Here’s Exactly How To Maximise Your Fitness Level The Older You Get
Struggling to keep up with your ageing self? Karate champ Tammy Fry knows how to maximise fitness as she ages. Here's how she does it.

August 7, 2017

Fitness equipment

Photography by Supreeya Chantalao /Freepik

We get it. The older you get, the more difficult it is to do the things you could do before.

Getting older doesn’t mean you can’t be 100% as amazing and fit as you were before. Tammy Fry, marketing director of Fry’s, karate champion and self-defence coach knows how to maximise fitness as she ages. Here’s how she does it.

Don’t Try To Workout Like You’re 20 

If you’re not a fresh 20 years old, don’t pretend you are. Before, Tammy used to smash two and a half fitness sessions. But now that she has a family, her workouts are an hour a day. But shorter workouts can still be effective. “You need to focus on strength work as you get older,” says Tammy. “As you get older, your recovery in training is longer, and injury has a longer recovery time.” Strength training is a great way to actually improve your bone density, something that declines with age.

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Tap Into Your Inner Child

Ok, so not quite contradictory, but getting back into kid-like exercises can help you strengthen the muscles that are neglected when you’re sitting at a desk all day. Play-time exercise recruits a wider range of motion, so you get a more complete workout. “As children, we were all doing monkey bars; we had so much vitality,” says Tammy. “Now, at most, we just walk around.”

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Tammy recommends doing bodyweight work, like mastering pull-ups and box jumps. Sounds like too much? “It’s not that we can’t do it, we’ve just lost the conditioning.” To get back there, focus on scaling the movement with assisted pull-ups, hollow body holds, and jumping over pillows or skipping until you’re fit enough to jump on a box.