In many ways coaching masters athletes is the easiest demographic to work with. The over 40 crowd tends to have lots of experience, accumulated fitness, and good technique. With their years of experience they have developed good habits, good routines, and have largely weeded through what works and what doesn’t for them. They readily see the link between lifestyle choices and quality training and prioritize sleep and diet more than their younger peers usually do. Their mental game is often much more developed than their younger peers as well. Much less driven by ego and a need to prove themselves they tend to be long-haulers and care more about continuing the long game, enjoying health benefits, socialization, and friendly competition and less about short term gains, race results, proving themselves, and giving up important other aspects of their life to chase a singular focus. It used to be that middle aged and elderly people still engaged in high level athletics was unusual. Now it is the norm. In many sports including mountain biking athletes in their 40’s are peaking and performing at world class levels. They aren’t slowing down much as they enter their 50’s and 60’s either.
Masters athletes often get lumped in a broad category of middle aged or older, but there are very different considerations for a 40 year old athlete and a 60 year old athlete. In most respects the physiological considerations that must be given to athletes in their 40’s compared with younger athletes are truly minimal. They are every bit as capable of handling hard training and racing. Beyond an extra rest day built into their training programs, a higher emphasis on healthy lifestyle considerations (which younger athletes should be doing too), more time spent stretching and doing mobility/range of motion work, and a little more emphasis on weight training are the key aspects they should target. Being an athlete in your 40’s is a blessing – you get to enjoy the perks of wisdom, accumulated technique, mental strength, fitness, and self awareness of the aging athlete, plus the responsiveness to training, speed, strength, and resilience of a younger athlete. There is a reason 40+ athletes are still winning olympic medals and standing on world cup podiums across a spectrum of sports. 41 year old Mavi Garcia won a stage at the Tour de France in 2025. Greg Minaar became a mountain bike downhill world champion at age 40 in 2021. Gunn-Rita Dahle won a world cup cross country race at age 45. With subtle tweaks to a training program this age demographic does not yet need to worry about performance declines. This is a decade where often the stresses of career, kids, aging parents, and general lack of time cause many to put their health on the back burner, and society likes to gently poke at the ‘dad bod.’ Many of your peers will have accepted growing soft and heavy, they will see their new aches and pains as normal, and they will think as generations before them have that middle age is a time to start slowing down. It does not have to be.
With consistent training the athlete in their 50’s and beyond can drastically slow age related declines, but certain degradations are inevitable. Sarcopenia (muscle loss), bone density loss, VO2 max declines, susceptibility to injury and illness, and reduced flexibility/ROM are some of the major battles the aging athlete will be forced to face. This is not a reason to dial back the training, take it easy, and coast into the golden years. If anything you may well have more time to train – kids in college or grown up and out of the house, retirement, more money than when you were younger… If you do not want to age into a weak old pile of skin and bones you will adjust your training accordingly and continue to enjoy great health and fitness for decades to come – this will entail some major changes to your training and lifestyle.
-sarcopenia and bone density loss are coming for you and you can slow their effects by integrating heavy weight lifting twice a week into your training. Focus on a handful of exercises that target big muscle groups and several joints, like dead lifts, deep squats, bench press, and pull ups. Light weights will not do it, do 3 sets of 6-8 reps with enough weight that the last set is very difficult to complete. Other than sleep and nutrition, heavy weight lifting is the most effective thing you can do to maintain your fitness and your health.
-continue to train cardio like you did when you were younger. Lots of base miles in zone 2, high intensity anaerobic intervals, and racing. If weight lifting is cutting into cardio time and something has to give cut out the zone 3-4 tempo workouts. If time is still a crunch emphasize the high intensity zone 4-5 work and heavy weight lifting. This is the BEST medication known to man to fight the aging process. You will need more rest days between hard workouts.
-DEAL with nagging injuries. That may mean surgery. If you have a long term injury that is not getting better with strength, stretching, mobility exercises, and PT you probably need to have surgery to fix it. If you don’t it will only get worse. Nagging injuries are a HUGE problem for the 50+ athlete, and whether it is stubbornness or wishful thinking many of them continue to try to work through it without ever getting properly fixed. The sooner you deal with it the better.
-Eat more protein. As a high performing athlete through your 40’s eating ~1 gram of protein per kilo of body weight per day is enough. Past 50 consider bumping this up to 1.25/1.5 grams of protein per kilo. This will work nicely with the added weight work you are now doing.
-You really do need to take it easier riding downhills now. Push yourself in the weight room, do hard cardio workouts and racing, but dial it back on the downhills. Think 90% speed of what your top end is. As you get older this number drops. The setbacks will be too severe and numerous if you crash hard and keep crashing as you age. You will heal slowly and probably not entirely. It is not worth it.
-Flexibility, range of motion, and balance workouts should make their way into your training if they have not already. These may not directly impact your performance on the bike but in addition to strength training they will make you more resilient and less likely to have an accident on or off the bike. Any type of balance board or slackline is fun and doesn’t require much time. Familiarize yourself with the deep squat both as a strength exercise and a resting position which will work wonders on your flexibility and mobility in your back, hips, knees, and ankles. These are great starting points.
If you are lucky enough to still be mountain biking in your 70’s and beyond you deserve to be held up as a paragon of good health, longevity, smart decision making, and admirable discipline. Kudos for being out on the trails and not on a golf cart or a lazy boy like most of your peers, dying a slow death from chronic illness. The silent generation (born before 1945) tended to view old age as a time to slow down and as such it is only now with the current crop of aging baby boomers that we are seeing what is possible from senior citizen athletes. The data is sparse but growing, and what it shows is encouraging. Athletes in their 70’s are completing Ironmans. They are running 3 hour marathons and doing open water swims. Alpinists are climbing Himalayan Peaks and sport climbers are sending 5.12s. There is no reason they cannot still be doing difficult mountain biking. Longer recovery sessions between hard workouts are mandatory, but intense racing, interval training, and heavy weight lifting are still very much possible and encouraged. These people are the true masters of our sport and we would be wise to learn from them rather than tell them what they should or should not be doing.