Wednesday 080702

Workout
TABATA!
Perform the following exercises for 8 rounds of 20 seconds work (in any order), 10 seconds rest:
Rowing*
Air squat
Push-ups
Pull-ups
Sit-ups

After the 8th round of each exercise, rest 1 minute before proceeding to the next. The lowest number of reps achieved in any of the 8 rounds is the score for that particular exercise (calories burned in place of reps are used for rowing). The sum of the scores for all of the exercises gives the score for the entire workout.

*Those without access to a rower, do SDHP with a 45 lbs barbell for each 20 second segment.
Compare to:
TITANFIT: Saturday 080524

How Long Can Peak Performance Last?
The question "How long can peak performance last?" sounds more salacious than does the answer offered by Elizabeth Weil, in her predictably lovely profile of a 41-year-old Olympic quality swimmer Dana Torres.

Weil quotes Hirofumi Tanaka, the director of the Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, who found that both elite and nonelite runners and swimmers could maintain personal bests until age 35, after which performance declined in a gradual, linear fashion until about age 50 to 60 for runners and 70 for swimmers.

Deterioration was rapid from there, writes Weil. Tanaka also found that swimmers experienced more modest declines than runners and that swim sprinters, like Torres, experienced the smallest declines of all.

At Yale, Ray Fair, a runner and an economist, crunched statistics on aging and peak athletic performance and created what he calls the Fair Model. The model provides a table of coefficients that enable an athlete to take a personal-best time and compute how long he or she should expect to take to complete that same event at a specific point later in life (assuming he or she has continued to train at the same level).

According to the Fair Model, a woman who swam a personal best 24.63 seconds in the 50-meter freestyle at or before age 35 should expect to clock 25.37 seconds at age 41. “I am struck by how small the deterioration rates are,” Fair wrote in a paper titled “How Fast Do Old Men Slow Down?” “It may be that societies have been too pessimistic about losses from aging for individuals who stay healthy and fit.”Read more from Liz Weil in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.