Trying (and failing) to become more athletic
I've always wanted to be more athletic...
I've always wanted to be more athletic (who doesn't!?). But for the past year and a half, I've been more focused and methodical about that goal than at any other time in the past decade. However, I haven't succeeded. Not yet, at least. This is the story of how that journey has gone and what I might need to do differently to actually succeed.
I. Some Background
In 2008, as a junior in high school, I tore my ACL. In 2009, as a senior, I tore my other ACL. Then in 2011, as a junior in college, I tore my left ACL a second time. Before all that, I would've told you I was planning to play college basketball. After all that, I became less serious about sports: I would still play pickup basketball sometimes, and run on the treadmill or lift weights in the gym at work or at the Y; every few months I'd run a few sprints at the track near my house; in 2015 or 2016 I started playing rec league soccer. In late 2017 I started playing ultimate frisbee. But I was never again as serious about sports and training as I was when I was a sophomore/junior in high school who thought he could play in college.
II. Setting new goals in early 2020
At the start of 2020 (I was almost 29 at this point), I had two brain flashes:
One, I'm not that old yet. I have about 5 years before my "prime" is over. And, because I've never really tried to maximize my athletic potential, I could easily (or maybe I shouldn't say "easily"...) be in better shape in my late 30s to early 40s than I was in my 20s. Elite athletes are already maximizing everything they can, so when they start to get old they have nowhere to go but down; but sub-elite people like me can make up for getting older by getting a bit more serious about training. So I have about a dozen years left where I could reasonably be in the "best shape of my life", if I do things right.
Two, I realized that I hadn't really tried in a long, long time to maximize my athletic potential. As mentioned above, when I was in high school, I was working out really hard for a while. Then I hurt my knees a few times, and I never tried that hard again all through my 20s.
Putting those together, I decided to try to make the most of the time I have left and take working out more seriously.
Back when I made this decision, at the beginning of 2020, I didn't get too into the details of what that would mean. But I quickly decided that mainly, I need to push myself on a consistent basis. Push myself to lift as much as I can, jump as high as I can, run as fast as I can, and do those things every week. I hadn't been doing that on a consistent-enough basis all throughout my 20s.
I started going to the Y and to the track a couple days a week each. After about 2 months of that, the covid pandemic hit. I stopped going to the Y, obviously, but I kept working out hard.
III. An aside: Improving my Knee Flexibility
[This part is a bit of a side track from the main thrust of the essay. Skip to the next section if you'd rather save a few minutes]
Well, it's not exactly true that when covid hit I kept working out hard. So let me sidetrack for a minute:
When the original "lockdown" started in mid-March, I decided to take a few weeks off to work on increasing my knee flexibility.
Ever since the 2008 ACL surgery, my right knee had subpar flexibility. For a while, I assumed I was doomed to having a "tight" knee. Then during my college years, I had some success getting it a bit more flexible. I would do a lot of sitting with my butt on the ground and my legs straight out in front of me, with an ankle weight over my knee to force it to straighten out completely. Before I started doing that, my leg was so inflexible that I couldn't sit in that position for more than a few minutes (even without a weight on my knee). I got to the point where at least I could sit in that position comfortably, though my knee still wasn't as flexible as it used to be.
In my last year of school, I took a yoga class for one credit. After a month or two of two nights a week doing lots of downward dog, I noticed that my knee was feeling better than it ever had post-surgery.
Then I graduated, got a job, and fell back out of the dedicated-stretching habit. I don't remember, in those years, why did I not care about stretching? Was my knee as flexible as it should be, and didn't need stretching, or did I just not care about it being "tight" because I wasn't working out that much? I can't say for sure but I feel like it must be that I just didn't care about it being tight.
(Flash forward to late 2018, I tweaked my knee playing frisbee. It could be that after this, my knee started getting "tight" again. To me, this is why the "it was flexible for years and then started getting tight again" story might be true — if it got tight after an injury. But it seems more likely that I just didn't care enough about keeping it flexible, and it was tight the whole time.)
Anyways, when the pandemic started, I saw it as an opportunity to work on my right knee flexibility. I spent so much time doing stretches, sitting on the floor with the ankle weight on my knee, and using my hands to move my kneecap and stretch the patella tendon. I didn't do any workout harder than walking for a couple weeks, and then for a couple more weeks I kept it to walking plus some biking, and then, after 6-8 weeks, I started working out again.
Those 6-8 weeks made my knee so much more flexible, but of course now that I'm working out again, it's been a constant battle to keep stretching enough to keep it flexible. I took a week off to focus on stretching in late September (2020) and again in February (2021).
That's where I've been for the past 6 months or so — I've fought it to a stalemate, where my knee is not as flexible as it could be, but it's pretty good. Better than it was for a long time. I hope that as more time passes, my body "learns" this new level of flexibility, and it requires less stretching to keep it at this level.
IV. Summer 2020: Getting more athletic, then losing it
So, that summer of 2020, the first summer of my plan to push myself to achieve my athletic potential, I had really good results. I started running faster, a few times running one mile in less than 5:50, my best being 5:43. I was sprinting faster, and jumping higher: easily dunking a tennis ball on the hoop near my house (which I later found out was not ten feet tall — closer to 9'10"). Aside from the mile, I had one other running workout that I'd time myself in and record the results: running 200 meters on the track, 10 times, with a 1-minute rest between each run. This is not quite a sprint, but close to sprint speed. My speed (averaged over a few of these workouts) went from 35 seconds to 33 seconds in the course of just a couple months.
So I thought I was doing everything right — my cardio/endurance was improving, and explosiveness/top speed was improving right along with it.
Then towards the end of August, I had a couple things happen: first, I had a couple injuries: I tweaked my ankle and tweaked my hamstring a little bit, too. And second, I moved to a new apartment (and started dating a new girlfriend). Between these things, I lost my focus on working out. I went about 6 weeks where I only did one sprint workout. By October, I ran a 6:12 mile, and I don't think I ran a mile under 6:00 again until mid-March (2021). Those gains were lost and I was back to where I started.
V. 2021: Focusing on the "everyday" workouts; Getting back lost gains
In 2021, it's been roughly the same path: after that late 2020 lull, I started working out through the spring and summer, and by late July I ran a 5:47 mile.
But this year, I've had to work out more to get the same improvements.
At the beginning of 2021, I thought back over my past year or so of working out, and noticed that while I had a period in July/August where I was super athletic, I was essentially back where I started, with no progress to show after a year. Except for two important exceptions! At the start of 2020, I could do a max of something like 35 pushups. In January 2021, I could do 65-70. At the start of 2020, I could do maybe 6 or 8 pull-ups. In January 2021, I could do 12 or more.
What set these workouts apart from the others? Well, for one, they were the upper body and the other workout goals that I tracked were lower-body centric (sprint speed, mile time, squatting, and jumping). But I figured that was just a coincidence. What seemed critical to me was the amount that I did these exercises: I did pushups every day (I might miss 1 in 20 days). I did pull-ups less, but still more than any of my lower-body workouts: I did 2 sets per day, 5 days per week. These were the two areas I'd made progress in. On the other hand, I was doing 1-2 miles per week, 1-2 squatting sessions per week, and 1-2 sprint workouts and jumping workouts per week. So I figured, maybe the key is to just do things every day, or almost every day. I decided I would try to run a mile in the morning 5 days per week (In reality, many weeks I only run four, or even three mornings). That started at the beginning of February. At the end of May, I added a 5-minute jumping drill to that, as well. (On top of that, I'm still doing other workouts, like the sprints, squatting, jumping, etc.)
And I have seen gains in my mile time and my jumping ability since I've started this routine. But again, I saw those same gains last year, when I wasn't running a mile most mornings; I was running a mile once per week, twice per week at most.
VI. Looking at weekly best mile times
After writing all that, I put together the comparison below of my best mile time in each week of the summer for 2020 and 2021 (to now).
A few stand out to me:
My confusion remains: pretty much every week in 2020, I ran less miles than I did in the corresponding 2021 week, yet I had a better PR. That being said, I did get to sub-5:50 faster in 2021 than I did in 2020. After I ran that 5:47 in mid-July 2021, I had a week on vacation where I ate a little too much and worked out not quite enough. If it wasn't for that vacation, perhaps I would have gotten down to 5:46 just as quickly as I did last year.
Second, it's clear when I started working out less in 2020: starting in mid-August, I had 9 consecutive weeks where i either did 1 mile or zero miles (with one week of two miles as an exception). Clearly that was a big factor in my running slower (however, in October/November I started mostly running miles only after doing a sprint workout. So the best mile those weeks is not necessarily representative of the best mile I could run if I was rested). The good thing is, I feel confident that if I continue to workout this fall, my mile time won't slow down the way it did last fall.
This graph helps me feel a little better. I probably push myself a little less hard this year when running miles, because any particular mile I run I know that (a) I'm going to run a bunch more that week, and (b) I also need to save energy for playing more ultimate frisbee. In 2020, I know that mostly I was running in the afternoon, without having done other workouts that day; in 2021, I'm most often running these miles in the morning, when my athleticism isn't at its peak. So although the best mile I ran recently was 5:49, if I rested and ran a mile in the afternoon, I might be able to run 5:46 right now.
VII. Why is it taking more effort?
So the key question is: what was I doing right in 2020, that enabled me to see more results with less effort (at least according to the workouts I track)?
Here are a few ideas I've considered. I've included ideas I believe and others that I think are pretty unlikely, but worth writing down and considering:
I'm eating less healthy in 2021. In 2020, I couldn't go out to restaurants or bars at all. Since I hardly saw friends in summer 2020, I hardly ever drank.
But I still eat pretty healthy in 2021. (And I didn't eat perfectly healthy in 2020, either. I have a distinct memory of eating lots of bowls of Stop-N-Shop brand granola...). It's a bit hard for me to believe that diet is making a big difference.
I couldn't travel in 2020, so I had no need to take a week off working out all summer. I did a week-long vacation in early April 2021, and another in late July. I still mostly ran on the weekday mornings, but I didn't do more intense workouts outside of that, and I didn't eat as healthy on vacation as I do at home.
Because I'm playing more frisbee in 2021, maybe more of my workout time is tilting towards sub-maximum intensity. Riding my bike to frisbee and playing a frisbee game burns calories, but there aren't a lot of opportunities to push the limits — running as fast, or lifting as much weight, as I possibly can.
I've read that athletic performance peaks for most people around 6pm. So a 5:49 mile at 9AM is pretty close to a 5:43 in the evening. In 2020, my 5:43 was run right around 6PM.
Maybe I'm just getting older, or living in the new apartment is exposing me to more unhealthy chemicals? But both of those seem unlikely to me (I mean, I am getting older. I just don't think that it's affecting my athletic ability, yet).
It's harder to achieve PRs on lower-body related goals like running because I have more upper body muscle mass (being able to do more pushups/pull-ups) than a year ago. Again, seems unlikely.
Maybe squatting really heavy weights is really important. When I was going to the Y before the pandemic started, I was doing heavy squats, 2 times per week. Squatting 250 for a full squat or 400+ (if I remember right) for a "half-squat".
Perhaps really heavy squatting is the key for jumping/explosiveness, and for cardio as well (if that sounds weird, do a set of heavy squats and see how hard your heart is beating). Perhaps that base of strength that I had built up by the time the pandemic started helped me be more athletic through the summer.Maybe I was a little too heavy on the cardio this summer, and overtrained? Maybe four days in a row of trying to run really fast miles never gives my cardiovascular system enough recovery time?
Perhaps I was pushing harder on individual mile runs in 2020 because I was only running 1-2 times per week. In 2021, any given mile I know I'm going to be running more miles that week so I hold myself back a bit? I believe this is true to some extent, but I'm also not jumping as high as I was last summer, and that definitely can't be explained by holding myself back.
Perhaps I just had the perfect mix of workouts last summer? One thing I would do back then that I don't do now is I would run sprints (or a mile) and then immediately go on a long bike ride of ~20 miles. I haven't done that this summer. But I have been going on some long bike rides: 15-18 miles to get to/from frisbee games twice a week. That's similar enough that I don't buy this explanation.
Perhaps one good thing about the long bike rides is the extended period of time where my heart rate is somewhat elevated. In my current workout plan, I perhaps don't have enough workouts where my heart rate is elevated for an extended period of time.
Maybe, with 2020 being the first year that I tried running miles, I just didn't know to limit myself. I had no idea of what speeds were hard or easy, and I just kept running faster and faster. Maybe now I have a little more of an idea in my mind that "running 5:50 is fast and hard", and my brain shies away from it a little bit. Again, I don't really believe this one.
VIII. Some other random workout thoughts
In addition to those 2020 vs 2021 comparison points, there are a few other things that I wanted to jot down, that may be relevant:
I've noticed I'm more athletic during the summer than during the winter. I don't know if that's because of environment (the sun is up later, the weather is nicer, there are more opportunities to play sports) or if there are biological reasons, as well (I feel hungrier and eat more during the winter, or I feel less drive to workout, or anything else that could be a mild form of "hibernation") This is curious to me. I will get something of an answer this winter, assuming I manage to stay focused on working out.
It's been hard for me to separate the differences between "I've gotten stronger" and "I've lost 5-10 pounds and now my muscles are having an easier time moving me around". My periods of lower athleticism are aligned with me weighing 170-175 lbs, while in periods of better athleticism I weigh 165-170 lbs. Could 5-10 pounds make that much of a difference?
It's worth noting that, aside from before I hurt my knee, the time that I was at my most athletic was the summer after I graduated college. I didn't find a "real" job so I was working for my dad doing landscaping, and I got even skinnier than I usually get in summer. I weighed myself at the Y one day after work and I was a tad under 160. That summer, I was this close to being able to dunk an alley-oop. I haven't jumped that high since.When I started my habit this year (2021) of running a mile five mornings a week, I noticed that the first couple weeks doing it, I started to develop shin splints. After easing off and doing rehab, I haven't had a problem with it since then. But perhaps this is one way to force gauge if I work out hard enough — I should be on the verge of shin splints, every once in a while? If I haven't had them since I started this new plan, I haven't been pushing myself quite hard enough. (But I'm not sure that makes sense. There are days where I rest because other things besides my shins are sore.)
Keep in mind that (1) I missed a few weeks because I destroyed my toenail, (2) I did a week on vacation in April & July that I didn't do in 2020, and (3) I ran 5:47 in mid-July where last year I got to 5:43 in mid-to-late-August. So perhaps we can say that the extra running this year put me on track to be a couple weeks ahead of last year? And injury and vacation slowed me down a little bit? I might still run faster than 5:43 by the same time this year: I have a few more weeks to get it done. (Also, last year my athleticism peaked at the same time that the weather started to get cooler in September. It's harder to run a 5:43 mile in August than in September since there are less days when the weather is cool and comfortable.)
On something of a tangent, I've gained a new appreciation for how improving the body is different from improving the brain (harder, and less straightforward), or even "muscle memory"-type tasks. I read in Chinese every day and I continue to be able to read more quickly, little by little. I listen to podcasts in Chinese every day, and without a doubt my Chinese listening ability is much better than it was two years ago. I practice throwing the frisbee for an hour a day and over a year plus, I've gotten much, much better at throwing frisbees. However, over that same time span I've also tried to get better at running and jumping...and up to this point, I've failed.
IX. Some positive points
There are a few "silver linings" to my workout results this year, that provide some good news amidst the what-seems-like-bad-news of running more but improving my speed less:
My endurance over periods of longer than a mile has improved. Last summer, if I tried to do a sprint workout and then run a mile, I would cramp up. This summer, although the top speed isn't quite as good, I can do that workout with no problem.
Maybe I'm just imagining it, but my calf muscles are looking more toned than ever.
(Knock on wood) Clearly last summer I was improving quickly, but I was also getting hurt a few times. This year, even though I'm running more and playing ultimate frisbee more, I have not gotten hurt (besides losing a toenail). Perhaps I have somehow traded some of that top speed for endurance and injury-resistance?
I subscribe to the theory that the body has "set points" (for weight, activity levels, etc.) that are difficult to change. Last year's results could be looked at as a temporary improvement then a regression back to the set point. This year, because I'm more consistent, I could be slowly changing my athletic "set point" in a way that will make it easier to keep these gains. The longer that I have this level of athleticism, the longer it'll take before it disappears (in 2020, I was only at this level for a few weeks, and then I fell back quickly)
X. Work out a lot
One thing that I can't avoid is that I just need to build up to working out more and more. Look at how much Michael Phelps trains: "Phelps trains for around five to six hours a day at six days a week... it has been reported that Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day...". Or see this post from David Epstein's newsletter where champion bobsledder Steve Mesler says an older mentor on his team would do "a thousand crunches religiously" every night. Or look at Chapter 14 of David Epstein's The Sports Gene, where he quotes Herschel Walker:
“I would start doing sit-ups and push-ups at seven P.M.,” he says, “and go until eleven. It was every night, on the floor. It was about five thousand sit-ups and push-ups.” These days, Walker says he “only” does 1,500 push-ups and 3,500 sit-ups a day—in sets of 50 to 75 push-ups and 300 to 500 sit-ups or crunches...
Or read Year of the Dunk, where Asher Price mentions feeling like he's working out so much his body is falling apart, or when he gets complimented by a fellow gym-goer for being the sweatiest guy in the gym.
This was another inspiration for my "morning mile" program that I started this year: part of being ridiculously athletic is the process of building up to being able to do these workouts every day. Build up your maximum, but at the same time build up the "I can do this every day" level, too. World-champion marathoners run the whole marathon faster than most people can sprint 200 meters, and world-champion athletes have an "I can do this every single day" level that is more difficult than what a normal person can accomplish in their hardest workout.
What I take from this is that regardless of all my hand-wringing about why my 2020 was different from my 2021, one of the biggest keys moving forward is to just continually ratchet up the intensity so I am able to work out more and more than I do now.
XI. I'm not the only one
A buddy of mine decided to try to get in better shape starting in late 2020. He started running and at the end of January 2021 ran a half marathon at just over two hours. I joined him for part of that half marathon run, and I distinctly remember telling him (paraphrasing) that it would be easier for him to get from a just-over-2-hour half marathon to a 1:50 half marathon than it was for him to get from not running to running just over 2 hours. But (as you can probably guess from the theme of this essay), I really put my foot in my mouth on that one. He ran another half marathon at the end of May, and didn't do any better than the first one; then he ran a 10-miler in July and again didn't do much better (in terms of pace). Like me, he's dealt with a few injuries here and there, and like me has also been affected by playing more frisbee taking away from opportunities to do other workouts. As much as this essay has been inspired by my own difficulties in getting to the next level, it's just as much inspired by my buddy who's been trying to find the path to his own next level.
XII. Moving forward
So, what do I need to change about my routine to get past this plateau?
Here's what I think are the keys:
Don't lose focus; continue building up I fell behind last fall, because I was distracted by moving and didn't work out as much. And that's not to say I can never take a break from working out. Instead, I need to be purposeful about it, and scale back my workouts in a way that I maintain my level of fitness ("What’s the Minimum Dose of Training to Stay Fit?", is a useful source). Remember that this is a process of slowly but surely increasing the amount of workout that I can handle every day.
Do as much as I can while rehabbing. The other reason I fell behind last fall is because I had a nagging ankle injury. Instead of trying to work out while rehabbing, I fell behind and hardly worked out at all because my ankle wasn't perfect. Next time, I'll push myself as much as possible while also taking the rest I need to recover. This could mean running slower, switching to biking, or finding ways to lift weights that don't stress the injury.
Do more long, easy workouts. One thing that was maybe different between last year's program and this summer's is the long bike rides I was doing. I can work in more workouts where I'm keeping my heart rate up for a full hour or more at a time. This can be biking (like last year) or long, slow runs. I think of this as "active recovery": doing more easy-ish activities that require some movement but won't leave me sore the next day.
Lift really heavy weights. The explanation that's most convincing to me about why I jumped higher last year is that I was lifting heavy weights (for part of the year, at least). So I need to get those heavy weights back into the mix. There a few ways I could do this:
— Easiest: Start going to the Y and doing heavy squats.
— More complicated but cheaper: do more lifting at home. I don't have the heaviest weights at home, but I can make lifts "heavier" by doing more 1-leg lifts, or by increasing the explosiveness level of the 2-leg lifts I'm doing (e.g. do squat jumps instead of just squatting).
— Make sure I get 2 or 3 days per week of lifting in, every week, instead of once per week or less like I've been doing this summer.Weigh Less. I've consistently found that I'm at my most athletic when I'm also at my lightest. Correlation is definitely not causation! But it's food for thought. Assuming that when I lose weight I tend to lose fat and not muscle, this relationship is logical: if I lose fat, my muscles have less extra weight to lug around. I'm already in pretty good shape, and I don't think there's that much weight to lose before it starts being a detriment to my athleticism. But I'd guess that being in the 160-165 range instead of having months where I get up to 175 would be optimal.
This might be the hardest one on here, though. We all know how hard it is to lose weight and keep it off. And it's also the one that I feel a little uncomfortable with: I've always believed in caring about what your body can do, and not what it looks like. I'm still focused on what my body can do, but bringing my weight into the picture starts to feel a little bit like caring what my body looks like.
At first I thought to myself, "weighing less can be a goal for sometime in the future; I can focus now on increasing my strength, and lose a few pounds in the future if I need to." That sort of makes sense, but if I believe in this "set point" theory, it makes more sense to start to change that set point as soon as possible, which argues in favor of paying attention to weight now instead of waiting.
I don't believe in "diets", but I do think a few reasonable tips have helped me in the past: first, not eating unless I'm hungry, and second, eating just until I'm full instead of overeating. Doing a little bit more of those two can be a healthy way of paying closer attention to what my body needs.
Overall, I'll focus on making sure to not miss workouts, and continuing to slowly ratchet up the intensity of my workouts. I'll make sure to do more squat jumps/heavy squats. I expect it'll be a bit easier to do harder workouts now that there's less frisbee to play during the week.
So, what happens now? I'd like to think that this is the start of me getting past the plateau I've been at (or below) for the last year. But in reality, I know there's a good chance that even now I'll fail to get past it. I'm glad I took the time to think about it carefully; I think doing this gives me the best chance to succeed in getting past the plateau. Check back for updates a few months from now.
XIII. PS: What I've been reading
To get a bit more context on this article, you can also read the reviews I've written of exercise-related books over the course of 2021:
The Sports Gene, David Epstein
Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights?, Alex Hutchinson
The Year of the Dunk, Asher Price
The Year of the Dunk is the closest to the subject matter in this essay: the attempt to reach a level of athleticism that you've never reached before, as a 30+ year old adult. The others mostly influenced my theories of how to best workout.