Training at 62: What I Do, Why I Do It, and What’s at Stake If I Don’t
As requested by many of you... My typical week
Sit back for a moment… this might be a lot longer than you anticipate. Not only will I go through my training week, but I will also discuss the rationale for it. So, some science, lots of training. And a downloadable guide at the end for Members.
I have spent more than 25 years as an orthopedic surgeon watching what happens to people’s lives as they age. Not the dramatic events like fractures, surgery, or car accidents— but the quieter erosion we normalize so easily. The things people stop doing. The trips they can’t take. The grandchildren that they can’t keep up with. The hobbies that disappear, not because they chose to give them up, but because their bodies made the decision for them.
I’ve had the privilege of practicing in the same region for nearly 25 years. I’ve gotten to know many of my patients well. Some thrive despite the years; many don’t. That observation started to quietly shape how I approached my training. Then aging started catching up with me, too. Not with limitations per se, but with longer recovery burdens, lower injury thresholds, etc. Hopefully, this post will help capture all of this and present it well.
Background: The Narrowing
Most people’s lives narrow. Not all at once, instead… gradually, a little at a time, until the opportunities available to them are a fraction of what they once were. I’ve watched it happen to patients who were otherwise healthy, who thought they were doing fine, who didn’t realize the margin was shrinking until it was already gone.
Long ago, I decided that mine wouldn’t.
That decision is the reason I train the way I do. Not to look a certain way and certainly not to compete or hit a particular number on my watch. I train for life. I train to keep my opportunities open — to hike, climb, play tennis, travel, and stay physically capable of doing the things that (for me) make a life worth living well into my seventies, eighties, and beyond. That’s the goal. Everything below is in service of that goal.
What follows is my typical training week, the reasoning behind each component, and how I think about the dose required to get the benefit. I’ll be direct about what the evidence supports and honest about what I find difficult. I pull it all together in the end with a weekly schedule. I’ll be honest… it’s a lot. In my enough, better and optimal framework, my week is squarely in the optimal range. You should not think that you need to do all of this. But my rationale for my approach might help you figure out what your week should look like.
To that end… I’ve included an Enough / Better / Optimal framework for each training domain so you can calibrate it to your own life. That’s important because biology doesn’t require you to do exactly what I do. It requires you to give it a meaningful signal. We're going to talk about the quality and quantity of that signal, and you’ll need to tailor it to your abilities and needs.
A downloadable weekly training guide with full workout details is available at the end of this article.
Training for Life, Not for a Goal
Most people, when they exercise, train what’s comfortable. They do the things they’re already decent at, in the planes of motion they’re familiar with, at intensities that feel manageable. That’s understandable, and It’s precisely why our functional capacity erodes. It’s okay to get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Getting Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
When we push to a limit that the brain perceives as “dangerous,” many beneficial adaptations occur. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds of compounds are released from our muscles that promote numerous beneficial downstream adaptations throughout the body. This internal pharmacy is more potent and protective than anything you can purchase.
The body adapts to what you ask of it — and only to what you ask of it. If you never jump, you lose the neuromuscular wiring for jumping. If you never move laterally, your hip stabilizers weaken, and your balance in the frontal plane deteriorates. If you never train rotation, you lose the core strength and power to handle the rotational stressors that real life constantly delivers — the awkward lift, the sudden twist, shoveling snow, or trying to catch yourself from falling.
The body becomes very good at a narrower range of movements, and that narrowing mirrors the narrowing of life I’ve watched happen in my office for 25 years.
Training for life means deliberately resisting that narrowing. It means building and maintaining the full spectrum of physical capacity: aerobic base, strength, power, rotational core, lateral movement, balance, and landing mechanics. Not because any single component is the answer, but because they are all part of the same integrated system — and because aging degrades each of them through different mechanisms and at different rates. You cannot maintain one and ignore the others and expect the system to hold.
I also want to say something about myokines, because they also shape most everything I do. Skeletal muscle is the body’s largest endocrine organ. When you challenge it — aerobically and mechanically, with power and speed — it secretes signaling proteins that communicate with virtually every other organ system in the body. The training program I’m about to describe isn’t just about keeping your joints working and your balance intact. It is a continuously renewed pharmacological signal that reduces your risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, dementia, and cancer. That’s the molecular biology of what happens when you move. It’s also the basis for a book I’ve started to write.
Aerobic Base: The Daily Foundation
I run or ride six to seven days per week. Most mornings, before anything else happens, I am either on the road or on the bike. This is not negotiable for me, and it hasn’t been for years. The timing of these aerobic sessions are the one variable I fully control, and I protect it accordingly.
Here’s what a typical week looks like on the aerobic side. I run four to five miles three days per week at a conversational pace… low heart rate (~120-125 bpm), where I can speak in complete sentences without laboring. The other days I ride a stationary bike. During the week, those rides are typically an hour. Saturday is my long ride — two to three hours. Can’t ride for two hours? Can you sit on a couch and watch a movie for 2 hours? Well… do that on the bike. You don’t have to go hard.
Sunday is my longer run. For total-minute calculations, I also count hikes, walks with the dogs, and other active movement toward my aerobic minutes, because they should count—they are real cardiovascular and metabolic work.
Most weeks, I accumulate more than 600+ minutes of aerobic activity.
Thursday is my intensity day. I start with a three-mile easy run to warm up, then move into either hill repeats, sprints, or a fartlek — unstructured speed work where I push hard for varying durations based on how I feel. Occasionally, I’ll do an intensity session on the bike instead, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. Every other aerobic session stays at a conversational pace. One day of intensity. The rest is low-intensity volume.
That 600-minute target is not arbitrary. Arem et al. (JAMA Internal Medicine, 2015) found that exercising at three to five times the recommended public health minimum — roughly 450 to 750 minutes of moderate activity per week — was associated with a 39 percent lower all-cause mortality risk compared to inactive adults. The dose-response curve for aerobic activity doesn’t flatten the way most people assume. For the adaptations that matter most with aging — VO2 max preservation, mitochondrial density, sustained myokine secretion — more volume produces more benefit, and that relationship continues well beyond what public health guidelines recommend.
VO2 max is worth understanding because it’s a number I care about a lot. It’s your maximal oxygen uptake — the ceiling of your aerobic capacity — and it is among the strongest predictors of longevity in the medical literature. A landmark study by Mandsager et al. (JAMA Network Open, 2018) followed 122,000 patients for a median of 8.4 years and found that low cardiorespiratory fitness was associated with a higher mortality risk than smoking, diabetes, or end-stage renal disease.
You do not need a ton of intensity to raise your VO2max. My regimen keeps my VO2 max above 50… which is in the top 5% for my age. That’s enough. The intensity needed to boost it higher increases my injury risk and recovery burden. And consistency matters far more than intensity when training for life.
This is by far the longest and most comprehensive training guide that I have written. More science, lots of explanations, and as usual, a lot of videos.
The downloadable guide is available at the end for Members.
In addition, I have created a more in-depth Midlife Training Guide… Members can download that guide here. While Non-members can purchase the guide here.
