As you might imagine, most of the athletes I train are not twenty something Games athletes, who set world records on a daily basis. The vast majority of athletes I coach are mature adults in their thirties, forties, and fifties. Often times they have a hard time understanding just how much progress they can expect to make as a masters functional fitness athlete. This article is going to look at research for elite masters athletes to show just how awesome you can be at any age.
In my years of coaching, I’ve found that working with masters athletes can be very hard, but incredibly rewarding. Often times they have years of poor training habits, and gasp, can be stubborn about change. They are also most likely to hold preconceived notions about the amount of improvement they can make. This can really limit them.
Part of my intention with this article is to present some excellent research that examines the science on aging, strength, and endurance capacity. I’m also here to present a realistic look at what happens during the aging process.
I’m going to keep it real. A sixty year old masters athlete is never going to be the same level of athlete as they were in their twenties or thirties, but that’s not the point. The point is their performance, at that age, is incredible and I can say, from personal experience, that I’ve witnessed athletes in their fifties regularly crush good athletes in their twenties. As it turns out, training and hard work matters!
Without further ado, let’s dig into the research!
Age Related Declines in Elite Male Athletes
The first research article we are going to discuss is very comprehensive, and looks at both absolute strength, and endurance performance of elite male athletes. Don’t worry ladies, we will be discussing some research relevant to you a little later.
As we age the general tendency for muscle fibers is to atrophy. This is what is primarily responsible for the loss of muscle power in older athletes. This is also why sports, that rely heavily on strength and power like sprinting, throwing, and olympic weightlifting, are drastically impacted. This chart highlights a normal progression for muscle fiber atrophy in adults.
Interestingly enough, there is evidence that while muscle power may decrease, overall absolute strength can remain stable up until age 50. Said in another way, your snatch might decrease because your muscular power has gone down, but your deadlift might be just as strong as when you were in your thirties. The next two charts highlight the different decay rates in muscle power, and strength.
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While weightlifting does require strength, it is even more important to express that strength quickly, which is muscular power. In fact, weightlifters have the highest recorded muscular power outputs of any type of athlete.
The next chart displays absolute strength decay. Remember that absolute strength is defined as the total amount of force you can exert. It doesn’t require you to exert the force quickly. Think a one rep max deadlift that takes several seconds to finish.
You can see in the strength chart that the rate of decline is much less for the control group (non athletes) and the Weightlifters. The rate of decline for power output is actually higher for weightlifters, as that specific skill requires the types of muscle fibers that degrade the most as we all age. The takeaway here is that you can maintain a lot of strength even into your eighties and nineties. Now, let’s switch gears and talk about endurance training.
Age Related Declines In Male Elite Endurance Athletes
Male marathon athletes also under go a decline in performance, as measured by VO2 max, which is a measure of maximal oxygen usage. The chart below compares marathon performance, and masters weightlifting performance.
You can see that marathon performance and masters weightlifting performance decay at roughly the same rate. The take away here, for male athletes, is that both endurance and strength athletes peak in their twenties and early thirties. They both decline between 30-60% into the 80’s. Keep in mind that strength levels might decline less than 20% over fifty years. Getting older is no excuse not to be strong!
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Elite Female Masters Athletes
As we’ve already said, sports requiring high power output decline faster in men. This is also true in women. This chart depicts female master weightlifters performances compared to men. The solid line is the predictive rate of power output decay. The smaller dashed line are male athletes, and the longer dashes are female athletes.
As we mentioned, the solid line is the predicted decay in performance. Men follow the line almost exactly as the equation was written based off of their performance. The researchers noted that women’s decrease in performance, around age fifty, faster than men due to the onset of menopause.
I’ve not read any research to confirm this, but I would be curious if masters women who under go hormone replacement therapy experience this drop off. I would imagine it might more closely match the men’s decrease. There is another interesting phenomenon that we should discuss.
Researchers noted that female masters performance has actually improved in recent years, compared to the same age groups in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Check this chart out.
This is more in line with male performance at this age. Obviously, the absolute load lifted is less, but in proportion, it is roughly equal. Researchers don’t understand why, but it could be hormone replacement.
It is also likely that there are more master female weightlifters and we weren’t seeing their true capability in previous decades. It takes a large population to see extreme outliers after all.
Discussion
There are several important aspects of aging and performance that we need to discuss. First, masters athletes should expect that strength and endurance will decay from age 35 on. It’s also important to point out that newer athletes, at any age, will still make killer progress. Let’s throw some concrete numbers out there.
If you are a life long athlete, and you deadlifted 405 pounds at your peak in your early thirties, you should expect that in your eighties you could still deadlift more than 315 pounds. I don’t know about you, but I’d be ecstatic with that deadlift in my eighties.
I should also mention that medical science has progressed much faster than in previous decades, and I wouldn’t be surprised if gene therapy doesn’t become widely available for those looking for increased strength or endurance. Scientists have already modified the genomes of mice with some incredible results. I wouldn’t be surprised if these types of treatments don’t become mainstream, much as testosterone replacement therapy has become.
In the end we are all humans, with limitations, and through hard training and a little know how, we can all make progress at any age. After reading several research papers, it was plainly obvious that while athlete’s abilities did decline with age, they were much better off than their non training cohort. It’s clear to me that if you want to be strong and healthy at any age you need to keep training!
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