Your body starts falling apart faster if you don’t maintain it.
There’s a corollary here that I don’t see anyone talking about. If you set a good plan to maintain your body fitness from say your mid 30s on, one day you’ll be doing that same reasonable workout routine and then you hurt yourself because its too much. Yesterday it was fine, the prior 15 years it had been fine, but now its not, and you have an injury you need 3 to 6 months to recover from. You think its a fluke and, once healed, you go back to your fitness routine and you injury yourself in a different way. Another 3 to 6 months of recovery.
There appears to be a need to modify or abandon parts of your fitness routine as you get older, but there’s no guidebook on what to stop doing and when, nor what to be doing instead.
I feel like this is like tech debt, it’s usually a result of neglect in other areas that are easy to dismiss or overlook. Stretching, foam rolling, staying on top of rest and recovery, avoiding ego lifting, etc. I think you can definitely course correct but it gets harder to do so the further you stray.
My guess is as you get older, those support muscles that help keep everything in place also need work. Also, bad form habits are more likely to rear their head as time goes on.
So the people who didn’t perfect their form, the ones who use tricks to lift what they do (like a curl you can only complete if you start out my building up momentum on the lower part to get through the upper part), the ones who only work their major muscles, those are most likely to get hurt.
Though there’s also wear and tear on your non-muscle infra, like your bones, joints, tendons, and cartilege. If you keep pushing for heavier weights, you put more and more strain on those. They can improve somewhat with training but they aren’t like muscles where straining them to the point of failure and tearing encourages the body to build more and age doesn’t help there either, especially if you develop arthritis or something that further weakens that support infra.
There’s a corollary here that I don’t see anyone talking about. If you set a good plan to maintain your body fitness from say your mid 30s on, one day you’ll be doing that same reasonable workout routine and then you hurt yourself because its too much. Yesterday it was fine, the prior 15 years it had been fine, but now its not, and you have an injury you need 3 to 6 months to recover from. You think its a fluke and, once healed, you go back to your fitness routine and you injury yourself in a different way. Another 3 to 6 months of recovery.
There appears to be a need to modify or abandon parts of your fitness routine as you get older, but there’s no guidebook on what to stop doing and when, nor what to be doing instead.
I feel like this is like tech debt, it’s usually a result of neglect in other areas that are easy to dismiss or overlook. Stretching, foam rolling, staying on top of rest and recovery, avoiding ego lifting, etc. I think you can definitely course correct but it gets harder to do so the further you stray.
My guess is as you get older, those support muscles that help keep everything in place also need work. Also, bad form habits are more likely to rear their head as time goes on.
So the people who didn’t perfect their form, the ones who use tricks to lift what they do (like a curl you can only complete if you start out my building up momentum on the lower part to get through the upper part), the ones who only work their major muscles, those are most likely to get hurt.
Though there’s also wear and tear on your non-muscle infra, like your bones, joints, tendons, and cartilege. If you keep pushing for heavier weights, you put more and more strain on those. They can improve somewhat with training but they aren’t like muscles where straining them to the point of failure and tearing encourages the body to build more and age doesn’t help there either, especially if you develop arthritis or something that further weakens that support infra.