Hey, what's up everybody and welcome back to That Triathlon Show, the podcast presented by

Scientific Triathlon.com.

I'm your host, Michael, and this episode is beginner tip 10, where I'll talk about triathlon training

as a master's athlete.

How does training and things that go around training

change as we grow older? Well, first, let me reference a couple of very important resources

on this topic if you want to go more in depth after listening to this quick tip. And the first

and most important episode that I've done on this is episode 20.

It's called Masters Athlete, How to Minimize the Performance Decline for Aging Triathletes.

But we also talk a bit about this in my interview with Joe Friel all the way back in episode

one. And more recently, I've interviewed Karen Smyers,

who raised professionally until age 49 in episode 102.

So we go into what she did to stay competitive to As a Master's athlete.

So I'll link to all of those episodes in the episode description.

But briefly, there are three main contributors to our slowing down with age,

which is a process that on average starts around 35 years of age in endurance sports.

And the first is reduced V-O-2 max, which means the maximum amount of oxygen that our muscles can use.

So it's basically our highest gear for anything longer than 90 seconds or so.

The second reason is that the amount of lean muscle mass that we have is reduced with age

and there's an increased mass of or increased percentage at least of body fat

so both of those they kind of go hand in hand to reduce the performance that

that aging athletes can retain.

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