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Master athletes train for fun, to maintain good health, for fitness and for competitive spirit.
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Generally men are more motivated by results, ke women seek sociality instead.
- As people age, inevitably their physique and performance also change. With what consequences?
Howold are you? How many times do you practice during the week? What are the reasons that motivate you to train and engage in sports? Most important to masters are the pursuit of fun, health and fitness, social interaction, and the pleasure of competition. On average, men seem more stimulated by achievement and competitive spirit; women by maintaining physical fitness and seeking opportunities for fun and socializing. Who exactly is a masters athlete? The precise age changes from sport to sport. It is defined by each federation and depends on the age at which maximum values are reached in a certain discipline. To be clear, in swimming you enter the masters category much younger in absolute terms than in golf. Having reached a certain age, the transition is automatic. It is obvious that as the years go by, the results tend to diminish. You may be an exception if you started playing sports in adulthood and therefore have not yet reached your peak performance.
Slowing down the advancement of age
With increasing age, muscle mass, blood flow volume, maximum heart rate and, of course, VO2max are reduced. The good news, however, is that maintaining training intensity and volume, even when you become a master, can significantly reduce the rate of physical decline. In both male and female endurance athletes, there is an age-related decrease in VO2max, which contributes to limited performance. However, the decline in VO2max depends on the degree to which athletes maintain volume, the intensity of training and the specific age of the subjects. Your performance can remain at a high level until age 35. They decrease slightly each year until 50, more noticeably until 70 and then drop dramatically. In long-distance running, as in all endurance sports, performance declines with age, and it appears that the decline is more pronounced in women than in men. The motivations are not only physical. The age-related decline is also due to lower training volume and intensity due to increased work or family commitments; behavioral factors such as reduced motivation to train the lack of a coach and thus specific training also contribute. Another interesting topic is your maximum heart rate. Age-related decrease in FCmax is a common factor for all endurance athletes (male and female). There are several standard equations that try to predict your maximum heart rate in relation to your age. In addition to the simpler and more traditional one (220 – age) the following formula seems to work much better for endurance athletes: 207 – (0.7 x age). Although they always represent simplifications and provide average values, they help you understand how heart rate changes over the years. It is important to keep this in mind because all studies show that the decline in VO2max that occurs progressively is related to the decrease in maximum heart rate. It is also interesting to analyze the behavior of blood flow volume. If you train continuously and regularly in endurance sports, the volume tends to increase, and noticeably so, and you can potentially achieve 20-25% expansion. This modification is important to facilitate greater thermoregulatory capacity through sweating, and greater cardiovascular stability during intense physical activity. Volume, however, also tends to decrease with age so another aspect to consider is just that: containing this reduction or even avoiding it as long as you remain active. Changes in anaerobic threshold, on the other hand, are less noticeable with age. There is definitely a reduction in absolute terms but there is a relative increase in percentage VO2max. It means that if you are a well-trained master athlete, you are able to take advantage of a percentage of maximum oxygen consumption that increases with age. Available data suggest that, in terms of speed, there is an age-related reduction in lactate threshold that contributes to reduced endurance performance. However, if we evaluate it as a percentage of VO2max, the lactate threshold increases in master athletes. This means that the loss of performance at the anaerobic threshold level is not that important. Among the determinants of endurance performance you must always consider theimportance of the cost-effectiveness of the athletic act, which is the cost-in terms of oxygen consumption-of sustaining an exercise at a given intensity. As the years go by, you will have no problem keeping the correct technique well. Therefore, it will not be the loss of cost-effectiveness of the act that will decrease your performance over the years.
Muscle mass
One certain fact is that as you age you have a loss of muscle mass, and training in endurance sports does not seem to reduce this phenomenon in a major way. In contrast, endurance activity improves the quality of your muscle mass, which is much more efficient and leaner than the muscles of your sedentary peers. The decrease in appendicular muscle mass (arms and legs) also contributes to the decrease in VO2max and thus your endurance performance. In summary: the reduction in your performance as a masters athlete is mainly related to the decrease in VO2max. Secondary causes may be a reduction in maximum heart rate, your anaerobic threshold speed, blood flow volume and muscle mass. Keep in mind, however, that the decline in performance is a consequence of different factors such as a lower propensity to train and especially a noticeable reduction in training intensity and volume commonly observed in almost all masters athletes.