Aging is a process that amplifies the effects of our habits. By the time we reach 50, the difference between an active person and a sedentary one really starts to show up in ways we could gloss over when we were younger.
All the best things in life are at stake in this process: energy levels, physical fitness, the way we look and feel, which activities we can take part in.
Endurance exercise is one of the best ways we can stave off age-related declines in performance and capacity.
Today, we’re looking at the hope in aging: how endurance exercise can keep us strong, healthy, fit, and proud of our physical capabilities long after we turn 40.
What do we mean by Endurance Exercise?
Endurance exercise refers to any type of training or structured physical activity that is aimed at improving endurance and stamina. It sounds obvious, but this also covers a huge range of different “cardio” activities.
For most people, running is the first thing that comes to mind. It’s a classic, and for good reason – we evolved to run long distances. However, you can also include rowing, cycling, combat sports, hiking, swimming, and countless other activities.
What ties these all together is that they challenge – and thus develop – your mental, cardiorespiratory (heart and lungs), and muscular endurance. So, whatever you do that gets you out of breath and leaves you aching the next day, falls into the broad category of endurance exercise.
Case study: Aging elite athletes vs aging normies – the risks and the disparity
So, what is the relationship between aging and endurance?
Here’s one way to look at it: what’s the difference between a “masters athlete” (someone over 35 who trains for or participates in athletic competitions) and someone of the same age who remains inactive?
Studies have shown that masters athletes are the best examples of successful aging – i.e., getting older with minimal lifestyle restrictions. For example, masters athletes lose heart rate and lung capacity slower than inactive people, with less than half the loss each decade (5.5% vs 12%).
Through endurance exercise, older athletes improve the physiological biomarkers needed for everyday activities, including better muscle mass, strength and power, and improved independence of movement and function.
Further, such improvements dramatically slow the effects of aging, with masters athletes performing like their 20-something counterparts in some areas.
The bottom line: endurance and strength sports both have the potential to turn the tide and fend off the worst risks of aging. You’re not consigned to rapid decline – you can take back control.
Benefits of endurance exercise
Cardiorespiratory: Heart and lung health
Endurance exercise is amazing for improving the health – and strength – of your heart and lungs.
The heart and lungs are the two areas where chronic illness is most likely to develop, and where they are most life-threatening. According to the CDC, heart disease and chronic lower respiratory diseases are the 1st and 4th most common causes of death, respectively. And most “natural” causes of death like heart disease and lung infections are worsened by inactivity and its effects – including obesity, poor fitness, and metabolic issues.
Endurance exercise directly reduces your risk of many of these issues at multiple levels. It strengthens the heart and lungs, reduces the hormonal problems that cause life-threatening chronic disease, and improves your health and fitness, even at rest.
Regular endurance exercise can reduce your risk of stroke, heart disease, artery problems, lung infections, and the severity of cold and flu. It’ll also improve your performance and capacity in all kinds of exercise – including improved heart rate variability, a key to post-exercise recovery and progress!
Endurance exercise also enhances immune function over the long-term. Regular, moderate exercise has been shown to improve the blood levels of immune function factors, helping reduce the impact of over-active inflammation, and improved metabolism in immune cells.
The result is a longer and healthier/happier life, less time in the hospital, less time bed-bound from illness, and greater physical capacity to go out and do things far later in life.
Musculoskeletal: Bigger, stronger, safer
Muscles: Strength, resilience, reactivity
While it’s not going to be as direct as strength training, endurance exercise does provide stimulus for improving the strength of muscles. It’s a way of using the muscles and it has high recovery demands, while producing less strength than you’d get lifting weights.
However, the combined repetition of endurance exercise – with the metabolic changes in the muscles themselves – helps to make muscles stronger and healthier. The benefits are primarily seen in muscular endurance, of course, but you get a little bit of everything: strength, power, endurance, and reactivity to impact.
These are great for reducing the risk of fall and fracture injuries as we age, but specifically helps to maintain everyday activities. The intensity of running is low, but these returns are universally helpful, which is why an appropriate pace and distance of running can be a low-risk strategy.
Power and Everyday Life
Endurance exercise also helps you improve and preserve your ability to produce power. This is like strength but explosive – rapidly producing force that you might see in throws and jumps.
What’s interesting is that recent research suggests explosivity, or force-velocity, is even more important than strength for activities in daily life (ADL) as we get older. It seems to be the difference between being comfortable with your everyday life and struggling with simple things like standing up from a chair.
Regular exercise will increase and/or maintain your power output, especially as you gain experience and begin to integrate intervals of higher-intensity endurance exercise. Paced intervals or sprint intervals, for example, can rapidly improve your power output.
Remember, however, that higher-power exercise does involve a higher level of risk to the joints. It’s something you should work towards. Also, it requires longer recovery.
Tendon remodelling
As long as you’re controlling the balance of stress and recovery, endurance exercise is great for improving tendon strength. It uses these “passive” structures extensively, prompting them to strengthen and also improving blood flow to drive recovery and adaptation.
Tendons and muscles work together – and they develop through the same process of stress-recovery in response to exercise.
Weakness in connective tissues like the tendons is one of the ways that injury risk creeps up on us as we age: inactive tendons lose their strength and stiffness, reducing control of joints and increasing the risk of degeneration.
Tendon remodelling does take more time, however: it’s estimated to be 5-10x longer than muscle strengthening. This is why it’s important to build up slowly – your muscles might be ready to go longer and harder, but are your tendons ready yet?
The cyclical training of endurance exercise is great for improving tendon strength, reducing joint injury risk, and improving the quality of life as you age. They also receive 5-7 times as much blood during exercise, providing the nutrients necessary for proper recovery and maintenance.
Bone density
Bones aren’t just the scaffolding of your body. They’re alive and they get stronger or weaker depending on what your lifestyle looks like.
As you age, the usual trajectory is to lose bone density and mass, increasing osteoporosis risk. This can lead to a cycle of breaks and hospitalisation that absolutely ruin the quality of life of people over 50.
The repetitive impact of endurance exercise can strengthen the bones when mixed with proper recovery. This is key for improving your long-term physical health and fitness, building resilience to falls and fractures, fighting off the hospitalisation cycle, and empowering you to keep exercising longer into old age.
This is also important for other common joint problems – like the degradation of bones in joints and chronic joint pain. Osteoarthritis accelerates rapidly when bones are weak and friction causes them to become sensitive, painful, and even more vulnerable to degradation.
Regular exercise combats this aging-related bone loss, as well as providing a buffer of strength to slow decline. If you have stronger, healthier, denser bones then even when you get very old and can’t prevent mineral loss, you have more to lose – prolonging your physical capacity and reinforcing that crucial quality of life!
How to do it better
Focus on exercise technique
Endurance exercise might be lower intensity than strength training, but it doesn’t mean you can slack off. With the repetitive impacts that come with endurance training, technique matters as much as ever: you’re going to be doing it so many times that poor technique adds up fast.
Whatever endurance exercise you prefer – running, rowing, cycling, team sports, wheelchair basketball – the idea is to move smoothly and without strain. Good running technique, for example, reduces your risk of common injuries like heel spurs or knee tendon damage while also improving your run times and how often you can train.
This applies across the board: good technique improves performance and reduces injury risk. It puts the strain on the appropriate tissues, which is going to allow those ones to strengthen and improve, while not over-stressing passive tissues like cartilage. Risks down, performance up!
Take some time to look into how the experts in your favourite training style perform their movements and pay attention to coaches. In the 21st century, there are tons of specialist resources out there for every type of exercise, and the more you pay attention and apply it in your practice, the better you’ll move.
Technique isn’t just to make it look pretty. It’s to get the most results with the least risk!
Pick an appropriate starting point
Controlling where you start is key to building a foundation of strength and resilience in your joints and muscles. Start well below what you could do at maximum effort. You should then progress without over-stressing the body.
Start endurance exercise with a duration: give yourself a time you think you can train for without stopping. You can use intervals of rest or lower-intensity exercise with higher-intensity exercise to get familiar with the movements and build up your endurance capacity.
For example, you might start running with 3–4-minute bouts, with 1-2 minutes of walking between them. Repeating this process for 20-30 minutes may be a full workout if you’re totally new to endurance exercise. You could then work towards constant running for that time by increasing the running intervals and/or reducing walking times.
Watch your Rate of Progress
Progress needs to be patient to be sustainable. It’s not useful to take the biggest jumps you possibly could if you’re going to make them infrequent: your body responds best to a gradual upward curve of stress and performance.
The idea is to stay behind what you could do if you absolutely had to. Workouts need to be challenging, but they also need to be spaced out to allow for recovery and adaptation – or you’ll just be tired and frustrated with your lack of progress.
Mileage is great because you can measure it and adjust it very easily. The usual guideline for running is to set an upper limit to your mileage increase of around 10% per week. Any more than this is likely to be a faster rate of development than your body can handle week-on-week.
This is a good guideline, and you can work around with it to see what suits your personal needs: perhaps you work better in the 5-7% range, right now, and so you stick with that. Perhaps it’s even less, if you’re already experienced, and you don’t want to push yourself too far too soon.
This applies across the board for endurance exercise, with the possible exception of endurance-heavy sports. In that form of exercise, you don’t control how long you’re moving for, so you might want to look at how often you’re playing to control the stress on your body – counting up weekly or monthly minutes to get a better idea.
Concurrent training is key: Blend strength and endurance
As we age, there’s always the concern that natural decline is in the background. Yet it’s something we can fend off – and even beat back – with proper exercise and recovery. We can become stronger and fitter than ever after 40.
But this does mean taking some precautions to control the aging process. When doing endurance exercise, make sure to also include strength training in your regimen. Strength training is a way of preparing the muscles and joints, as well as reinforcing the bones, to help prevent injury from the repetitive action of running, rowing, or cycling.
I’ve talked about strength training at-length before, but the key factors are:
- Strength is the best way of preventing injury
- You can build range-of-motion in a safe and effective way with weight training
- Strengthening the stretch-shortening cycles of muscles is crucial for better endurance performance
- You can directly target problem areas more easily with “isolation” strength training that targets one muscle or joint
- Building power and speed – crucial for health and wellbeing in endurance exercise – is easiest with some additional weight
- Strength and endurance aren’t opposites: they are different factors that have a common source and work really well together!
Practicing both strength and endurance together is called concurrent training and a lot of the recent research is telling us that – while you aren’t going to be a world champion weightlifter and world record ultramarathon runner – you can improve both at the same time.
These are the two main factors in fitness and tying them together can make your training really productive, much safer, and – my favourite – really enjoyable!
Closing remarks
The way that you train after 40 is going to be a bigger determinant than ever of your physical and mental wellbeing. When we look at the range of benefits, you’re covering everything from your heart to your mind, and the musculoskeletal system along the way.
The things you do and ignore are more important than you think. Every year is a chance to fend off aging and improve. Life gets busy, but regular endurance exercise is a few hours a week and it can save you hours, months, or years of high-quality living as you age.
Endurance training will pay back on your time-investment in the long run!
