People tell me they’re old. They say it at thirty-two, which is my age, and they say it at fifty, and they say it as though it explains the pain they came in with.
It usually doesn’t. I work with people in their eighties I wouldn’t describe as old, and the difference between them and someone twenty years younger who feels finished has less to do with the year they were born than with what they’ve asked of their body and how much room they’ve left it to recover.
Aging doesn’t have to be painful if you take care of yourself. What changes is the recovery process, rather than the capability.
My mother, in her flower beds
She’ll do a proper workout in the morning. Then in the afternoon she’ll go out and weed the flower beds, and by the evening she can barely stand up.
Neither activity was the problem. Doing both in one day was.
When I explain this she tells me that a day of only gardening doesn’t feel like she’s done anything, and I understand the instinct — but the body doesn’t distinguish between activity that counts and activity that doesn’t. Pulling weeds for two hours is the day’s training session. Stretching afterward isn’t recovery either, however virtuous it feels.
If you take recovery as seriously as you take activity, you’ll be able to keep doing the things you want to do.
The bench press question
I see a lot of men in their fifties and sixties working toward a number they hit at twenty-one, and I’ll usually ask where in their actual life they need to lift that much.
Sometimes there’s a good answer. More often the goal is inherited from a version of themselves that had different priorities and a different recovery capacity, and it’s now driving a training program that ignores the stabilizing muscles the shoulder needs to survive it.
The people who stay capable into their later decades usually changed what they were training for at some point.
What tends to happen in your thirties
You’re working, possibly raising children, and deep enough into a career that the first thing to come off the list is yourself. I understand how that happens. I’d also point out that if you aren’t at your best, it’s difficult to show up for anyone else at theirs.
Thirty minutes on yourself is not a small thing. Some of my patients tell me their appointment is the only half hour in the day that belongs to them, and I take that seriously.