Energy, Not Time.
What to do when you just don't have the gas.
I write a lot about being an athlete who doesn’t have enough time. What do you do if you’ve only got 30 minutes? What do you do if you can only train two days a week? What do you do if your schedule is just so crazy you can’t get everything that you want done? Seriously... if time is an issue, I can come up with some awesome workouts to fill that little amount of time. Unfortunately, this isn’t really my only issue anymore.
There is another limiter. This limiter is far more daunting and far more troubling for most of us. What do we do if we just are too goddamn tired, or wiped out, to train?
For aging athletes, this is often the bigger complaint. Why can’t I do what I used to be able to do? Why can’t I just follow the same training plan I did 10 or 20 years ago? I have the motivation, but I just don’t have the gumption.
The solution for most of us is to just grit our teeth and try hard and then be pissed off by our lack of performance. We default to favorite modes: Trying to run even more or trying to do the same workouts in the gym that we did years ago and that felt so successful. And when we push it for long enough, we end up injured or overtrained. It doesn’t result in some kind of spectacular performance down the road…just more fatigue.
Before I continue, I will be honest and tell you that this is my own major struggle these days. If I had a quick and easy solution, I would have implemented it and wouldn’t feel need to write this. In so many ways, this is a note to myself and a reminder to do a few things that I don’t really like to do.
I’m going to divide this into three sections. The first section is about daily lifestyle habits that can enhance recovery. The second is about training interventions that tend to improve metabolism and overall function. The third is about goal setting and realistic planning.
Livin’ The Vida Tranquila
It’s not the training that gets you more fit, but the recovery from the training. This is one of the great mistakes we start to make as we get older. If we continue to try to exercise and recover as we did as a young person, we risk injury and staleness and overtraining. It’s simply a function of recovery taking longer as we age and training taking more energy than it used to.
About ten years ago, I went to a great presentation on recovery where the presenter outlined over a hundred proven recovery interventions. These ranged from supplements to massage to acupuncture to stretching, and yet the sum of all of the recovery modes paled in comparison to getting enough high quality sleep and enough food.
If an athlete comes to me and is struggling with recovery, sleep is the first thing we talk about. Even if an athlete believes they are getting “good sleep,” we look for an improvement in quality and duration. We all will meet resistance with sleep time, and it’s understandable. It’s a highly habitual thing, and it’s a difficult habit to break.
Step one is to go to sleep 15 minutes earlier every single night. Most of us have some amount of down time in our nightly routine, which might include looking at our phone or watching some TV. Very few people are actually busy in the hours leading up to bedtime, but rather just in a routine. It’s okay to miss out on a little bit of the time you spend in the evenings winding down. It’s just getting used to having less of it.
A second problem with going to bed 15 minutes earlier is that often we will start to wake a bit earlier as well. If this happens, the most important tactic is to just stay in bed until your planned wake time. You might not be able to get this done every single morning, but staying there, focusing on breathing, and trying to stay relaxed can still enhance the recovery we achieve from sleeping.
Sleep quality is a second issue. There are whole books on this subject, but the general idea is to avoid things that disturb our sleep in the hours leading up to bedtime. For me, this shows up in the form of big meals, desserts, or alcohol. If I can reduce the size of my dinner to a reasonable portion and avoid a lot of sugar and chocolate afterward, it feels like I can maintain deeper sleep in the early part of the night. Same for alcohol. I don’t drink a lot, but when I do, it seems best if I drink it with dinner and then have a few hours before sleep without consuming any more.
Experimenting with room temperature, noise, light pollution, and more are other ways that we can address sleeping. The simple truth is that if we can improve our sleep quality by just a few percentage points, things start to line up well for greater energy the next day.
Next, eating.
It seems like every time I give nutritional advice, there is someone that has to jump on a soapbox and tell me I’m full of shit or that I am marginalizing someone, or being mean. I am not a dietician or a nutritionist. I have, however, been studying nutrition since college. I minored in it while getting my degree in exercise science and have a couple of certifications, which basically mean I am probably more confused than the average person.
That being said, my nutrition advice when it comes to recovery is fairly simple:
Drink two or more liters of water a day.
Eat protein with each meal and,
Aim for more than five servings of vegetables every day.
This is super boring and it’s not that delicious all the time, but it tends to keep us in the correct lane. One thing I notice when I’m dragging and having a hard time recovering is that my diet has slipped into eating more simple carbohydrates and not getting enough protein.
I don’t have anything against macro-limiting plans or other restrictive eating beliefs other than the fact that it makes a hard job even harder. The easier it is for us to get all of the fuel and vitamins we need, the less stressful the nutrition piece becomes.
Training To Be A Human
I can spend an hour in the gym doing heavy finger rolls, reverse wrist curls, and squeezing a gripper. I can probably do 30 sets of grip work without feeling the effect from it the next day. This is a reflection of my early focus as a climber, which was to develop my grip in any way possible in the weight room, long before the advent of climbing gyms or spray walls.
My friends would go run for an hour, and I would wrist curl dumbbells. This focus came at a cost, of course, and that cost was a lack of general body strength to help me through the activities of daily living. Could hold on but couldn’t move.
It’s not uncommon for me to test a climber that can pull more weight on a small edge than they can squat with both legs. Sport performance is an excellent pursuit, but not when it conflicts with or limits overall health.
One of the best ways to develop the capacity for daily activity is to do slightly more intense activity throughout the day. For a person that has done nothing except for rock climbing for the past several years, starting out with just a couple of easy weight training sessions a week and a little bit of walking is the prescription. Ultimately, we would work up to two hours per week of resistance training, either in two 60-minute sessions or split it up between three 40-ish minute sessions. We also would do a lot of low-intensity movement, such as walking or hiking or easy cycling.
These sessions should not be so hard that you are negatively affected by them when it comes time to climb or ski or even get out of bed. Coax some strength, don’t chase it.
Admittedly, I tend to default to climbing on the TB2 whenever possible. When I do add even simple strength sets to the end of my session a couple of days a week, I feel better overall and I sleep better. There is abundant evidence of the benefits of strength work, but the key for me is to get short, frequent sessions in, avoid going to exhaustion, and looking for slow gains over longer periods.
Once in a while, things will line up and I’ll do a couple of too-hard days back to back and I end up feeling beat for four or five days. I can’t train hard again during this time, so I try to avoid digging too deep if at all possible. There are older climbers who swear by infrequent but really crushing and long sessions. These people are unicorns, and most of us should not follow their advice.
Plan, Even Though Plans Fail Every Time
There are about a dozen good quotes that speak to this idea, but the most important aspect of this is that the vision is an important component of the program, even if the mechanics of the program change once they meet the real world. I think the mistake most of us make in our planning is to plan the details but to ignore the structure. We might have some specific ideas on exercises we want to do or goals we want to see ourselves hit within the sessions, but we don’t step back and look at the overall structure of our week, the structure of the month, or the specific goals associated with each training session.
At the very least, it is worth sitting down and scratching out a month calendar of training. When we do this, we lay down a vision for not just the days and times of our workouts, but how those workouts should progress session to session. Usually within the first two or three days of the month, you will find yourself having to make an adjustment to the program. Instead of fretting about this, it is useful to simply schedule a review at the end of each week. I put this at the end of my last training session and spend 5 to 10 minutes assessing how I could have better executed the training and what adjustments I need to make for the following week to be sure that that happens.
It’s important to remember that the two fundamental tenets of training are consistency and progression. Questions to ask yourself include:
How can I be more consistent with the program?
How do I progress this session in order to see the results I am seeking?
How can I improve my recovery between intensive efforts?
This last one is of supreme importance for the aging athlete. If we don’t focus on recovery as a primary goal in our training, we risk ending up in big fatigue “dips” where we will spend a couple of weeks just feeling tired and disappointed in ourselves. It is better to chase great recovery, do shorter sessions, and look for progress in the individual performances of exercises than it is to seek out a feeling of fatigue or soreness as a marker of quality training.
Being a middle-aged adult athlete requires you act like an adult. If you can do this—act wise, thoughtful, and thinking in the long-term—you’re going to have a lifetime of continued performance. If you can’t do that, at least you can reminisce about the good old days.