Mature Athletes – Your Fitness and Sports Skills Programs are at War and Here’s the Peace Plan
- Brainz Magazine
- Dec 22
- 7 min read
Dan's exercise Physiology/Sports Nutrition education, NSCA Strength and Conditioning background, and work with a wide variety of active older adults since 1998 make him the ideal guide to help navigate the muddy waters of optimal eating and training strategies for the over-50 athlete and fitness seeker.
Most training plans for over 50 athletes fail for one simple reason: they pit fitness and sports skills against each other instead of aligning them. This is the most common and most damaging, albeit avoidable, factor in the programs of many older fitness practitioners. But how do you avoid it? After all, you only have so much time during the week and want to maximize both your conditioning and your sports performance capacity. Wrong. You want to optimize both, and this is critically important in relation to each other. Keep reading to learn how.
Problem: Both your fitness foundation maintenance and sports skills training draw water from the same well
Sports skills training and foundational fitness capacities (strength, endurance, mobility, balance, coordination, directional precision, explosive power, deceleration capacity, core stability, sprint, and acute recovery capabilities) require similar resources. And our well gets drier with each passing year (sorry, the truth hurts, I know). So, clearly, more trips to the well are not the answer. Neither is filling up multiple buckets each time you go. The solution is to both ration your “water” for the most important and urgent needs, while simultaneously developing a sustainable system to keep the main water supply to the well renewing and as productive as possible for as long as possible.
Redundant training effects
All fitness capacities have points of diminishing returns for optimal cultivation. Each of the above-mentioned abilities has its own, and they have collective points of diminishing returns. The unfortunate thing with older athletes is that, although we rarely require incentive or motivation to hit the gym or the playing field, we’re commonly ill-equipped to make objective evaluations about where that point is. Often, we overestimate what we should be doing, and we succumb to blind spots of familiar training patterns that worsen the problem. Incomplete muscle stress recovery, excess aerobic loading (both acute and chronic), and inadequate post-workout (WO) recovery are epidemic in our community.
Competing training effects
What’s commonly known in hybrid athlete circles (and is a more consequential problem for older athletes) as the “interference effect” refers to any combination of elements for which maximizing one ability/skill makes the other one suffer. This is almost certain to happen when the collective points of diminishing returns collide. Running and lifting weights for the lower body are classic examples. Surfing the morning after a three-hour hike the previous afternoon would be another such convergence. Isolating the individual training templates and calculating the optimal combination and timing requires expertise, an elegant touch, and an open mind regarding conservatism when experimenting with different protocols.
Age related diminishing tolerance of redundant and competing effects
Hormonal changes, durability and elasticity of muscle/tendon tissue, the robustness of other connective tissue (primarily ligaments and cartilage), and the need for improved nutrition and recovery habits all factor into the requirement for the 50+ athlete to shift her/his focus from competition to long-term resilience. A severe acute or nagging chronic injury will not be the first warning that the shift is due, but either will ratchet up the importance dramatically if you’re paying attention and are open to the change.
The mobility and strength paradox
As most aging athletes discover over the years, we slowly move across the continuum of limber-to-stiff until we’re far less vintage Jim Carrey and more the Tin Man squeaking for the oil can. At least as disconcerting is that we either lose a significant amount of strength and muscle volume or fight like crazy to retain as much as possible. For the latter group (likely your situation if you’re reading this), joints and connective tissue become more rigid and movement becomes more restrictive, sometimes as much a result of years of resistance training as the normal aging process. Optimizing both to avoid the conflicting effects takes careful programming and relentless adherence to it. Most mature athletes struggle with doing this.
Optimal pre training requirements for both conditioning and sports skills work
Endurance and sprint training are performed better when the muscles are not in an immediate post-resistance training recovery period. It’s the same with most sports skills work, but cardiovascular exhaustion and central nervous system (CNS) fatigue also compromise optimal sports skills practice. CNS fatigue is more influential in degrading the quality of sports skills training in older athletes, as we present more consequential hormonal and physiological challenges as well. Separating the training modules to allow for peak performance of sports skills is critical to successful programming.
Solving the problem: Practical tactics
There are many ways to structure a training program. It can be event-specific periodization or, more commonly in our age group, weekly cycles that allow for constructive work/recovery phases. The important point is that measures should be taken to ensure the program structure effectively addresses these important factors:
1. Avoid excessive central nervous system fatigue
Accumulated, full-body systemic fatigue is an easily overlooked obstacle that can drag down older athletes. Early signs are often ignored, and the progression of chronic CNS fatigue is usually slow and cumulative.
2. Train with a power, sprint, and strength sequence
Explosive power, especially the kind that also requires precision, control, and consistent repetitive quality, requires the least impeded runway. Peak performance for this type of movement is most achievable with the least amount of starting fatigue. After that, sprint capacity requires cardiovascular recovery to be as robust as possible. Finally, strength can be effectively built and retained with less detrimental encroachment than the other modes preceding resistance work. So, the sequencing should be planned accordingly.
3. Protect joints and connective tissue
Joint and soft-tissue stress is minimized if the program sequence is optimal for both energy and recovery management. But it is also important to limit acute training/event stress and to structure the frequency/duration/intensity triad conservatively. The key to successfully managing this rate-limiting component is to err on the side of restraint regarding accumulated training time over the week.
4. Prioritize acute training module recovery
As implied above, the successful longer-term (chronic) program will be determined primarily by the strategically implemented individual post-WO recovery intervals. The body will respond to a given event or training session in accordance with the adequacy of the rest period allowed, given the overall work of the previously accumulated training. Ideally, the athlete feels fresh and rejuvenated for each training bout or event. If that bar is repetitively unmet, trouble is brewing.
5. Manipulate the frequency and duration relationship
The reality is that athletes rarely vary the applied intensity of their given WOs dramatically. If, in fact, these variations are built into the structure of the program, this is ideal. However, more often, given a base level of consistently moderate to high intensity, the overtraining trap is the result of a rigid weekly program that is either too frequent, features WOs that are too long, or both. Often, the driven older athlete is reluctant to add two or more non-consecutive rest days to their program, fearing it will compromise performance. Instead, these elements are often the linchpin for performance breakthroughs as well as a valuable preemptive measure that reduces injury risk.
Sample weekly training template
This is my current weekly program. For reference, my sport was boxing, so the physical and neuromuscular demands that potentially create maximal interference in the training process are about as severe as they can get. I’m 63 and maintain an outstanding age-specific Vo2max, better than 1:1 strength-to-bodyweight single-rep max capacity for the big four lifts, and have very open, balanced mobility, head-to-toe. Mobility warm-up and push/pull muscle-endurance lead all formats (except cardio/core/yoga), all formats (except Sunday) end with large muscle group eccentric dynamic flexibility.
Mon: Heavy big four lifts and isolating exercises using cables and dumbbells for accessory muscles. This provides an ongoing benchmark for overall strength to bodyweight ratio.
Tue: Rest, modified fast day, details in subscription program.
Wed: Peanut bag and heavy bag training, core work, and high intensity interval training or muscle endurance if fully recovered from Monday’s workout.
Thu: Rest or light recreational movement such as a long walk or bike ride if fully recovered.
Fri: Shadow boxing, mitt work, light sparring, and a 60 repetition full body dumbbell stack. This elevates heart rate dramatically and becomes a de facto integrated strength, sprint, and skills workout. The hardest session of the week.
Sat: Rest.
Sun: Cardio, core, and yoga format with four minutes work, one minute rest, and three to four cycles of each as fatigue dictates.
Why this model works
Preserves neuromuscular capacity: Each day involves different loading patterns, force-application planes, movement techniques, pacing variants, and specific directional placement and stabilization requirements.
Sequences work to minimize redundant and conflicting training effects: Because of the variety mentioned above, the order (light warm-up before heavy lifting, power/sports skills before more fatiguing conditioning) and proper spacing for similar stresses, diminishing returns, overtraining, and injury risk are all minimized.
Allows adequate recovery time for joints and connective tissue repair: The multi-plane loading, varying pure strength vs. power, separating impact, and allowing chronic recovery between WOs combine to allow more comprehensive repair for both muscles and connective tissues (ligaments, tendons, and cartilage).
Provides fine-tuning options to adapt to current conditioning and skills response: The format has built-in flexibility, and all three variables (WO duration, frequency, and intensity) are adjusted ad hoc as indicated by the body’s freshness for each new WO. Additionally, I recommend and practice periodic de-load weeks (monthly, quarterly, or as needed based on how the athlete feels).
Employ expert guidance to personalize fueling and training
Optimizing your training and sports skills programs is an individual art based on broadly applied scientific principles. Most older athletes would benefit from the expertise and objectivity of a guide well-versed in the needs, preferences, and profile-specific priorities for both eating and training. So if fueling for performance consistently with precision, maintaining your athleticism, and avoiding injury are priorities, choose the right mentor. The 50+ Hybrid Athlete subscription program is built around the fundamentals covered in this and my other articles in this six-part series. You can unsubscribe at any time, but you won’t want to miss the ongoing helpful guidance and the time-released, astoundingly valuable bonus products that you get as a subscriber.
Read more from Dan Taylor, MS, CSCS
Dan Taylor, MS, CSCS, 50+ Fitness and Nutrition Expert
Dan left a career in high-tech corporate finance in 1998 to pursue his mission of leading others in elevating and simplifying the art of physical aging through the best fitness and eating practices for the mature athlete (and the aspiring athlete). His online subscription program provides a clear and simple pathway to achieve peak performance while lowering disease and injury risk, adopting powerful and principled eating practices that effectively support the training framework, and developing an individualized, manageable, and adaptable template for both.
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