For many of us, fitness isn’t just a form of escape or a means to an athletic end — in some ways, it’s also a constant source of anxiety. As I get older (and the odometer on my injuries continues to climb) my body responds to workouts differently, my results become less pronounced, and the guy I see in the mirror looks less and less like the version of myself I recall proudly posing in front of mirrors back in my twenties and more and more like the bearded dads I remember from 80’s movies.

At its heart, that transition is what Old Man Fitness is all about – learning to adapt our perspective on fitness as our relationship with it evolves. Gone are the days of effortless six packs and workouts being a means to burn off excess energy… in fact, now I find it almost impossible to imagine a version of me with any excess energy to burn at all. Nowadays, when you see me in the gym, it’s because discipline won out over the clarion call of napping on an isomat for forty-five minutes while my wife wrangles our daughter on her own.

I’ve been asked what constitutes “old” in terms of Old Man Fitness several times since starting this column, sometimes from folks that relate to these articles but don’t quite feel old enough to self-identify as such, and other times from self-declared “old” fitness enthusiasts that take umbrage at my use of the word, seeing as I’m only in my thirties. I usually provide the same response: it’s not always about what year a truck was made; sometimes it’s about the mileage. Last year’s model with 190,000 rough and tumble miles on it will face a lot of the same challenges as a well-kept twenty-year-old Sunday driver.

Likewise, with fitness; with too many broken bones to count, metal pins, screws, plates and wires in every joint below my waist but one, slipped discs, a trick shoulder and a lifetime of rugby, football, and fighting related concussions, I’m lucky to be getting out of bed at all some days. I may have rolled off the factory floor more recently than some, but you’d be hard pressed to find another guy of the same model year with more ticks on his odometer.

 

The challenges we face when coming back from injury are similar to those we face as time gets the better of us, and for those of us now facing a combination of age and injury related problems, the need to adjust fire in our workout regimens grows exponentially. That doesn’t mean we can’t still accomplish incredible things — what it does mean, is that we may need to use different approaches than we could have in our younger, injury free days.

The thing is, as fitness gets harder, it’s easy for our motivation to wane and eventually, for even discipline to falter in the face of life’s challenges. Maybe you work 80 hours a week. Maybe your teenage son is getting in trouble at school, your marriage is on the rocks, or your bad knee has become such a hindrance that all it takes is a flight of stairs to ruin your morning. Once upon a time, surviving this long would have made you a wise and storied village elder — now you’re just trying to convince yourself that one cup of yogurt is “enough” for lunch as you poke at the bit of belly that hangs over the seat belt of your car.