Training: Health vs Performance

In another post, Dan will be tackling the issue of goals and goal setting, as it is an important one.  Goals and goal setting go hand in hand about what I am tackling in this inaugural post.

I think it is important to recognize that there is a clear distinction between the actions we may choose to take in order to achieve or maintain some level of performance, and the actions we choose to take which will confer upon us the greatest level of health and longevity.  I think in most cases, the two do not necessarily go hand in hand.  Will training for some performance related endeavor optimize our health versus living sedentary lifestyles, sitting on the coach, eating bonbons, while watching re-runs of Oprah Winfrey and Sally Jesse Raphael?  Most definitely.  Will it confer on us a the most optimal level of health in regards to longevity?  I am not so sure.

A lot of different things led me to start thinking about this.  First off, I am approaching 40 (I am two years away) and for the past few years, until recent, I was training with the notion I was/wanted to be a competitive exerciser.  I was doing CrossFit, or a version of it that had a performance related goal rather religiously.  Okay, I realize my being a competitive exerciser was a pipe dream, but I was training that way, and focused on the competitive aspect.  With the birth of my son, and less than optimal sleeping conditions, along with normal daily stressors, I started wondering, and researching about what was optimal for my new current conditions.  It also led me to start thinking about taking an approach for a style of exercise that was conducive to longevity and sustainability.  So the wheels in my head started churning.  I read, I listened, I researched.  Along with my research I came upon a talk, along with some podcasts, by Dr. James O'Keefe, who looked at endurance athletes, and realized that more was not always better with these athletes, and their seemed to be a dose response curve, similar to drugs.  Give too little of a drug, it does not work.  Give too much, it's toxic, give an appropriate dose, and it works great!  He believes running is the same way.

So back to the question, health versus performance.  I love CrossFit and its metabolic conditioning.  I also love power lifting and Olympic weightlifting.  I see benefit in HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training).  But are these optimal for health? Longevity? Performance?  I think each can be but the issue is in the dosing.  Another issue to consider is age.  I think dosing is also age dependent.  As you get older, you may need to cut down the dose of one type of exercise, and increase the dosage of others.  There will always be exceptions to the rules, genetic freaks who live until a ripe old age, performing at the extremes.  There are exceptions to every norm.  I think it is unsafe to consider yourself an exception.

If you want to be a competitive power lifter, you need to lift heavy ass weights a lot.  When you exert yourself on a 1 RM back squat, the blood pressure for that exertion for that moment I am sure is exceedingly high.  Is this good to do over and over again, day in and day out?  Probably not.  Is it safer when you are in your 20's and there is more elasticity to your entire CV system.  I would think so.  As you age, the frequency of this type of extreme bout of stress  I think needs to be reduced.  Do you need to stop lifting weights?  Hell no.  Resistance training has so many more benefits, and strength rules over everything, however, the style of lifting and/or rep schemes needs to be modified.  Dan John says it best when he discusses that hypertrophy is the most important thing past age 35.  Should you be trying to lift heavy 5 days a week?  Depends what heavy is to you, and the demands it is placing on your body.  also depends upon the lift itself.  Lots of variables.

You want to be an Olympic Weightlifter.  Same thing.  Lots of heavy weights.  Oly lifting while fun, is unfortunately a higher risk endeavor.  There are a lot of places where things can go wrong and injury could result, especially in an untrained or immobile lifter.  Is this optimal for health and longevity?  Once again it is dose dependent related on age.  The younger we are the more we can sustain.  Is there risk at any age?  Yes.  As we age, it is necessary to maintain power/force development.  Maybe not full Olympic lifts as we age, but power and hang power varieties with a barbell or dumbbells are necessary  to maintain power in the hips.  There is an old saying, if you don't use it, you lose it.  This is true.  Maintaining hip mobility and force development, is important at any age, but still necessary as we age, just the style and type, may need to be modified.

HIIT training and CrossFit Metabolic conditioning are also things which I think are very dose dependent and age related.  Can a young person be able withstand the intensity of these workouts day in and day out compared with an older individual?  Yes.  I think as we age, we need to decrease the number of times in a given week where we have such a high level of relative intensity, basically we need to decrease the dose.  Remember we are talking about optimal health not optimal performance.

Through the course of the past few months, I have started to re-adjust how I train.  Trying to train more optimally for health and longevity overall, and intersperse into this baseline training periods where I will train for some performance related goal.  Basically, I am altering my dosage.  What does this look like?  More hypertrophy training.  More Mobility.  More Body Awareness.  No more full Olympic movements.  Sporadic Sprinting.  Sporadic MetCons.  More Rest.  More Walking.

Being male, changing my training from how I trained even 6 months ago, means swallowing some pride, as I may not be able to do things I used to do.  Changing my training means I probably should not be doing some lifts and/or rep schemes I used to do, or at the very least revise how they are done. It does not mean I should sit on the coach and eat bonbons though!  

Please leave questions in the comment section as I would love to try to answer them.  This is such a broad topic it is tough to touch on everything, at least in a concise manner.