As the Baby Boomers , who fueled marathon and triathlon crazes, enter their 50s and 60s, their unquenched competitiveness can become a threat to their stiffening joints, rigid muscles, hardening arteries and high-mileage hearts. And it doesn't help that nearly every exercise message they hear emphasizes more.
It's as if nobody wants to acknowledge that exercise isn't the fountain of youth. The competitive flame is hard to extinguish, as the returns from retirement of cyclist Lance Armstrong and professional quarterback Brett Favre have shown.
As co-author of a new book called "Fit Soul, Fit Body," Mark Allen (a 51-year-old athletic coach once known as the world's fittest man) argues against fighting age with more hours on the treadmill. "If you can't let up on the competitive part of it, if you have to go as fast at 50 as you did at 20, you will grind yourself into the ground and become stressed out, bitter and unhealthy," he says.
A study published last year in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine reinforced other recent research showing that intensity tends to diminish the view of physical activity as pleasant. "Evidence shows that feeling worse during exercise translates to doing less exercise in the future," says Pateleimon Ekkekakis, an author of that study and a professor of kinesiology at Iowa State University.
Taking on new sports or challenges can give long-used muscles a break while feeding the desire for new goals, says Marjorie Albohm, president of the National Athletic Trainers' Association, who at 58 has become a recent devotee of spinning. "As you age, you have to be flexible about new activities.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2009
