Maintenance is Growth
Exploring how to use maintenance to create time for life and organize your priorities.
Exercise as we age can be a scary prospect, but it doesn't need to be. All too often we see people stop moving once they enter the professional stages of their career. We spend our entire childhood and early adulthood playing with our friends, playing sports, and moving around pursuing hobbies, but once we hit the professional stage we notice this large shift. This shift is away from moderate to intense exertion, the lack of play, and the fear of being seen as weird or different. But why is this, why does it seem that our joy associated with movement goes away, and why the pressure to conform to the sedentary life take over? For all too many it seems that once they hit this stage their soul dies but then they continue to live on for a long time. Much like the damage of chronically starving yourself, the lack of consistent movement can be just as debilitating in one's life. This is truly where that idea of stealing your life comes in with the exercise portion of it all. I want to talk about how to view maintaining, what it takes to maintain your physical conditioning, and then considerations to avoid these pitfalls.
To begin, let's talk about what maintaining is so we are on the same page as avoiding this early loss of movement. Maintaining is the idea of doing just enough to make sure we can continue to do what we did yesterday without undergoing enough stimulus for you to get out of your comfort zone and grow. We hear the excuses of being too tired, too busy, or it is just too hard to make time for exercise. These are very short-sighted views of exercise and what it takes to maintain the current level of activity that you're at. It has been shown recently that it takes roughly 1/9th the amount of work that it takes to grow to maintain. Slightly more as you age bringing this up to 1/7th the amount of work. When we boil this down what that means is, that we just need to be sure that we are providing a consistent low-intensity stimulus for us to stay at the levels that we are from the previous day. Looking at those common excuses that we hear, if it takes you 45 minutes in the gym to get an adequate stimulus for you to grow, you can strip the weight down and go through those motions to maintain the position that you were at. The last caveat that I want to put in, is there will be some loss in general muscle recruitment and form and technique changes that still need to take place. Now with the idea of what maintenance is, we will chat about why it is important to consider this.
You may have heard that once you get old your body just starts hurting or you may have people in your circle around you that say they can’t do some sort of physical task because “they’ve gotten too old for it.” When you hear excuses like this it puts into perspective why the idea of maintaining is so important. If they had just done the amount of work from the moment that they were able to do that task then it would not be a second thought about participating in whatever activity it is. As you get older the ability to maintain turns into growth within itself. If you take the point of where decline tends to start, which is around the age of 35, if you maintain the person that you are at 35 and bring that to when you’re 45, you’re a very in-shape 45-year-old. If you take it further into 55, 65, or even 75, you’ll be one of the most fit for your age. As you get older, that idea of maintenance isn’t just staying where you are, but it is combating the natural decline that comes with age making you grow your abilities in relation to where you would have been had you not maintained your previous self. This maintenance can come in many forms, it takes intentional work to make sure that you stay on course, however. I say intentional because the categories that you want to maintain have to have intentional work put toward that to help maintain. You can work at maintaining your balance, flexibility, strength, endurance, or even your work capacity. We will then explore the ideas of what putting effort toward maintaining those looks like.
Now that we know what maintenance is, and why it is important, let’s touch on some steps that you can take toward maintaining the progress that you have made and when to do so. It is rather simple when you break it down so I will touch on each of the different avenues that I had spoken about previously. When we want to maintain our strength and endurance it comes down to just doing the same thing week to week, never changing, and never pushing outside of that comfort zone. It may sound easy, but that is because it is. We don’t need to push toward that point of failure or out of our comfort zone if the point that we are at is a place that we are happy with. If you are happy that you can run for an hour, just make sure you consistently do an hour of running to ensure that you keep that ability. Maintaining balance and flexibility. It is the same idea, keep testing the ability of your balance or your flexibility, but never push too far out of your comfort zone to stimulate growth. One of the big reasons that you want to put something into maintenance mode, aside from the idea that maintenance is growth as you age, is to give focus to other aspects of your fitness. Say you are happy with your strength progress but you wish you had a bit more endurance so you could handle that amount of weight but for more reps. You will look to put your strength into that maintenance mode, using the same amount of weight each week with no intention of trying to up it, then we will then focus on expanding the amount of endurance work that we are doing to push that area of fitness outside of your comfort zone. Creating a tactical approach to using maintenance periods to facilitate intentional change within other aspects of fitness and not overwhelming the amount of time committed or the fatigue accumulated.
The last thing that I wanted to talk about was the common pitfalls that happen when we think about the idea of maintenance. I hope at this point you have a good understanding of why maintenance is important and how it is seen as growth as you age. That doesn’t mean there aren’t pitfalls and common issues that can arise when people get put on maintenance mode for a prolonged amount of time. Some of these struggles include: maintenance being boring, not making the maintenance work a priority, and doing less than what is required to maintain even when they think that they are doing enough. The first and second pitfalls do run parallel to one another, maintenance can be boring which can then lead to them not making it a priority and a focus. Maintenance doesn’t need to be boring, if you want to maintain your bench press strength, you can pick any variety of pressing movements to help keep that movement fresh and exciting. You can work with different rep ranges and different equipment, it all comes down to focusing on making sure that you continue to show up and do the movement. Leading to the idea of not making it a priority. If you are intentionally maintaining, you want to have a plan with it and keep in mind the duration, if you don’t have an exit maintaining strategy and just put it off forever, then it can feel like you’re spinning your wheels at times. This can cause people to question why they are doing it, and then down the way, it can cause you to fall off. This is why I said that you need to be intentional with your need to maintain. This leads to the last point of thinking you’re doing enough when you might be undershooting it. There is a wide variety of what it takes to maintain but as a general principle, it still takes effort if you are doing the same as you were doing last week with no growth in any aspect, sets, reps, rest times, or weight then you will be staying in the same spot that you were thus maintaining. It is the easiest way to do it without thinking too much!
To recap why maintenance is so important, it is truly growth as we age. We combat the effects of the natural decline with aging. The amount of work that it takes to maintain is less than it takes to grow as it just ensures that we aren’t pushing that comfort zone. With that idea established though it does take intentional work in that area for you to ensure that work is still being made. With intentional work in a certain area to maintain, it can free up the focus to grow other avenues of your health and wellness. Maintaining that perspective of being able to do tomorrow what you can do today, allows you to be more present in your life and lets you keep up with the tasks that you want to be able to perform tomorrow. Allowing you to become more resilient and strong for a prolonged period of time. At the end of the day, the idea of maintenance can come after you’ve been growing for a while, or even at the stage of life you’re at. No matter the place you’re coming from, making sure your health stays the same or grows will always be better than letting it fall by the wayside.
If you need further ideas on how to improve your sleep quality always feel free to shoot me a message, or if you have topics that you’d like me to chat about, questions, clarity, or any other feedback please feel free to reach out to my email at sidneyabartlett@gmail.com also share this around with anybody who may find some useful information within this or any of my other posts. The more people that get the information to them, one step at a time we can hopefully work to build a more healthy society!
Until next time,
Sidney Bartlett, CSCS