Midlife Fitness: A Blueprint for Vitality and Longevity

Tailoring Your Workout Routine: A Personalized Approach

Exercise is one of the most powerful tools for graceful aging. It allows you to maintain physical function at the highest levels possible despite the passage of time. For the best overall fitness results, develop a routine that combines strength training and aerobic exercise. The trick is finding a plan that works for you based on practicing movements you enjoy.

Assessing Your Fitness Level: A Starting Point

Checking your current fitness level is a valuable step in formulating a plan. Knowing where you stand allows you to focus on improving your weak points and gauge your progress over time with periodic re-testing. 

Health-related physical fitness has five key components: 

1. Cardiorespiratory Fitness

2. Body Composition

3. Muscular Strength

4. Muscular Endurance

5. Flexibility  

Left unchecked, aging will diminish all five of these.  A sound exercise plan, in contrast, can boost your health in these areas.  Testing yourself to see where you stand in each of these domains is a good first step for outlining your own exercise plan.  There are many ways to test the components of health-related fitness; here are my recommendations:

1. Cardiorespiratory Fitness: Take a 6-minute walk using an indoor track or a motion-tracking fitness app and see how much ground you can cover walking (not running) for 6 minutes at your briskest pace. This test is relatively easy and provides valuable information about your functional capacity.

2. Body Composition: Most people monitor body weight alone, which doesn’t tell you anything about the relative amounts of fat or muscle you have. Body composition testing with field methods, such as bioelectrical impedance or skinfold test, is a better (though not perfect) way to keep track of this health domain.  I recommend retesting no more than every three months or following a weight change of 10 lbs or more.

3. Muscular Strength: Testing your strength with rep maxes for the main strength exercises you train with every 12 weeks or so is a great way to check on your progress. In addition, I recommend testing your grip strength (if you can access a hand dynamometer), as grip strength has been correlated with the risk of mortality.

4. Muscular Endurance: My recommended test for muscular endurance is the one-minute curl-up (aka abdominal crunch). Like grip strength, abdominal muscular endurance has been correlated with a lower mortality risk.

5. Flexibility: Hips and shoulders are two joints that are prone to mobility issues, so I recommend Apley’s Scratch test and a seated hamstring stretch to test your flexibility.  These tests can be easily used to check whether you have adequate flexibility – you can either touch your shoulder blade (Apley’s) or toes, or you cannot.  If you cannot, then you have something to work towards!

Setting Realistic Goals: Small Steps, Big Results

I recommend testing yourself in these domains to set a baseline. Then, perform follow-up tests every 3-6 months to check on your progress. If you are new to exercise, you can expect to see rapid improvements in your fitness within a few months of regular training. Retesting and seeing improvement is highly motivating. Setting goals can also be a great motivation to stick to your plan. Use a training log to keep track of your assessment results, goals, and daily workouts. 

A good guideline with goals is to use a mix of outcome-goals and process-goals. Outcome goals are goals in which you set a benchmark you wish to achieve. For example, I want to bench press 90kg for 10 reps in the next 12 weeks.  It is possible for you to miss your outcome goals, even if you try your hardest.

You have direct control over your process goals, though. Process goals are when you commit to performing specific actions over which you have direct control of the outcome. For example, I have a process goal of weight training three times per week. I control whether this happens. By achieving this process goal regularly, I build motivation for training.

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