn鈥檛 Enough

Just like Pollock鈥檚 study, other research on aging in experienced endurance athletes generally supports the notion that in order to reduce the decline in aerobic capacity with advancing age, training must be intense. That typically means training anaerobically鈥攁t or above the . For experienced endurance athletes, an exercise regimen based solely on long, slow distance (LSD) will do little to improve or even maintain your aerobic fitness status over the years.

There鈥檚 little doubt that intense training is risky. As workouts become more challenging, the chances of injury, illness, and overtraining increase. Intense training needs to be modulated in regard to your current level of fitness and personal age-related limits. Those limits may have become magnified by the absence of high-intensity training in recent years. If that鈥檚 the case, you need to be extra-conservative with training changes as you ease into what I鈥檓 going to propose. If is something you haven鈥檛 done for a long time or have never done, you must consider several things: the type of hard workouts, the frequency of hard workouts, your short-term recovery from hard workouts, and your nutrition relative to hard workouts.

Incorporate Intervals into Your Training

Note that when you perform intervals, the absolute intensity, the duration of the repetitions, the number of repetitions, and the duration of recovery between intervals must be only slightly more challenging than your estimated current capacity for physical stress.

What that means is that you must know or be able to sense your physical limits and not exceed them. It鈥檚 best to take a conservative approach to intervals if it鈥檚 been a while since you last did such a workout. Don鈥檛 try to get in shape in just a handful of these sessions. Too much, too soon will nearly always result in a breakdown of some sort, such as injury. Take a long-term approach鈥攁s in several weeks鈥攖o safely produce the results you want.

Because an interval session can be quite stressful, it should be preceded by a gradually progressive warm-up. This approach has also been shown to improve workout performance. Stop the workout when a reasonable workout goal is attained, when it is apparent that high-end performance is declining, or when the effort feels unusually high for the output (pace, speed, power). My advice to the athletes I鈥檝e coached for the past 30-some years has always been the same: Stop when you know you can do only one more interval. The last interval is the one to be most wary of, so simply don鈥檛 do it.

I am not going to prescribe specific methodology for measuring intensity. I am going to assume that your years in your sport have given you a strong foundation in monitoring the intensity of your workouts. You can use a rating of perceived exertion (RPE), , lactate threshold heart rate, or functional threshold power if you are using a power meter and are familiar with that measurement. Go with whatever you are comfortable using and whatever is most repeatable for you.

I recommend that you keep track of your heart rate even if you do not use it to measure intensity. Heart rate is a useful component in determining the state of your fitness and the rate at which you are improving it, as you will see below.

If you have been diagnosed with coronary heart disease, have concerns about your heart health, or are taking statins or other medications that alter heart rate, then you should consult your doctor before starting an interval training program. Fortunately, the risk of heart attack among otherwise apparently healthy athletes as they age is quite low.

If you鈥檝e previously done intervals throughout your sport career but have had a gap in recent years, then you know how to get started again. Just be conservative with the progression of this workout. If LSD training has been your only training method, you may need some guidelines for getting started with interval training. Here is what I suggest for the first few sessions for someone who has not done interval training recently.

Step 1

Warm up for 10鈥�30 minutes gradually, ratcheting intensity up to a moderate effort. It鈥檚 common for older athletes to need more warm-up time than young athletes. Warm-up may also vary by sport. For example, it is typically longer for cycling than for running. Swimming generally falls between these two.

Step 2

Do 3 脳 3-minute intervals with each interval at or slightly below lactate (anaerobic) threshold and 1 minute of light recovery between them. As I mentioned before, the gauge of intensity for an interval workout such as this may be based on heart rate, pace, speed, power, or perceived exertion. Some of these measurements are better than others, depending on the sport. Heart rate鈥揵ased intensity is perhaps the worst way to gauge how hard to work with intervals, especially short ones of a few minutes or less, as heart rate rises slowly during each interval.

It may take several minutes to achieve lactate threshold, during which time you are left guessing how hard to work. Most athletes err on the side of starting intervals too fast to force heart rate up quickly, and then they slow down later as the goal heart rate is finally achieved. This is just the opposite of what should be done; instead, you want to finish each interval with a slightly higher intensity than when you started.

Step 3

Cool down with several minutes of easy exercise. As with the warm-up, the duration of the cooldown depends on the sport, with cycling typically long and running relatively short.

At first you should most likely do only one such interval workout in a seven-day period. Over time, however, you can increase the number of weekly sessions to two if you have the stamina and time. It鈥檚 not common for senior athletes to be capable of doing more than two of these in a week. I鈥檝e coached some who could, but they are rare and more likely in their 50s than their 70s.

Adapted from by Joe Friel, with permission of VeloPress.

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