G.9: Getting Old(er)

The final post (11/11) in a series on the intersection of data and fitness.

Okinawa, Japan. Author’s photo, 2022.

Click here for the rest of the series.

'Strong people are harder to kill ... and more useful in general’ - Mark Rippetoe

That quote was the philosophy at Tacoma Strength, and it’s emblazoned on the back of a well-worn workout shirt I still wear. I’ll be very sad on the day that shirt finally wears out. Because, eventually, everything does. But today is not that day.

You’re not as old as you think you are

I had the privilege of working out with Don King at Tacoma Strength from 2009 and 2017, minus a brief two years from 2012 to 2014 when I went to grad school as a Downing Scholar. When I came back from that sabbatical at the ripe age of 33, Don was competing in the Crossfit Open 55-59 age bracket. He is still competing and still crushing it today in the 65+ bracket. Once, back in 2015, I asked another friend in the gym, ‘Do you think I’ll look as fit as Don does when I’m 55?’. In a sharp burn, my friend replied, ‘Erik, you don’t look as fit as Don now.’

Don’s ability to continue to perform is due in large part to an indomitable spirit. He has a lot of humility for someone who performs at his level. I’ve never once seen him show any arrogance in the gym, and he’s always there to motivate those around him. He has long been one of my favorite workout partners, as much because of his spirit as because he can kick my ass in most workouts.

When I dropped back in to Tacoma during a visit in 2021, Don was there. As we were about to start the main workout, he called over from his rower, ‘Erik, you’re doing the challenge scale, right?’

I begrudgingly laughed, ‘Well I am now.’ That’s exactly the push I needed, in that exact moment at 0530 when I definitely wasn’t feeling like I wanted to do a challenge set. And it came from a man twenty years my senior.

I’ll concede Don is a unique individual. But just because I still don’t look like Don, doesn’t mean I’m allowed to give myself excuses to not work out anymore. And yet, that’s exactly what a lot of colonels and sergeants major do. The field grade leader who stopped caring about their fitness may be a trope, but it’s one that is present in every brigade in the army.

This midlife period is when most senior leaders tend to move into more mentally demanding positions and, as a result, become increasingly sedentary while working longer hours.¹

Too many soldiers chalk this up as just part of the inevitability of getting older. Doing so ignores the agency we have in how we age.

Many adults in midlife misattribute their physical condition to primarily aging and underestimate the role their own decisions play in the aging process. Several research studies, particularly those that followed twins across their lifespan, attribute 25% of longevity to heredity. Thus, environmental factors and lifestyle choices play a far more significant role in determining longevity and the resulting quality of life than people realize.

Three quarters of how we age comes down to the decisions we make. While eating well matters more as we get older, keeping up our fitness can also help avoid debilitating conditions like type-2 diabetes. Opting to be sedentary means we’re choosing to shed muscle mass and bone density at a faster rate. Meanwhile, continuing to challenge ourselves physically allows us to not only delay the loss of strength, but continue to see gains. As I cited in G.3:

For example, men over the age of sixty-six who trained at 80% of their one-repetition maximum achieved gains in strength similar to improvements seen in much younger men. Moreover, adults over the age of ninety also improved their strength, resulting in higher levels of mobility.

Fitness also helps regulate your hormone levels. At the pre-command course last spring, a H2F leader came to explain the new army program to us.² My peer students didn’t ask any questions about the new facilities, coaching, or nutrition resources they might be able to bring to the unit they would soon be commanding. Instead, they asked for easier access to testosterone replacement for themselves.

These leaders saw lowered testosterone as the cause of their lack of fitness, despite the fact only about 2.1% of men have low-testosterone and typically at an older age than we are. Where low testosterone is common is ‘…in overweight, obese, or diabetic men’. Regardless, testosterone therapy might not help. A review of 156 randomized controlled trials found testosterone therapy ‘…did not benefit cardiovascular health, sexual function, muscle strength, mood, or cognitive function’.

Know what did help? Vigorous exercise. These future commanders had the causal arrow going the wrong way. Their testosterone dropped because they stopped being fit, not the other way around. They could turn it back on, they just needed to get back in the gym.

As you age, you should be lifting more often, not less. Not just because of the above benefits to your heart and hormones, but also to avoid the injuries which a fitness paradigm without weights invites:

…the most common overuse injuries are typically attributed to improper training characterized by repetitive physical activity that the body is not prepared to perform. These injuries are primarily linked to running and include the typical overuse injuries such as, runner’s knee, stress fractures, tendonitis, and plantar fasciitis. Moreover, 66% of soldiers 45 years old and older account for most overuse injuries.

If you’re a soldier over 40 you really should read all of chapters 2 and 3 in the army’s Maximizing Senior Leader Health and Wellbeing. You’ll find the same arguments made throughout ‘Where Data Meets Gains’: lift more, run less, train to failure, work on your mobility, and breathe better. One thing not covered I do recommend is finding friends to join you. It can get lonely when you pin on ever higher rank. But there’s a reason we don’t wear rank while working out. Fitness is the great equalizer, so go find some workout partners and get after it. Don’t let rank be the reason you’re not working out.

You ain’t young either

The benefits of keeping your fitness up as you age are indisputable. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to change how you’re getting it. As we hit middle age, payments on loans we took out in our 20s start coming due. Many of us took out those loans never expecting to pay them back. Standing in the turret of a Bradley in downtown Ar Ramadi, LT Davis certainly never expected to live to be 30, never mind 40. But here we are.

As I’ve written previously, your one-rep max days are probably behind you. Knees and shoulders are some of the most popular pain points. Much of that comes down to overuse, too often from too much running, or worse, too much ruck running. I could pick out every veteran of the 82nd airborne in my battalion just from the sound of their shuffling run. They thought their knees were shot from jumping, but most of the debts they picked up were from trudging up and down Ardennes. If this sounds familiar, then you need to go check out a rower or an assault bike.

Perhaps the best advice I’ve ever been given on aging came from a Special Forces chief: ‘Motion is lotion’. Those pain points need to get the mobility work every session. About half of the mobility exercises I do are dedicated to my hips, shoulders, and knees. I think Hip switches should be part of everyone’s regimen. My PT Jason clued me in that injuries don’t just come from trying to back squat too much weight. A lot of times they can come from weak ankles. ‘Christmas lights’, he said. ‘Stepping off the ladder can be the end of people’.

Sustaining high levels of weight-bearing training also increases bone mineral density, strength, balance, and coordination, all of which lower fall risk and instances of bone fracture later in life.

These days I do a lot of work on my independent leg movement. Workouts like ‘It’s Just A Mile’ and ‘tabata sprints’ force me to switch from accelerating to decelerating, while ‘Death By 10m’ works my ability to pivot back and forth abruptly. I do ‘tabata pendulum lunges’ once a fortnight, which requires you to lunge forward and back on the same leg without stopping while holding a kettlebell overhead on one side. It does great things for your stability. Bulgarian split squats with kettlebells are another way to work each whole leg independently.

Just because you’re not young, doesn’t mean your PR days are behind you. I earned 41 PRs last year. Some were in achieving new bests in old workouts, often row sets. But half were in finding new workouts and movements to challenge myself. My heavy snatch days may be in my rear view, but I’m still improving on my bar muscle ups. Looking back over last year’s data, I only deadlifted over 310 pounds twice: both were during an ACFT. Turns out you don’t have to do massively heavy deadlifts to still exceed the standard.

‘You’re always being assessed.’

More than one person has reached out across this Gains series to ask, ‘What’s your take on age / rank?’ For me, it comes back to readiness. Are you ready to do your job? To put it explicitly:

1. If your job requires higher standards, then you need to meet them. Regardless of age, gender, or day of the week.

2. For everyone else, the army has a minimum standard, and as long as you’re in a deployable job, you need to meet it.

I’ve written a handful of things in this series that have pissed people off:

• the two-mile run is dumb

• BMI is dumber

• colonels need to get back in their lane and stop telling soldiers when to work out.

I admitted I don’t even own a reflective belt, and I haven’t worked out with my shirt tucked in since 2007. I even wear ankle socks. But saying age isn’t an excuse not to meet the standard might be my most controversial opinion.

If the army elects to adopt higher standards for close combat jobs, then all of those MOSs need to be able to score 450 points across the ACFT, with a minimum of 150 pounds in the deadlift. As bodybuilder Ronnie Coleman put it:

‘Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights'.

Sub in ‘close combat’ for ‘body builder’ and you get what I mean.

I can’t stand on the altar of readiness and preach for tougher fitness standards because the jobs demand it, only to quietly excuse people who can’t meet those standards, especially just because they’re older. The expression ‘You’re always being assessed’ is something you start hearing at SFAS and you never stop hearing it, even after you retire from units like Special Forces and the Rangers.³

There are roles across our army for soldiers with close combat experience who can’t sustain their readiness anymore. We probably need to separate out the ready close combat jobs from the rest. If someone’s ever played in the NFL, no one could ever take that away from them. But only the current ones get to call themselves ‘players’. Not every job for an infantryman needs to be combat ready. There’re staff positions that need an old salt’s experience and knowledge, and our training and recruiting pipeline are critical to keeping the army ready to fight tomorrow.

However, I’ve seen enough soldiers who worked their way back from injuries to know it is doable. I even had the privilege of working alongside soldiers with significant combat injuries that recertified as combat ready. It’s humbling to see a fellow soldier missing limbs who’s still crushing it next to you. If they can do it, it’s hard to argue why I can’t.

As for the minimum readiness standards, they are the minimums and with reason. We know about the 507th Maintenance Company and units like it throughout the last twenty years. Nothing about high end conflict makes that sort of unplanned combat less likely to happen. If you’re going to be deployable, then you need to meet the ACFT minimum. I’m not saying you get the boot the first time you don’t meet the standard. Everyone gets one bad day. I also really like the proposal in the RAND study for a ‘trial by combat’ challenge. But readiness needs to be the measure.

There are jobs for the non-deployable, but only so many. The numbers from 2018 are a little dated, but I’m not certain 11% of the army’s jobs should be non-deployable ones. In the end, the army is a force that prioritizes people over platforms, and so those people need to be fit to fight. Last year, the average soldier on the front in Ukraine was in their early forties, the same as many senior field grades in our army. The Ukrainian recruits are overwhelmingly new to service too, with some joining after Russia’s invasion in 2014, and most following the expanded conflict in 2022. These ‘new recruits’ have come from all walks of life, something a US ‘great power war’ would equally rely on.

Rank doesn’t get a pass either. Your fitness as a commander can have an outsized impact on your whole organization. I don’t know if a brigade or division commander needs to meet ‘close combat’ standards, but they should need to meet the minimums for the army.

Is that hard? Maybe.

Hanging up the uniform

We all leave the army at some point. I’ve got fewer years in the army ahead of me than I have behind me. When we depart, our fitness habits will have an outsized impact on how we enjoy the benefits we earned for our service. What are yours going to be?

Getting out of the army is a passage from the old way into a new and uncertain future, not unlike New Year's Day. People have come to regard the second Friday of January as ‘Quitter’s Day’, marking the point when many people give up on their New Year’s Resolutions. While many people don’t stick to their resolutions, this probably has more to do with how they approached it than any personal failing. As you plan for a life outside the army, you should leverage the right cognitive tricks to help your success in maintaining your fitness. Don’t have a zero-defect attitude. Not getting it done yesterday isn’t an excuse to not try again today.

If the only thing that kept you fit while you were in was an NCOIC smoking you, what’s going to keep you going when you’re out? What’s going to be the spark that gets you moving? If you hated doing ‘push-up, sit-up, run’, what’s something different you can do instead? If you’re struggling with the wear and tear of overuse injuries, what’s something new and shorter you can do instead? What’s an innovative way for you to lure your friends into joining you?

Giving yourself some grace

I still hate doing Devil’s EMOM, but it’s right there on my schedule for Monday. That said, I can find it hard to start workouts where I know I’m not going to get anywhere close to my old PR. Finding new PRs is great, but that doesn’t make not even coming close to an old one any easier on the ego.

I’ve had to learn to let that go, to give myself some grace. That might mean cutting the weight to something more manageable. Sometimes it means not caring about the time I get. The best WoDs are the ones where I didn’t even want to start, but then I did. All I wanted was ‘finished’ anyways. My old swimming pre-meet warm-up is its own workout today. You can’t let who you used to be get in the way of who you are today and who you want to be tomorrow.

'You have no obligations to your former selves. They know less than you, and they don't exist'. - Hank Green

Those old PRs have their purpose, but you need to ignore them the minute they’re getting in your way. Getting gains today is all that matters.

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Corporal Seyit

The inspiration for this week’s WoD comes from The Battle of Galipoli. Seyit Ali Çabuk was a gunner along the Dardanelles. A heavy naval bombardment left his artillery’s loading crane damaged, and the other gunners injured. On his own, Corporal Seyit carried three artillery shells — each weighing 276 kg (~608.5 pounds) — to the gun where he then fired them, striking the HMS Ocean which capsized shortly after.

Following the battle, Seyit was promoted to corporal and publicized as an iconic Turkish hero. He was asked to pose for a picture with the one of the shells he had carried, but Corporal Seyit could not move the shell no matter how hard he tried. Unfazed, Corporal Seyit said, "If war breaks out again, I'll lift it again." The photographer used a wooden shell for the photo above.

The WoD is a short one that is easily scaled as needed. The focus is on working your grip strength. Farmer’s carry bars aren’t at every gym, so be prepared to use regular bars or improvise with something else like kettlebells. For the sandbags I usually throw one on my shoulders and then carry two, one in each hand.

While Corporal Seyit is a sprint, Gallipoli is a slog. But even though it’s long, the weights shouldn’t be enough to worry too much about injury. As a general rule, if you can clean it, you can carry it. This WoD works great for the older crowd who don’t want to get injured. Plus, you’ve got that ‘old man grip’, right?

1. The quotes from this post come from Hosie, COL Michael, COL Maurice L. Sipos, and LTC Thomas W. Britt. "Maximizing Senior Leader Health and Wellbeing." (2023). Links should take you directly to the page they are lifted from.

2. H2F is the Army trying to catch up to SOF’s THOR3 (Tactical Human Optimization Rapid Rehabilitation and Reconditioning). Both are programs focused on improving the mental and physical health of soldiers. Good programs include nutritionists, mental and physical strength coaches, and robust PT resources.

3. Special Forces Assessment and Selection. The 24-day course candidates attend that tests their ability to train to become a Special Forces soldier - a Green Beret.