Faster, Stronger – is it possible to have it all after 40. To be able to lift heavy weights and still run well? For me, the answer is yes and we’ll get there in a minute.
Lifting weights will slow me down, cardio will kill my gains. Both of these are complete nonsense but have a strong hold on the internet. Yet only the elite need to be concerned with the quantity of one or other of these affecting their chosen pursuit.
You can perform around 10 hours of conditioning work without it killing your “gainz”. You can also do at least a couple of strength sessions a week and see nothing but a positive impact on your running. Structured correctly coupling these two will reduce recovery time, improve performance and reduce your chances of injury.
Specialisation – why not to
There are is a time and place for specialisation and it is in your late teens and 20’s. Outside of this, the generalist wins. In the first instance because of developmental factors and skill development. Young children and early teens are far better spending time doing many different activities and there are plenty of studies that show early specialisation is bad for them. In the second instance for those of us in our 40’s and older from a health point of view.
As we get older we start to lose muscle at a rate of 3-5%/decade after 30 if we are inactive. Getting into the gym and lifting, relatively, heavy things help to combat this decline. You might not need to be as big as the Worlds Strongest Man but keeping a hold of what muscle tissue you have is good for your health.
The other side of the coin is that being in good cardiovascular health is a great idea. 1 in 7 men and 1 in 11 women die from cardiovascular disease. Being in good “CV” shape is one way of helping reduce your chances of being affected by this. Diet, stress, hereditary factors all play a role too.
The process of getting in good shape tends to help deal with stress. You are also more inclined to make better food choices but we can’t do much about our genes.
Having it all
So is it possible to have a double bodyweight squat and be able to run a fast 5k, that is sub 25 minutes. The lighter you are the closer to 20 that this would be. Few people achieve this as they tend to have a scatter gun approach to training at best but it is entirely possible to do both of these at the same time.
How do you achieve good performances in the gym and when you are running? It is simple, you put a little bit of thought into your programming.
As we get older there is little point in running at full throttle for anything other than very short periods. It is far better to train within your means and slowly build your foundation. This allows you to develop your capacity to run and lift well at the same time. It also allows for short periods where you can really intensify things should you desire, say a 5k race or powerlifting competition. You can do this with the knowledge that your base is there.
The great thing about actually thinking about your program is that even with the fatigue of training you will find you are running faster and lifting more than before.
Structure
There is any number of different ways to structure your routine that will aid your progress. For me, I like to look at the training week as 14 days rather than 7. This allows me to get everything in whilst training 4-5 days per week. By extending to 14 days you aren’t trying to cram everything into the one week. It allows you to do easy paced running and still be able to fit in harder sessions. It’s the same in the gym where you can cover both the higher volume lower intensity work and lower volume higher intensity work and even work on power development if it is appropriate.
It might look like this
14 day training week
Monday – gym – volume work on main movements
Tuesday – run – 30-45 minutes @ HR 140ish
Thursday – gym as per Monday
Friday – run as per Tuesday
Monday – gym – intensity work on main movements
Tuesday – run- long intervals/tempo work
Thursday- gym – as per Monday
Friday – run – short intervals
Even within this structure, there is plenty of room for variation and progression. Just because the session nominally says 25 reps at 75% doesn’t mean that it is 5 sets of 5 that you do. It might be that you do sets at 70%, 75% and 80% and it is the average intensity of the work sets that is 75%.
You might be doing an easy run session but perform 5x km intervals at 10k pace with a HR based recovery. The fact that it is only a 1km interval and the pace is 10k means that the overall session is fairly easy but it adds variety to your training. It also allows you to get comfortable with what 10k pace feels like. The same session could be made harder by running them at 5k pace or really hard by using 3k pace. In each one, the recovery period can be played with depending on what you are trying to achieve.
Progression
As the weeks progress the gym work might move from working with 70% in the volume weeks to 75%. You may even find and should to be honest, that you start being able to handle 80+% in the volume weeks. At this point, you need to re-assess the working weights because if you are using 80% plus in the volume weeks then it isn’t really 80-85% anymore. At this point, it is worth testing at around a 5 rep max to give the give the next block of training a more meaningful target to work from.
Similarly with the running. Every few months, around 3-4 is a good time frame, it is worht testing your 5k or 10k time. 5k is quite handy as you can head along to a park run and take the guess work out of the distance. You can then plug this into any of the pace calculators that are on the internet and adjust your training paces accordingly.
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