Why Plyometrics Are Essential As You Age

Putting the Pep Back in Your Step with Plyometrics

Even if you’re keeping up with your overall fitness as you age, you might be losing some of your “pep”.

So how do you prevent this? It boils down to having a consistent, well-rounded approach to your fitness. Even though you start to lose overall strength each decade past age 20, you can still gain muscle mass. But keeping muscle mass is only part of the equation for continued health as you age. You also need to work on your power.

Maintaining your current power output (or ever increasing it) as an adult is not necessarily done via what you see professional athletes doing. High-level, high-intensity power movements like cleans, snatches, and jerks are excellent strength and conditioning exercises. But there are other lower-impact, efficient movements to help you chip away at improving your athleticism.

Lower-level power or plyometric movements such as jumping rope, hopping, agility ladders, KB swings, and even sprinting can easily be added to a program to improve power as we age.

There are a lot of different schools of thought on what you should be doing and how you should go about it. But my advice is to find something that fits your goals and routine and go with it.

Adding plyometric or power work to your current workouts will help you feel more confident with dynamic athletic movements. Just make sure you add it to the beginning of your workout so you’re not doing it while fatigued.

Why Power Matters

So why power? Why does it matter? If you trip and catch yourself, it requires a sudden loading of the muscles and then a quick push back up to keep from falling over. If you don’t have enough power to do this, you’ll likely fall over, which can mean broken bones.

Power is moving weight fast and performing fast movements.

Many aging athletes don’t train as many fast-twitch muscle movements, which ultimately limits their overall power capabilities. Keeping tabs on your reaction time and motor control is also important for an aging brain. Training plyometrics helps with all of this.