Fitness For the Middle-Aged Alpha Male

If Tom Matlack could get back into shape, you definitely can.

I’m 46 with a background in swimming, rowing, marathon running, and kickboxing. I like to think I am a badass—that is, I did until I tried to ride a very steep seven-mile hill on a road bike, and stopped once half way up and then six miles up for good.

In road biking parlance, what happened to me is called “bonking.” The non-technical translation of that is falling off your bike in exhaustion, puking your guts out, being unable to move, and requiring a rescue helicopter to airlift your lardass off the mountain. In my case, the chopper never arrived, so I had to get on my bike and ride back down the hill about a mile from the top, babbling incoherently the whole way.

The site of this humiliation was on Mulholland Highway, which rises up from Pacific Coast Highway north of Malibu.    Further east, Mulholland Drive is famous for a really bad film of the same name and, more recently, the mysterious disappearance of one of Charlie Sheen’s vehicles over the cliff.

But I really didn’t give a crap about Charlie’s lost car. What I cared about was the fact that my college roommate Brian—a guy who I had been able to manhandle in pretty much any athletic event over the course of a quarter century—had just brought me to my knees. Literally.

This set me on a course to explore what could be done in the realm of fitness for a washed-up alpha male. Six months after my roadside meltdown, I traveled back to LA to test myself against not one but two of my college roommates—both very serious riders—over three climbs bigger than Mulholland, totaling nearly 9,000 feet of vertical ascent, over 65 miles of riding. The result was vindication.

Here’s how I did it, with some general thoughts on fitness for the alpha male, in 10 easy steps.

Next: Pick Your Pleasure

#1: Pick the Right Sport for You

I’ve run marathons, been really into yoga for years, and tried my hand at the martial arts. But I finally settled on road bike riding because it’s easy on my old man joints, a bunch of my friends are into it, there’s plenty of gearhead stuff to think about, and it combines tough aerobic activity with a great view. I have friends who swear by tennis, swimming, and even golf. Do something you really enjoy, that takes you out of the stress of your life, and fits your body (okay, at 6’ 3” and 225 pounds, biking is probably not my ideal sport in terms of speed, but I just like it).

Next: Diversify Your Portfolio

—Photo denıse/Flickr

#2: Cross Train

Injury is caused by overuse. Overuse is caused by doing the same thing over and over again. Shit we could get away with when we were 21, we can’t get away with at 50, so that means doing a wide variety of exercises to strengthen your whole body, even if your focus is ultimately one sport. In any given week, I try to circuit train twice, swim twice, and ride as much as I can. My riding is broken down into short rides, long rides, and hill workouts (more on that in a minute). My body needs the variety in order to avoid injury.

Next: Never Go Into A Dark Alley Alone

—Photo The Wolf/Flickr

#3: Get a Coach

If you really want to get in shape and make substantial progress, it’s almost impossible to do it alone. My friends out West have a riding coach who emails them workouts. The tennis players I know work with a pro who keeps them on track.

I work with a Russian kick-boxer with a comprehensive weight and conditioning regime named Konstantin Selivanov. For some time he taught me how to fight, and then we started doing more circuit training with weights. Over time we developed a routine and friendship. So when the time came to ramp it up, I asked Konstantin to tailor a program for me. Over the last six months we have met twice a week for an hour and a half per session. I would not have succeeded without him. Period.

Next: What Is the Point?

#4: Set a Goal

The tendency is to think that you just want to “get in shape.” But in order to really make progress, there has to be some point to what you are doing—some concrete place and time you are working towards; otherwise, your training will inevitably turn stale and you will struggle to find the motivation to continue.

In my case the goal was clear: Don’t puke on those massive hills out West. Over time, my buddies and I plotted out the exact ride when were going to attempt, including not just one massive hill but three—each harder than the one that had nearly taken my life. My goal was merely to survive … to make the entire course without bonking.

One of my college roommates, Dave, added a bit of extra motivation by sending along this email to my second college roommate, Brian, once the course had been determined:

Sounds hard but great.  Not much of a warmup before Piuma, but I’m happy to do it as long as I know Tom is suffering.  That section of Shueren before the summit at Stunt should be very unpleasant for Tom.  Also, Tom’s gonna hate those rollers on Mulholland after the brutal, brutal Rock Store climb.  Not to mention the fact that nothing in Massachusetts will prepare him for that final, Bataan-like death slog up Latigo during which, for the first time in his life, he will wish he is 5’6″, 130…

Next: Getting Jacked Up

#5: Get Strong

No matter what your sport and what your goal, strength is crucial to success. It’s also crucial to your well-being as an older dude. As we age, both our muscles and our bones naturally atrophy. That leaves us more susceptible to injury and illness. To participate vigorously in any sport, it’s crucial to have a well-balanced strength-training program to supplement your practice of your activity of choice.

The training Konstantin developed for me consisted of a an hour of circuit training focused on a rotation (one per session) of Legs/Back, Shoulder/Biceps, or Chest/Triceps followed by a half hour focused exclusively on developing leg strength.

For the first hour we most often did a rotation of three exercises at a time repeated three times, including two lifting movements and one aerobic one like jumps or Konstantin’s favorite, “jump like a bunny” which means hopping across the room and back. Over time, I was able to move from one exercise to the next without more than a moment of rest and what at first was intense sporadic pain became more of an endurance test.

Konstantin saved his real creativity for the last half hour of legwork.  “We have to keep the pressure up now,” he’d tell me. Step ups on a bench with weight, hops onto a bench, heavy squats against the wall with a ball, and his favorite “rocking squat” which includes holding a heavy weight between your legs squatting and rocking forward to straight legs and then rocking back through another deep squat to straighten back up (don’t try that one at home).

Over the months of work together, my strength and condition increased dramatically over time and built the foundation for my success.

Next: The Good News? Sleep (A Lot)

#6: Rest

Perhaps even more important than what you do is how much time you give your body to heal. Older bodies need more rest, not less; that means tough workouts require days off. The impulse to do more will often result in overtraining and, ultimately, injury. Konstantin constantly asks me to rate my energy level from 1 to 10. When in doubt, we do less. He asks me about my weekly plan for workouts on my bike and in the pool, insisting that I take days off even when that is not my original plan.

If you can afford it, massage is a great way to restore your body’s muscle tissue. Just good old sleep is equally important. Go to bed early and stay there. Look forward to big workouts, but if you feel run-down, cut back and wait to do them when you can complete the job without risking your overall progress.

Next: When It Comes to Food, Not Less But More

—Photo kendal7/Flickr

#7: Food Matters

I haven’t had a drink in 15 years, but I am addicted to two things: caffeine and ice cream. When I started this last round of training, I had a gut. Konstantin was constantly harping on my daily ice cream habit.

What I finally realized is that it’s not only how much bad stuff you eat but how much good stuff that matters. Protein is really important if you are training hard. Konstantin advised me to get pretty much any 10-percent whey protein drink and drink it before and after every workout.

Over time, I realized that the protein cut my desire to pig out on ice cream or other empty calories. It also gave me a baseline of nutrition that made me tend to eat better.

Of course, eating during long athletic activities like the five-hour, 65-mile ride my buddies and I took the second time out in LA is essential too. Sports bars, sports drinks, and bananas are all really important to a solid performance.

Next: Gut Check Time

—Photo Nick Kauffman/Flickr

#8: Test Yourself

If you have a goal, you need to find ways of testing where you are in achieving what you set out to accomplish. I wanted to be able to survive the massive climbs in California. But in Boston all we have are little hills. It’s impossible to simulate a 10- mile hill at a 12% grade.

I found the steepest hill I could (Summit Avenue in Brookline, about a mile from my house) and began doing sets riding up and down the same hill multiple times on the clock. By the end of my training I was doing 15 hills in sets of 5 with 2 minutes of rest between each set. That took an hour and a half of straight climbing, and totaled three thousand feet of ascent, more than any one of the single ascents in LA. I still had the downhill to rest, so it wasn’t the same. But parts of my workout hill were brutally steep. So I felt sure I was as ready as I was going to get.

Next: This Is Really About Friendship

—Photo Digammo/Flickr

#9: Be Social

In the end, it’s really important to do your workouts in the context of your friendships. If you really think you are going to break some world record, you are deluding yourself. Konstantin kept talking about the “race” we were training for. For a while I would correct him to say all this hard work was really just to go for a very long and hard ride with two of my best friends.

One of the really cool things about riding is that everybody has a GPS device that collects all kinds of data about every ride. So even if you live three thousand miles from your riding buddies, you can share daily workouts with each other. And in my case I could bitch about riding in subzero temperatures while my friends rode in beautiful Southern California sunshine.

Next: The Point, In The End, Is To Enjoy It

#10: Have Fun

In the end, the most important thing is to have fun. As much it can be painful, I look forward to my weekly sessions with Konstantin. I love riding down the country roads well outside Boston listening to Jimi Hendrix. And when the time came I thoroughly enjoyed my long ride with my pals out in LA. The fact that one of them lagged behind me the whole time and the other bonked on the third climb was just icing on the cake.

They were shocked by my improvement and my ability, despite my stature, to keep up (real bikers, including the faster of my two friends are in the 140 pound range).

“I trained my ass off,” was my response with a satisfied grin. “And I had more than a little help from a Russian kick-boxer.”