Managing Training Volume at Forty, Fifty and Sixty

What falls with age is your rate of recovery, not your capacity to work hard.

A fit fifty-year-old can hit the same session as a thirty-year-old and produce a very similar effort. What's different is Thursday. The thirty-year-old is ready; the fifty-year-old is still carrying Tuesday.

Three things drive that. Muscle protein synthesis — the repair response after training — is blunted with age, so the same session takes longer to complete. Tendon and connective tissue turn over more slowly than muscle at any age, and the gap widens, which is why the injuries arriving in your fifties are Achilles and shoulder rather than muscle. And sleep quality drops through midlife at the point where work and family are taking the most.

One thing I don't want you to take from that: train less often.

Cutting sessions is the wrong lever, and it's the one everybody reaches for. Attendance is the thing holding the whole structure up — the booking, the habit, the people you'd be letting down. Drop from four to two and you don't get a better-recovered athlete, you get someone who's out of the routine by November.

What changes with age is the shape of the week, not the number of days in it. You keep the frequency and you vary the intensity.

In your forties, four or five sessions with three properly hard ones. The other two are the same class at a lower gear — same movements, moderate loads, breathing hard but not emptying yourself.

In your fifties, keep the four or five days, drop to two or three hard ones, and leave 48 to 72 hours between hard efforts that hit the same pattern.

In your sixties, the frequency holds up best of all. One or two hard days, the rest moderate, and less inside each session rather than fewer sessions.

The hard part is deciding which days are which — before you walk in, not at 6:04 when the clock starts.

And this is the bit people don't do enough: ask the coach for a movement sub. If you squatted heavy Monday and again Wednesday and Friday has squats in it and you're feeling it in your joints, say so. You'll get a sub that trains the same thing without asking the same tissue for a fourth time — a single-leg variation, a hinge, a machine. It isn't scaling down and it isn't a favour — it's the correct call, and any coach here will make it with you. Often they'll spot it before you say anything, but they can't feel your legs.

We build room for this deliberately. Percentage-based strength lets a 55-year-old work at 70% while somebody else is at 85%, and the metcon time domains rotate so nobody gets twenty hard minutes three days running.

Five sessions with two easy ones beats three sessions where you try to bury yourself every time.

We coach a lot of people on either side of fifty, and the programme is built for it. Free, no-obligation 15-minute chat with Jeremy or Beth at crossfitchiltern.com.