I've coached surf and kite sports since 2004, worked all across both industries and since 2014 have my own 'bricks and mortar' surf school, Surf Sanctuary, at The Headland Hotel, in Newquay. Aside from the natural beauty of the ocean, what I love most is working with people. As I've studied over the last 10 years, I've explored a thread that has diverged from coaching surfing: integrated personal wellness. I started Natural Scientific to provide personal training and fitness programming to people in at least one of three categories:
1. Over 35 years of age
2. Want to re-evaluate their relationship with alcohol
3. Haven’t got time to bugger about
I chose these categories because in my opinion, they capture a fairly good spread of people around Newquay in the mid-life bracket, me included. I’m 46, I don’t drink alcohol, and have a very busy home life (three kids, two dogs etc...) and another business outside of Natural Scientific. I know that for people like us, programmes and lifestyles developed by young fitness influencers who don’t have the responsibility of running households, raising kids and working full time, just don’t work. Time is short. Any available window has to deliver some swift returns!
Most people in mid-life will occupy a Venn diagram of these categories with varying distribution of their focal points. Let us briefly expand on the relevance of each one:
1. Over 35 years of age.
One might presume that in mid-life we’re all a bit worn-out and should take longer to recover from exercise. However, the science is undecided on this and there doesn’t seem to be a precipitous decline in recovery rates and improvements in response to exercise between early 20’s and mid-life adults. Skip to the deep dive at the end for a summary of relevant studies.
US sprinter Justin Gatlin was 36 years old when he became the fastest human on Earth and regained his 100m World Champion title in 2017. Two years later, he ran a 9.89 second 100m. I’m not saying that we should launch a World Championship athletic career at 35. I’m just saying that being over 35 doesn’t mean you cannot reach your physical peak. The differences, or if you like improvements, to our exercise programmes compared to when we were young, will have a psychological rather than physiological age-related foundation.
It’s likely that you have people dependent on a functional you: kids, partners, older parents, colleagues, staff, clients and so on. The consequences of a torn bicep or trashed rotator cuff are more serious now than they were twenty years ago, when you lived with mum and didn’t care about your job. Additionally, we become aware that the skydive doesn’t last forever and the ground is getting closer. So we should build in the kind of movements that we never had time for when we were young: those that pre-hab the joints and protect the body into later life.
In mid-life we have likely accrued more injuries that need to be worked around and reduced range-of-motion (ROM) from years of sitting around that needs to be recovered. This means the trusty ‘arms and chest, forget the rest’ is out, full-body compounds, asymmetrical lifts, knee and hip ROM and postural corrections are in.
Most importantly, your motivations for committing to a mid-life exercise programme will be different to your youthful aspirations. Our life experience tells us that our health, and that of our loved ones, is the most important thing we have. By making ourselves strong and energetic, we can give that power back to our families. We can play sports with our kids, go on adventures with our partners, bump start cars and lift paving slabs. We can make our kids proud to be with us, rather than just tolerating us being around.
In summary, your exercise programme will be built around movements that you like to reach goals that you set for values that you have defined. It will deliver results in two or three one-hour sessions per week. It’ll be a mix of mobility and pre-hab, compound lifting, and metabolic conditioning. Ideally with plenty of chance to learn new movement patterns because that’s what the brain loves and neuroplasticity is the real trick to long life.
2. Re-evaluating your relationship with alcohol
If you lived in Newquay through the 90’s, 00’s, and 10’s you will have witnessed one of the most fun nights out in the UK, about a thousand times over. Tony Blair brought in the “café culture” 24hr drinking laws in 2003, and Newquay’s night time economy expanded into the void. Newquay was the triple threat party town: strong local and visiting surfing contingent, long tourist season, and a supply of party animals from RAF St Mawgan air force base with around two-thousand young Brits and Americans with money to burn. For a lot of us, every night was Saturday night, for quite a long time.
Nowadays Newquay has around 30 gyms but I’d struggle to count 30 pubs. At 6pm, the gyms are busier than the pubs. Since the pandemic, for many drinkers the party shifted indoors. This is purely anecdotal, but I’d say the alcohol sections in Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrison’s are bigger now than they were.
In Newquay, the party is over which reflects a national trend with the frequency of drinking at least once a week in the 16-24’s (30%) almost half that in the over 55’s (58%) (Drink Aware, 2023). Without even touching on the health concerns, there are less reasons to drink alcohol. Repeated nights of Netflix and wine are sad. The snag is, alcohol is an addictive substance. This is why in the face of boring nightlife, 52% of the UK adult population still drinks at least once a week.
Typically, contemplating a month or more without our companion alcohol would be psychologically uncomfortable. You have to white-knuckle it through the cravings, and use willpower to fight against the feeling of missing out. You’re on a count-down to when you can drink again, romanticising about when, where and what that first drink will be. What a reward you will have earned after 30 days of no drink! Actually, why not make it two weeks? That’s a long enough break and after all you only live once. Sound familiar and depressing?
Instead, using a few tools we can take an honest reflection on whether alcohol is really benefiting us or not. We can consider alcohol’s impact on our hierarchy of values, draw up a short-term vs long-term profit and loss forecast for drinking, and objectively examine each perceived benefit of alcohol that we hold. We can use systems thinking to look at the alcohol trap with a bird’s eye view and see where it pulls us back in each time. We can conceptualise breaking the ever-tightening alcohol feedback-loop using alternative engagement. This powerful cognitive reframing of the consequences of drinking gives us great motivation in the first week or so of sobriety. As we continue the ‘work’, the knowledge settles in to our subconscious and we see our cessation of drinking as something we ‘get to do’, rather than ‘have to do’. In this scenario, we don’t rely on the limiting resource of willpower or white-knuckling. Sobriety becomes self-reinforcing.
Sobriety goes hand-in-hand with a decent exercise programme. Cutting out alcohol frees up time, energy and money to get a genuinely rewarding buzz by making your body do what it has evolved to do.
3.Haven’t got time to bugger about
Post-35, we have just as much time as we’ve always had, it’s just taken up with a full-time job, running the household, raising kids and rearing pets. Any free-time needs to deliver a decent return on our investment. No one has time for visits to the gym for slap-dash unplanned pushing and pulling. We need structured two-to-three month programme focussed on our health and fitness targets. When the path is properly mapped out, we know our exercises in advance, we know the quantities of weight, time, and repetitions. By working towards a set goal, we get a one-two punch of satisfaction. Firstly, planned sessions are all-killer and no-filler so we walk out of the gym feeling like we left everything in there. Secondly, we enjoy a sense of measurable progression and getting better at something.
It is really this third point, not having time to bugger about, that has most influence on the type of exercise we will want to do. Each Sunday my partner Kirstin and I timetable our week ahead and schedule our activities. Surfing, mountain biking, hunting, workouts, and hiking together. With a 3 month old baby, 9 and 11 year old kids, and two dogs, time is at a premium. During the winter storms, some weeks all you get is three visits to the gym. No way is unstructured treadmill jogging (while gazing at a phone) and randomised machine pulling going to keep the wolf from the door. But learning full-body barbell lifts, functional metabolic conditioning, and shooting the heart rate to the maximum so that at the end you’re lying on the floor gasping like a husky at the end of the Iditarod? I’ll take that over a close-out session at Towan with 200+ uncontrolled surfboards.
Outro
We’ve looked at three main differences in what we need from exercise as we enter the Great Middle Age of life. We will have different fitness goals and values to those we had in our youth, we may be looking to re-evaluate our alcohol consumption, and we absolutely don’t have all day to spend in the gym. Don’t be dismayed by the fire-hydrant of child-free fit-fluencers on Instagram and Tik-Tok, they have yet to walk a mile in our shoes. Forget the hundreds of must-do bio-hacks. Instead do what the mid-life brain does best: project manage the hell out of your fitness. I’m happy for you to delegate that responsibility to me, get in touch if you want to chat more.
THE DEEP DIVE:
A recent meta study (Hayes et al., 2023) found there were no conclusive differences in post-(resistance) exercise induced muscle damage (EIMD) between young adult men and men over 65. It would be fair to interpolate that this would apply to middle-age men too. For women, while there is a lack of available data, it is proposed that oestrogen has a protective effect on EIMD, resulting in impaired recovery rates in post-menopausal women compared with young women. I could not find any data comparing the recovery rates of women in relation to oestrogen cycles.
Aerobic Exercise:
Downhill Running: In the study by Hayashi et al. (2019), participants engaged in 45 minutes of downhill running at 65% of their maximal oxygen consumption. Recovery was assessed through visual analogue pain scores, maximal isometric strengths, and plasma creatine kinase activity. Surprisingly, the recovery rates for both young and older trained groups were not significantly different, challenging the notion that older adults have slower recovery from strenuous aerobic exercise.
Running Sprint Interval Training: Willoughby et al. (2016) conducted a study where participants underwent a 4-week running sprint interval training program, consisting of 4 to 6, 30-second “all-out” sprints on a self-propelled treadmill, separated by 4 minutes of active recovery, three times per week. The study found that the improvements in aerobic and anaerobic fitness were comparable in both younger and middle-aged adults, indicating similar recovery capabilities in response to high-intensity aerobic exercise.
Anaerobic (Resistance) Exercise:
High-Volume Isokinetic Resistance Exercise: The study by Gordon et al. (2017) utilized a high-volume isokinetic resistance exercise protocol, consisting of 8 sets of 10 repetitions with 1 minute of rest between sets, performed on an isokinetic dynamometer. Recovery was assessed based on strength, inflammation, and muscle damage markers. The study found no significant differences in recovery measures between young and middle-aged adult men, indicating similar responses to high-volume resistance exercise.
Squat: In the research by Fernandes et al. (2019), participants performed 10 sets of 10 squats at 60% of their one-repetition maximum. Recovery was measured through perceived muscle soreness, creatine kinase levels, maximal voluntary contraction, and other muscle function indicators. The study found that middle-aged males, both trained and untrained, experienced greater symptoms of muscle damage and an impaired recovery profile compared to young resistance-trained males.
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