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For all of you that don’t know, your favorite personal trainer turned 30 last week.

With this major life milestone have come some conflicting feelings -

• On the one hand I feel wiser and more mature, on the other I want to have more fun and enjoy what’s left of my youth.

• I have to accept that life doesn’t have the same endless possibilities, and on the other hand I’m full of energy and focus to try new things.

And the most interesting paradox on turning 30 comes physically -

• I want to push as hard as I can physically to get the most of my body while it’s ability level is still high. On the other hand, I have to come to grips with the fact that an athlete’s body declines as it ages …

Or does it?

I’d have to say it’s a choice - we all like to blame aging for drops in our performance, but just like everything else, it might just be another excuse.

It’s true that team and competitive sports athletes decline once they pass thirty - competitive sports like tennis or basketball test so many areas of fitness, including power, flexibility, endurance, and recovery time, that effects of age do seem to show in the performance of these athletes.

However, break any specific sports activity down to its fundamentals - such as sprinting, power-lifting, or long-distance running and you’ll find that records are still being set by people in their thirties. I couldn’t find a statistic on it, but it seems to me that more often than not top athletes are even performing better.

Carl Lewis put up the greatest 100 meter sprint and long-jump records of his life in the world championships after his 30th birthday. And the trend is even greater for female athletes, where you see many world records in sports like swimming being set by women in their thirties.

Some attribute this to better diet and training habits. I myself have to admit that I feel stronger and more energetic due to better eating now than I did through most of my twenties. There are times I feel more sore after workouts, but that could also be attributable to the greater neuro-muscular sensation I have from all my years of training. And anyway, I’m willing to trade that for the better smarts and training knowledge I now have in the gym.

This quote from an American Journal of Sports Medicine article about the effects of aging on the athlete written by and William E. Garrett, Jr, MD, PhD supports this:
… neither reduced muscle demand nor the subsequent loss of function is inevitable with aging. These losses can be minimized or even reversed with training. Endurance training can improve the aerobic capacity of muscle, and resistance training can improve central nervous system recruitment of muscle and increase muscle mass. Therefore, physical activity throughout life is encouraged to prevent much of the age-related impact on skeletal muscle.

I would call most of my clients physique athletes, and in that case there’s more good news. Bodybuilders will often admit that their bodies look better as they age; it’s a concept called muscular maturity, and makes the muscles look harder, leaner and more vascular the older you get. You also notice this in female physique competitors; it is easier for them to look more toned because of the drop in estrogen with aging; estrogen promotes water and fat retention.

I think the weight increase I hear people complaining about with aging comes more from their changes in lifestyle. You’ll find less physical activity in individuals as they age; and although they may not eat more, the cumulative effects of a lifetime of poor eating can adversely affect your metabolism. In the case of women, add child-birth to the equation and we can find causes other than aging to explain the weight gain with aging.

I’m using all of the positive data in this area as motivation for myself - I’m pushing my body harder and being stricter than I’ve ever been. And you know what that means - I’m not going to accept age as an excuse from any of my clients either!