50 y/o & 5 half hour sessions in a week…
I was talking to a 50 year old working mum who said she knew she needed to do something to avoid he slide into disability and decrepitude that her parents were experiencing. She also wants to be a good role model for her kids. The problem was she didn’t know what to do with that time for the largest fitness effect. TBH, she didn’t know what she was trying to achieve, let alone how to get there. This isn't a criticism of her, why should she have any fitness, training, nutrition coaching knowledge?
Start with why:
There are two things to consider. The length and quality of your life.
Chances are you’ll die from a heart problem, cardiovascular issue, cancer, a lung issue or dementia. However, the quality of your life will probably be influenced by less lethal things, such as your bone density, muscle mass, aerobic capacity and mobility.
QoL is also strongly effected by social factors such as the number of friends you see regularly, your extended familial support network and your mental health. There is a clear need for a nutritional and lifestyle component in the plan as well as training and social stimulus, but nutrition is outside the scope of our 5 x 30 minute workouts. It is something I as a coach would weave into the conversation and aim for small but steady changes
We’re looking for activities and habits we can build that will positively impact all of those measures of quality of life while at the same time reducing the likelihood and severity of symptoms of those diseases, pushing back the onset as far as possible to give you the longest, healthiest, happiest disease free life.
Right, so 5 x half hour sessions in a week…
The amount of time and amount of kit you have when you start is not necessarily a long term limiting factor. Getting started is the hardest step. Once you are in the habit of getting up and doing something, getting hold of extra kit or making a bit more time for a long workout once a week are probably doable.
What would a week look like:
2 x strength sessions, we can start with bodyweight exercises.
1 x long slow workout (loaded fast walk or a jog)
1 x sprint session, zone 5 as hard as you can go
1 x medium effort, medium duration tempo workout
Day 1: Strength 1
Day 2: Sprint session
Day 3: Medium effort tempo cardio
Day 4: Strength 2
Day 5: Long loaded walk
Sprints:
The sprint session doesn’t care whether you do 10 seconds hard and 30 recovery or 30 on, 30 off or 4 minutes as hard as you can go, 4 mins recovery. There is no magical protocol.
Warm up, work as hard as you can, recover. Do it again 2-10 times. As with everything, build up volume and intensity. The sprints should leave you gasping and hating your life choices.
Medium effort tempo cardio
This means go as hard as you can for somewhere between 10-30 minutes. Run, row, bike, ruck, whatever. Pick a route, keep the time the same and try and beat your distance each week.
Long slow cardio:
Slow, but not super slow, out of breath, but not dying. Add 10 minutes each week until you’re getting an hour and a half of solid Z2 cardio. If you can’t manage that, do what you can.
Strength:
What do the strength sessions include? We want to cover all the big, commonly used movement patterns, but try and avoid doing very similar movements on the same day.
These movement patterns are:
Squat – getting up out of a seat
Hinge – picking something up from the floor
Push – both vertically and horizontally, vertically as if you were putting a suitcase on top of a cupboard and horizontally as if you were doing a push up.
Pull – vertically, pull ups and chin ups. Horizontally, bent over row of some type
Split – lunges, step ups/ downs, split squats
Rotation: movements that mimic throwing a rugby ball or a hook punch
Anti-rotation, the ability to stop yourself from being rotated by either outside forces or your own movement
Crawling & floor work: copy a young child, crawl, roll, get up, get down
Now we’ve decided on the movement patterns we’re going to use, we need to pick a specific exercise to start with.
Ideally we’ll have a scaled version so we can start nice and easy and progressively make it harder applying the principle of overload. This could mean more reps, but often means adding a bit more weight than you did last time. The most common reason I’ve seen for people not progressing is lack of overload. We tend to avoid overload because it is hard work and gets scary.
Hopefully as you can see, there is a lot to consider, and we haven’t touched on nutrition or lifestyle yet.
Coaching makes this all so much more manageable. Get in touch if you need help.
Photo by <a href="https://buff.ly/4dtfrdG">Peter Conlan</a> on <a href="https://buff.ly/4dvB6li">Unsplash</a>