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TRANSCRIPT OF THE AUDIO:
This is Paul von Zielbauer from Aging with Strength, with some strategies for dealing with midlife athletic injuries and the frustrating, sometimes demoralizing limitations they impose on us. One of the most challenging aspects of hitting my fifties (and maybe you can relate to this) is reconciling the inevitable decline in physical strength and performance with my expectations — unreasonable as they are — that I should be able to just keep doing pretty much what I did last week, last year or 15 years ago.
Not to mention the particular personal psychology that whispers, convincingly, that physical strength and ability are standards that must be upheld. As if they were virtues that, like all actual virtues, don’t ever change.
And the pernicious feeling that if I can’t maintain my athletic standards, well, then, who am I, really?
Of course, these thoughts and feelings are rarely overt; they’re more like emotional microplastics polluting my subconscious. But like all toxins, they tend to accumulate over time, to the point where they can influence my self-perception and, thus, my behavior. And here’s the problem with that: If you’re in a state of continual dissonance between what you want your body to be able to do and what it can actually pull off, you’re all but asking for an injury.
Or, more to the point of this post, a nonstop series of injuries.
Because athletes in their 50s are like the Tom Hanks character in, “Cast Away.” Remember that movie, from 2000? A guy stranded on an island invisible to the outside world. He survives on pure improvisation, lives in a cave gnawing on fish bones, staring at the wall wondering WTF. And then he becomes emotionally dependent on a volleyball and cries when it goes away.
Sound familiar, athletes? If “Cast Away” isn’t an analog to life after 50 I’m not sure what is.
At least we have access to ibuprofen and CBD gummies.
The consequences of “ignore & override” for older athletes
At this point in my audiocasts, I usually offer a disclaimer that I’m speaking not as an expert but as a journalist and curious explorer. But on this topic…I’m an expert. My guess is that many of you are, too.
Or, if you’re not yet, because you haven’t yet hit the 50-something athletic injury wall that no one ever bothered to tell you is approaching, I’m here, now, warning you about the negative surprises that many midlife athletes confront.
Or, as the case may be, simply ignore.
I wrote a post in October that examined the consequences of continuing to fight through athletic pain. And in the months since then, I’ve become a living lesson of what happens when ignore & override becomes your rule instead of the exception.
A brief summary of my 50-something injuries
So let me quickly run through what I’m dealing with, so I can get to the strategies for managing the nonstop injuries after age 50 with credibility.
My right shoulder now has 2 partial tears that make upper-body training tough. They wake me up, every night. I probably need surgery, because it feels a lot like my left shoulder 8 years ago, when a surgeon stapled together a full tendon tear.
But now, in both shoulders, I also have severe tendinitis of the long head biceps tendon, which connects the biceps to the shoulder. This is a direct result of my ignore & override habit, after too many rounds of hitting 200 tennis serves at a time.
I was in too much of a hurry to be really good at tennis, and got a repetitive stress injury as a result.
Consequences!
So, now I focus more on lower body and core strength training, for stronger legs, quads, glutes, hip flexors, lower back and pelvic strength. As you get older, you want to be stronger from the ground up. And these are big muscle groups that burn a lot of calories.
Oh, yeah: As if on cue, last week my right knee took on fluid, for reasons I have yet to pin down. Going too heavy on the box jumping? Or the stair workout? Tennis drills against the pitiless ball machine? Whatever.
Using athletic stress therapy to speed recovery
Though I make light of the stress I put on my body — and maybe that’s just another variation of ignore & override — when it comes specifically to tending to athletic injuries, I’ve found that continuing to use it — playing, running or working out on whatever part is hurting — can in some cases speed up the repair process far more effectively than the RICE therapy, which is based on Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation.
Carefully stressing certain non-acute injuries, through newer therapies with acronyms like PEACE, LOVE, and MEAT works only if you know what you’re doing and have a strong and sensitive connection to your body’s nuanced pain signals.
I could do an entire post on physical stress therapy, so I won’t go deeply into it here, but it’s not for everyone.
But what if, instead of more effective therapies, we avoided taking on athletic injuries in the first place. Maybe there’s a better way to build strength and endurance and flexibility after 50 than simply by pressing on with the same workouts, the same routines, the same sports, even, that we practiced 5, 10, or 20 years ago.
Getting smarter about staying physically strong
In that previous post about the consequences of continuing to ignore & override progressively louder pain signals, I gave two examples of friends, each with great tolerances for pain, who decided to stop doing certain sports they loved, to save their bodies.
Because, yes, discontinuing what is painful may be the smart move.
There are always other creative ways to build physical strength, including neuromuscular strength training.
The concept of slowly, slowly ratcheting down your workouts over time
But, instead of just pressing on doing the same routines and talking to a volleyball to keep from losing our minds, I’d like to introduce the idea of a controlled, almost imperceptible ratcheting down of your workouts, over years, as a way to stay healthy, remain physically strong and flexible and get off the perpetual injury train. Through more mindful, disciplined movements that recognize, instead of ignore, our changing physical abilities.
It would look something like this:
1 | A 1% per year reduction in weight/duration/distance/intensity of the training regimens or sports most likely to cause the injuries that set you back, physically and mentally.
maybe it’s 1%, maybe 5%, maybe .05%, but it becomes something you manage, which requires forethought, attention and discipline — things that athletes tend to be good at.
in the gym, that can look like preemptively reducing the amount of weight you're using in favor of doing more repetitions. You don’t need to go heavy to build strength or muscle.
after my 2017 left shoulder tendon repair, I ratcheted down to 50 pound dumbbells for chest presses, from 60 pounds, and that was absolutely the right move. 60 pounds is ego; 50 pounds is disciplined, mindful.
instead of keeping your max workout volume at 11, turn it down to 9. At first, it can feel disappointing, like you’re leaving endorphins on the table. But it’s still 9! And it creates a disciplined buffer against frequent commutes on the athletic injury train.
I no longer hit 200 idiotic tennis serves at a time, and instead limit myself to 40 or 50. That’s lowered my daily pain score, which I’ll explain in a moment.
2 | Commit to acquiring no new injuries
what would that require you to change in practice, at the gym, on a bike, on a running trail, in the pool, or just negotiating a darkened staircase while texting and eating a sandwich?
3 | Quantify the pain load you’re carrying, to lower it
example: on a scale of 1 to 10 daily, my right shoulder is a 5; my knee is a 1; my left shoulder a 2, for a total pain score of 8. I want my daily number to be 4 or lower. What’s my plan to achieve that?
4 | Acknowledge the mental and emotional stress that athletic injuries create
that daily pain score directly correlates to the energy that you require to ignore & override or, worse, unleash your transmogrified pain on someone else.
5: | Invest in high-quality, professional guidance for your specific athletic goals
instead of training only using free YouTube videos, which I use as well, create a modest budget to spend on your personal physical performance and maintenance.
a good physiotherapist or coach is as valuable to your enduring physical resilience as a good psychotherapist is to your emotional well being. This is a worthy investment that takes time and effort and pays major dividends.
Since I mentioned psychotherapy, which I’ve been reaping the benefits of for 20 years now, let me mention one final, really important element of what drives many of us, especially men, toward unsustainable levels of athletic stress, pain and the dead-end of ignore & override. And this is where I also speak from personal experience.
Confronting the lingering need to be dangerous
What I’m talking about here is the need to remain “dangerous.” Which continuing to keep up an increasingly painful athletic standard, almost regardless of the consequences, bestows.
This is a real need, felt by many men, especially. Here, dangerous does not mean antisocial, threatening or violent, but something much more subtle, socially acceptable and rooted in athleticism: a form of physical achievement and self-possession that tends to make people take notice in some way, small or large.
As many psychotherapists, including mine, will tell you, the reason so many men of a certain age resist dialing down our athletic habits is because to dial down would be a tacit acknowledgement of mortality. But if you can still blow away that 38 year old dude on the trail, or compete with him, entirely in your mind at the gym, you’re not average! And you’re not going to die!
As my therapist said to me recently: “There’s a limit to how strong one can be at different points in one’s life, regardless of one’s will. You need other capacities, other than just determination.”
Other capacities: like maybe self-acceptance, self-forgiveness and an appreciation of the non-athletic qualities that make you strong, attractive and worthy. Capacities like tolerance for the physical declines that are, in fact, inevitable.
We can’t will our way back to 35.
But I think we’ve all seen what happens to some people — men, mostly — who haven’t cultivated capacities other than the very traditional pathways to perceived masculinity.
I mean, I get it. There’s a reason I talk about the male need to feel dangerous with my therapist. There’s a line from the 2012 movie “Act of Valor,” about a Navy SEAL team, voiced over by an active-duty SEAL, that captures this dilemma, which is:
“Before my father died, he said the worst thing about growing old was that other men stopped seeing you as dangerous. I've always remembered that, how being dangerous was sacred, a badge of honor.”
For many older athletes, modulating if not letting go of the need to be seen as physically elite or, for men, as dangerous, as a socially acceptable form of masculine identity, remains unexamined aspects of our personalities.
But sooner or later, the time comes to work out that problem.
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