Exercise isn’t all or nothing

Go hard or go home

Back in Roy’s Gym in the ’90s, a few friends were fond of saying things like, “Go hard or go home!” In my 20s, I was all for it, and I carried this way of thinking all the way into my early 40s. I knew, even at the time, that this attitude was responsible for various low-level injuries and many, many colds and coughs as I pushed to failure whilst also working hard for long hours.

This was the foolishness of machismo. I had already learned, in my mid-20s, that I couldn’t workout as hard as I did whilst working hard as a class-teacher and also trying to beat road-cycling sprint PBs – one of them had to go, and I backed off the cycling. But I couldn’t seem to back off the weights.

What my fifties taught me

What I’ve learnt through my 50s is that I can apply the attitude I took to cycling to my workouts: when I’m not at peak, but I’m not so rough that I want or need to be inactive, I can still do the workout, but I can back off, I can do fewer reps, easier variations, that sort of thing.

A client who made the choice

The other Friday, an Active Choice client told me he’d done his second solo go at the new workout I’d given him, and he’d absolutely smashed it: a rep or two more on everything, and more importantly, he had got in the groove. Then, on the Sunday, he reported that an unrelated activity had been cancelled, he’d gone for a good walk, but had still felt under-exercised…so he did the same workout, same movements and timings, but just did an easy number of reps for each. He said it felt great.

I think I felt even better than he did, TBH. He’d used what I’d given him to make an active choice. If he’d tried to repeat or beat what he’d done two days earlier, he’d likely have been disappointed, or, worse, risked injury or lowered immunity – we just can’t train hard as frequently in our late 50s as we could in our 20s and 30s. He did what he needed to do to feel good. Go hard or…maybe go easy? You make the choice.