As Peter Attia has been making his rounds to promote his new book, he was making a statement about how important it is for older people to be vigilant about avoiding injury.
He claimed that the progress that is lost from just a week or so of missed training can take weeks to recoup. This doesn’t seem quite right but maybe I didn’t understand the full context. I am assuming that if we maintain a reasonable diet and adequate protein intake we might expect a small drop in short-term performance but not much change in overall physiological adaptation. What’s your opinion of his claim?
Do you modify your general recommendations for older people to specifically avoid injury? E.g., move to a lower RPE scheme for lifting, stay away from sports with a higher incidence of injury like martial arts?
I have actually familiarized myself with a fair amount of the ideas and recommendations he’s made in his book, due to a number of questions I’ve received on the topic. I found the injury-related content to be, by far, the worst. Whereas he actually seems to be quite vigilant about being evidence-based in the realm of cardiovascular disease, for example, all of this seems to go completely out the window in the realm of pain and injury management/“prevention”. The vast majority of claims made in that context are simply made up, or repeated from “experts” he’s listened to … who similarly made these claims up.
Diet and protein intake does not really play a major role in injury management for most people. The rate of recovery from injury is highly variable between people, between specific injuries, and to an extent depends on the management strategy employed. We’ve discussed our preferred approach to this in a lot of our existing content.
We don’t make such recommendations specifically for older people, but rather recommend that everyone – young, old, male, female, etc. – adjust their programming approach in accordance with their preferences, current fitness level, and goals. This means that if an older person has no interest in 1-rep max powerlifting performance, there is no need for them to train in that way … but this would similarly apply to a younger person. If a person wants to pursue martial arts training, there is going to be an accepted risk of injury by participating in a combat sport – and this applies regardless of age, too. It ultimately comes down to: is the person adequately prepared to do what they are trying to do?
Indeed, while I’ve learned a great deal from his podcast guests (i.e. Alan Sniderman, Tom Dayspring) on CVD and similar, it seems that a lot of his “injury-prevention”/workout info is a decade + old and comes mostly from the DNS/“movement dysfunction” school of thinking. I would love to see Austin or Jordan on his podcast at some point.