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What is 40fit?

40fit supports a community of athletes age 40+ with Fitness, Community and Lifestyle resources. The goal is to support performance, lifestyle and quality of life for 40 plus athletes. By combining the resources of evidenced based science, anecdotal experience, and the community, individuals are challenged to look at aging through a refreshing perspective and reach their maximum genetic potential.

Why?

The more I trained using various methods, the more I realized there was something missing.  I noticed that even though I was significantly more fit than most of my peers, my experience in training was not the same as the “younger crowd.” The higher my fitness level became, the more I realized the value of fitness and lifestyle factors that I paid less attention to in the past. This is true for almost any athlete seeking higher levels of performance and capacity. Any inexperienced athlete can make quick and sometimes astonishing gains.

40fit programming is based on my own personal experiences as an athlete, evidenced based science and the collective experiences of the community. The programming model is a conjugate of these inputs and represents an adaptive construct to support the maximum genetic potential of each individual athlete. There is no one system that can meet the needs of all individuals, and anyone who would tell you otherwise is selling something for the purposes of selling something. The programming in the training model will constantly change and be a work in progress. We will not follow fads or training techniques just because someone else recommends them or they have become sexy. The foundation of any training should be based on what works, not what sells. I know that puts us at a significant disadvantage to spread the word, but I hope that the results of those who engage in our training will be evidence enough.

Jun 1, 2018

Coach D and Trent discuss the basics of programming for the Masters athlete. Our programming philosophy is built upon the Stress-Recovery-Adaption cycle, originally outlined in Hans Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome in 1936. When we talk about training, we think of individual workouts as stressors, and the time between workouts spent sleeping and eating as recovery. If the stressor is sufficient to disrupt homeostasis AND the recovery is sufficient between sessions, then an adaptation occurs. It's easy to apply to strength training - the tonnage moved (weight x reps) is the stressor, the food and sleep in between the session is the recovery, and getting stronger is the outcome, the adaptation - but it applies to all aspects of physiology.

 

Thus, programming is the manipulation of the basic training variables to achieve a desired outcome over a period of time. We also subscribe to the Minimum Effective Dose principle. This principle is taken from medicine, and means that we use the absolute minimum amount of stress needed to drive adaptation. Hard is good. Hard is necessary, if the workout is going to provide a stress. But more is not better, and we want to make our workouts just hard enough to drive progress, and no more. We can't forget about recovery -- if a single workout is so taxing that it leaves us sore and "wrecked" for a week, then it prevented productive training during that week, and may have cost us whatever adaptation we gained from doing that workout (since we tend to detrain without engaging in the SRA cycle).

 

So, we aim to make our workouts just hard enough, and to change a single variable at a time. The basic variables are intensity (the weight on the bar in a strength program, or the target speed at which a row is performed in conditioning work) and volume (how many sets we perform). Other variables include exercise selection, which we rarely change in a strength program since the basic compound lifts drive the most strength gains, and frequency (how often you do an exercise in a week or training cycle). Importantly, when designing programming we only change one variable at a time, so that we know what works (or doesn't). Changing multiple variables at once does not give us useful data regarding what is actually driving progress.