Growth: easy vs. difficult

Yesterday I trained a mother and daughter in two separate back-to-back sessions, and it got me to thinking about how age changes adaptations to training stress. When we’re young, all of our growth response to training stress is hormonally-driven; each night about 30-45 minutes after we fall asleep, our pituitary gland releases a burst of growth hormone. We can eat nearly anything, sleep soundly, and will recover overnight from heavy training sessions. The amount of GH released begins to slowly decrease after about age 25. When we get into our late 40s as this mother is, or late 50s as I am, the majority of adaptation to training stress is recovery-driven. Training very heavy requires days of recovery to effect full adaptation. These days, my older clients and I do the very heavy strength-building sets of functional movement patterns only once per week, but this is enough frequency to keep us strong and getting stronger. Kids have it easy in this regard, always have…they adapt and grow like weeds! As we age, our priorities shift to maintaining full-range mobility, enough strength to physically do what we need to, the maintenance and/or development of a good aerobic capacity, and not doing stupid things and getting injured, because recovering from incidental mistakes in the physical realm is a much more time-consuming issue than when we’re young. A simple daily mobility routine of 15-30 minutes duration will suffice, along with a session dedicated to strength or aerobic training, no more than 1 hour total. As we age, we must prioritize our training more to maintain functional fitness, but at most this entails 1 hour daily, only 7 of the 168 hours allotted to us weekly.